STBYM Listener Mail: Cave of the Crabs

episodes or older episodes if you want so. If you've got a correction that you need to give on something we said in an episode, obviously please send it our way. We always want to make sure we're getting all the facts right. But if you have something interesting to add to a topic we've talked about, something we did not get into in an episode series that would add to the subject, that's bullseye. That's exactly what we want kind of build on what we've done here in our listener

mail episodes. Also, just any general feedback. If you want to suggest a topic for the future, suggest a movie for Weird House Cinema, or just say hi, tell us an interesting story, whatever suits you. Contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

thank you, So you're welcome, Hannah. But I figure I'm going to kick things off after this with a message from Hugh and this is responding to our story about the miracle crab of Saint Francis Xavier, which, according to legend, took hold of a crucifix that had been lost in a storm at sea, and then brought that crucifix, raised in its claws, back to its owner, Saint Francis, once he had landed on shore. So, Hugh says, dear Robert, Joe and JJ, do you think Xavier's crab booked it

that entire way or was maybe a relay situation. Yeah, I didn't think about that. The crabs are working together. That did come up later, and actually later in the first episod, right, the question of whether crabs are ever cooperative or whether it's always just one crab for themselves.

so familiar? And I realized it looks exactly like the original theatrical release poster for Star Wars that has an illustrated, very muscly rendition of Mark Hamill holding the lightsaber up above his head. It's uncanny the resemblance, very very similar.

the painting you referenced. Congratulations on the Netflix gig. Thanks, huh, You're all doing a great job, Hugh. So, I actually did not know Frank Frazetta, at least my name, well not my name. Once I looked it up, I was like, oh, I recognize this style. So it is the classic paperback fantasy book cover style where you got hot barbarians and loincloth and metal bikinis, and you get weird monsters and beasts bristling, a lot of muscles and gleaming weapons and

just bodies. And the figures in these in these illustrations have a lot of I was trying to think what to call this. They just have a lot of poise. They're like they they look like like statues in motion kind of. They're radiating strength and victory.

And sometimes those human forms are not even wearing loincloths or metal bikinis. Sometimes they are naked. But then also all of these fantasy elements and sci fi elements that were you know, you know, a part of the commercial

aspect of so many of these works. And there is that sense of movement, And I don't necessarily have the artistic language in my head to describe all of this, but there is a sense of like culmination and rising and physical movement, like the muscles that you see and the bones, like they all seem to be biologically active and some rippling.

I'm like, okay, I'm going to cue this up. The crabs crabs await us everywhere, even in places we thought we'd fully explore.

to guess crab, but they usually don't. And this led to us talking about whether nefarious crabs of some kind could be behind the social media strategy where people post riddles that don't actually have answers. In this case, it's to get people confused and make them waste a lot of time engaging with a post on social media or like arguing in the comments, And the purpose of this is engagement farming, trying to game the system on these

you know, horrible social algorithms. But this led to Rob mentioning the riddle why is a raven like a writing desk, which obviously predates social media, but the through line was that this is also a riddle without a clear intended answer, or.

the Mad Tea party. He doesn't wait for an answer before the conversation moves on, but when Alice asks for the answer later, he replies, I haven't the slightest idea. See now, I'm wondering if it actually is in the Last Unicorn, and if I'm not misremembering something from Alice in Wonderland. Oh, Okay, who knows. I have a feeling we'll come back around to The Last Unicorn on Weird House Cinema at some point in the future, so we'll figure that out then. Okay, But anyway, more answers from

Nathan here he continues. According to The nit Alice by Martin Gardner, Carol wrote the riddle with no answer in mind, but that didn't stop many readers from suggesting their own. There are too many proposed solutions to list in full. But here are some better ones. Okay, here we.

Because there is a B in both and an inn in neither.

rather in transcription. Thanks as always for your delightful and insightful podcast, Nathan, Thank you, Nathan. Yeah, that's that's that's I again. I'm not entirely sure now if this poem, I mean, this riddle is reference in the Last Unicorn. Maybe I was misremembering it from else Adventures in Wonderland, But at any rate, This was a lot of fun going through these supposed answers to it.

it's binding her there. It reminded me of Hyamiyazaki's excellent Spirited Away, in which a family inadvertently travels to a spirit realm, where the parents eat at an empty restaurant and are turned into pigs by a resident for their transgression. Yeah, they eat of the food of the spirit world, and thus they are trapped there. I don't remember crabs being part of their meal, so there is no connection to

the Crabbag episodes that I'm aware of. However, Crabbag episode three and your discussion of crabs as inspiration for military devices an inventor is writing directly to President Lincoln. And the mention of balloons used during the Civil War did bring to mind Jules Verne's Mysterious Island, in which balloonists blown to an island in the South Pacific did encounter a giant crab, among other things, at least in the

nineteen sixty one si Infield film version. Keep out the good work, and maybe iHeart will finally give you, gentlemen, that squad of research assistants and librarians you deserve. Chris, Yes, it's a long shot. I keep requesting them. I want them to be like the Dwarves and the Phantasm movies, except they do research for us. Yeah. This is kind of a yeah, a peek into behind the scenes discussions.

You know, We've talked about this before, and I feel like part of the problem is that the research process is sort of how we create the product. Like a lot of what we end up talking about is not just presenting information, but talking about the process of learning about a subject, which you only really get if you do the research yourself.

interests while researching. And you know, you might get that if you had a really good research You know, certainly there's plenty of podcasters out there and writers and so forth use researchers and make good use of their their talents. And I don't know, maybe we're just stubborn and we should we should give it a shot. But h but this is what we've done so far.

of no particular denomination. Thank you for the years of brain food and many more to come, sincerely, Sir Eel. And then we have this nice tight little sketch here of a crab species unknown holding crucifix denomination unknown that has a Christ crucified on it.

Scientific American. This was during the Civil War, and the letter advocated that the Union Navy construct a giant steam powered horseshoe crab called the King Crab Warship, which would be invincible would be the ultimate naval technology, though there were some details of both biology and technology in this letter that seemed a little fuzzy, and CDK writes not

CDK sorry, Carry rights, Rob and Joe. Hearing cdk's description of his idea contained in the Scientific American of a ramming weapon modeled on the horseshoe crab, I get the feeling that he never actually saw the animal in life. That's the possibility. His description of the pointed prow, the back being wedge shaped, the bow armored with a row of smaller spikes, and the ability to raise and lower its front makes me think that he was confused and thought that the back end of the crab was actually

the front end. Yeah, we sort of came to the same conclusion, and that's what it sounded like, Carrie says, when you look at a horseshoe crab this way, his description makes sense. The crab's rear end is pointed, its actual head is wedge shaped, there is a row of backwards pointing spikes, and the telson can lift the backside. Just an observation. I thought, I chair take care, Carrie, carry. I think you're I think you're dead. On on that that that was my reading as well.

something else called Alice in Wonderland syndrome. This, by the way, is also discussed in Oliver Sack's book. Anyway, they continued, thank you for the great episode. Lily Putian hallucinations are equally fascinating, and I have a bit of secondhand experience with that. More on that later. Alice in Wonderland syndrome involves distorted perceptions of the size of yourself relative to other objects, and even the size of one of your

body parts relative to one another. Alice's experiences in the book are caused by a mushroom, but in reality, the syndrome mainly affects children who have had a serious infection. Thankfully, it usually doesn't last for most kids. I highly recommend looking up some of the children's first hand accounts of their experiences. This might sound mean, but there is something especially adorable about the way that kids describe this bizarre and unfamiliar experience, such as, Mommy, why did your hand

turn into a doll hand? If you look up the very short Wikipedia article on the Lecutian hallucinations, it mentions Alice in Wonderland's syndrome and a few other related syndromes. What I find so intriguing about these is what you brought up in the episode, which is that certain stimuli can cause highly consistent hallucinations, while other hallucinogens involve a broader range of altered experiences. Perhaps related is the phenomena that certain drugs and drug combinations can induce deja vu,

sometimes an overwhelming and upsetting frequency of dejav vu. Now that's interesting. I wasn't familiar with that myself. Yeah, so we may have to come back to that. I don't know that we've.

lillly Fusian hallucinations. My dad has experienced them. He would sometimes go walking at dusk or night, and he has fairly bad eyesight. Not sure walking at night was the best idea. He doesn't do it anymore. He said that if he could make out something like a leaf or a stick, he would see little people crawling on them and dancing. I had already heard of these types of hallucinations before and told him it was probably not serious and not to worry too much. I should ask him

if he still ever experiences them. Truly wonderful, wonderful episodes late you still find interesting topics and continue to be delightful and entertaining after so many years.

the movie Goldfinger. This originally came up in passing on an episode about the Twilight Zone episode the Rip van Winkle Caper, and because it was just kind of a side comment, we actually hadn't researched the answer, but I guessed that the answer was no, that would not happen because humans don't actually significantly breathe through their skin. We

breathe through our lungs. But then on the Listener Mail episode after that, a listener named Brian got in touch to share a story from history in which a chronicler of the Medichi family from the sixteenth century claimed, and this was Brian's description. So, in Brian's words, quote, Pope Leo the tenth, a Medichi and arguably the worst pope of all time, had a boy painted fully painted in gold to celebrate the Pope's return to Florence. The boy

died mere days later. I'm sure the I'm sure paint in the sixteenth was highly questionable in and of itself, so presumably any of the substances in the paint could have been the cause. But yes, we do have death by gold paint.

heat out through your skin. But again, we breathe mostly through our lungs, not through our skin, so it didn't seem like suffocation would be the most likely explanation. But of course, you know, as always, were open to contradictory evidence. So we joked then about whether the MythBusters had ever tried to sort this out and whether such an attempt would would have involved painting Jamie Gold. Wouldn't you know?

The joke scenario that we conjured up actually happened on the show and multiple listeners got in touch to let us know. So this is from Karen. Karen says, Hi, Robert and Joe. On your recent listener mail episode Lamerte, you further discussed the possibility of death being caused by being covered in gold paint, then offhandedly suggested that the MythBusters may have done it, including joking did they paint Jamie Gold? Yes to both, They did indeed test this

myth by painting Jamie with gold paint. The plan was to cover him in paint and have him run on a treadmill. However, after the latex paint was applied, Jamie started to show a significant negative reaction. To everyone's surprise, his blood pressure shot up and he reported feeling generally ill and lightheaded. Two onset ParaMed two onset paramedics strongly advised him not to do any strenuous exercise and remove

the paint immediately. The conclusion was that covering the skin with latex paint caused him to overheat and subsequently feel ill and stressed in various ways. The episode also featured Shirley Eton, the actor who who portrayed the gold painted woman in Goldfinger. Apparently there's an urban legend that she died during filming as a result of the paint. She recounted the experience on set, feeling very hot and strange

while being covered in paint, but definitely not dying. And then Karen provides a link to the full episode and talks a bit. Oh, and then says, I didn't write in after you discussed this in the original episode because I assumed many other people would bystander effect here. So I'm writing in now in case any in case everyone else is suffering from a listener male version of the bystander effect. Oh, I preempted you. Yeah, sorry, Thanks for the fantastic podcast, Karen.

so like hide that lethal blade. And then people got into putting all sorts of things in their canes as a gimmick, you know, like little things like they would often line up with your occupation. Like I covered a fiddle that was hidden in a cane. It's not a good fiddle, it's it's just a novelty. But you can imagine a scenario where oh, you know, he likes to play the fiddle, he needs a cane. Now he has a fiddle cane and it's what it was fashionable.

about my stick. I let them know how the white cane is actually recognized as a protected federally regulated safety device, and because of such, my cane is allowed to have a small three inch retractable blade in the top in the handle all white canes do. And invariably when they ask me really, I tell them no, not really. But hey, please help me propagate this rumor because maybe you'll help. You'll be helping keep a blind or visually impaired safe

person safe. One day, some mugger remembers hearing the Old wives tale of blind guys with knives in their canes. Anyway, thought it was appropriate and wanted to share all the best.

not exist. Polywater was supposedly a polymer like arrangement of water which took on a jellied or wax like consistency at room temperature, but again, of course, it never existed, and by the early to mid seventies, skeptical scientists had proved that it was largely the product of just contaminated experimental samples. And this historical saga led into a discussion on our show about a concept known as pathological science.

So we got into the question of how researchers can be led into delusion and compounding error like a paper talking about common features of programs that go haywire in this way, and then we also did a segment about historical cases of scientific research containment panic when people get the idea for valid reasons or not a lot of times not for valid reasons, but sometimes with legitimate cause for concern, when they get the idea that a specific

research program will lead to worldwide calamity if pursued or if it gets out of hand. This was related to polywater because some researchers in the late sixties proposed that if a molecule of polywater got out of the lab and into the soil or the natural water supply, it would lead to an apocalyptic scenario like the end of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat a cat's cradle where all of the world's water is frozen at room temperature and is

made biologically useless. In this case, we imagined a bizarre wax world where all the water is turned to a waxy consistency. Wouldn't be a good thing to happen. Fortunately, there was no danger of this because again polywater isn't real. But anyway, one of the research panic episodes that we talked about in this discussion was when some people got the idea for not good reasons in this case, that activation of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN would create

black holes that would consume planet Earth. And it turned out physicists had already modeled this and they ruled out. They ruled that there was no danger of this happening. But our longtime listener and frequent correspondent Jim gets in touch on this subject. This is from Jim in New Jersey who says, Robert, Joe, and JJ you mentioned the concern that the Large Hadron Collider might destroy the Earth. Fortunately we can check for that at has the Large

Hadron Collider destroyed the Earth destroyed the world? Yet dot com so they got a dot com domain there not a dot org. That's interesting, and Jim says, last I checked, We're good. I went to check this website out, and Rabbi attached a screenshot of the homepage as of this morning. It's a big black screen with white text that says nope.

And Jim has pointed out some embedded HTML from this page that includes I think it's JavaScript saying like if and then the variable is world has ended right up, and then you know else write nope the script ends. And then also the page contains some other you know, embedded text that says something about if a giant laser eyed bunny has destroyed the world, you can email this email address to get a refund, I guess for a refund for being an earthling. I think.

this is a big one. It's central to one of the video games. I was stoked to see this episode arrive in my feed. I am a lifelong Pokemon fan and a professional naturalist and conservationist. I was born in nineteen ninety six, the same year that the original Pokemon video games were released, making both them and I late malis. For as long as I can remember, I have been

obsessed with both Pokemon and the natural world. As I have grown and my interests have evolved, my love of nature and my love of Pokemon have continually fed into each other, and I am by no means alone in this. In my interactions with friends and colleagues in my field, I've come to realize that within my generation, the proportion of zoology professionals, paleontologists, taxonomists, wildlife biologists, and naturalists who

are also Pokemon fans is wildly high. Whether this relationship is causal or correlative is another question, but I can confirm from first hand observation that it's very real. I currently work as a naturalist and educator at the Minnesota Minnesota Zoo, where one of my responsibilities is to write educational curriculum for summer camps that we host. I am currently in the process of revising a Pokemon themed zoology summer camp that the Zoo has been hosting for several years.

This camp is the brain child of several of my coworkers and I, who suffer, as y'all might put it, a chronic Pokemon infection. The summer camp is dedicated to comparing and contrasting the world of Pokemon with our own natural world, using the Goliath franchise as a springboard to discuss real world biology and natural diversity. Campers in the class collect Pokemon in a pokedex they illustrate by observing their natural world parallels around the zoo, marrying the creature

collecting mechanic of the games with naturalist observations. They also learn the ways in which real world evolution differs from evolution in the Pokemon games, pokemon evolution is better likened to the real world phenomenon of metamorphosis. Quote, Fully evolved Pokemon lay eggs that hatch into their unevolved states, indicating that this is an adult slash juvenile relationship. The three stages of many insects and amphibiuan Pokemon directly mirror real

world examples of metamorphosis. To the credit of these first and second graders, very few fail to grasp distinction others mileage may vary, but for me and many scientists and science educators of my generation, the relationship between Pokemon and naturalism is not one of competition, but of beautiful symbiosis. I hope you've enjoyed my unapologetically nerdy perspective. I know it has a home among the wonderful community surrounding the show.

As ever, thank you so much for your fantastic intersectional dives into subjects mundane and marvelous. Sincerely, Taylor.

An exception that breaks the fourth wall is the Pokemon Magic Harp, a fish Pokemon known for being completely useless see the Magic Carp song in battle. Magic Harp is only capable of using the move splash, which it helps in which it helplessleave flops around on the ground. This is the main one I was familiar with because this was shown to me at some point and it was hilarious. So I didn't know if they all behaved like magic Harp or not. But now we have a complete answer.

magic Harp. I don't know. I'm out of my depth here because I don't know Pokemon, but that's my memory. It was magic Harp that leaps over something and turns into a dragon. Does this ring a bell for you.

of polywater, one real, one fictional. The fictional one comes from the Three Body Problem trilogy by Sitchin lou The End. It is the dual vector Foil. It's a weapon fired at solar systems with tech signals by advanced alien species as a preemptive strike. Once the weapon enters the Solar system, it expands and accelerates towards and through the Solar System,

collapsing all matter into a lower dimension. Planets become massive discs, and then rings of color beings caught in it flatten and freeze, and stars collapse and spoilers for the end of the trilogy. Well you know, warning, folks, spoilers are incoming. Since these weapons have infinite range, they eventually convert all matter into two dimensions.

you produce. Cheers, uh, and let's see. Oh. Tanner also asks for the discord link. So I assume we sent it to Tanner, but I.

me ever since. Also, it may be too recent for Weird House Cinema, but I have to recommend a movie called The Man Who Killed Hitler and then The Bigfoot. I consider it an honorary Vonnegut story. Best wishes, Chris.

that's a film, a short film. Could be a podcast or a video game for all I know, but maybe something is brewing in the Ankle Snatcher universe.

but yeah, it's uh. That would be a lot to do in one episode. The episode weird how someone can run long even covering one movie, So I think we would probably break it up into two episodes.

is a time traveler from an apocalyptic future. There's lots of weirdness to enjoy, including a freaky looking humanoid robot. This one is directed by Michael Anderson, who did Logan's Run seventy six, another possible candidate for Weird House. Keep up the good work well. Logan's Run seventy six is a favorite of mine and one we may very well come back to. Millennium I've never seen I remember when it came out, and it definitely has a cool cast

and the stills look interesting. But I mostly remember this film because of a sketch on The Kids in the Hall in which Scott Thompson's buddy Cole is doing a monologue and he's talking a little bit about differences between Canada and America and talks about the film and TV industry and anyway, there's a where Buddy Cole was talking about having been in Millennium. Scott Thompson, the actor playing Buddy Cole, actually was. So Cole tells us, I'm going

to quote the skit here. I'm in this new American picture, Millennium. It's a big budget science fiction thriller starring Cheryl Ladd. You see, one day some American thought, hey, I want to make a terrible movie in Canada. Everybody else has. I play the best friend of the timegate operator. He has one line, but he says it directly to me. This movie is full of Canadian actors with one line. It's great. It won't make a dime.

guess we'll go ahead and throw it out. If you've made it this far through the through the listener mail episode, hey, make sure you rate interview where if you have the ability to do that, give us some stars, thumbs up, two thumbs up. I don't know. Every platform is a little different, but whatever it is, we greatly appreciate the support.