Behind the Scenes Minis: So You Hate Waffles

I feel like the one of the things that has happened in Internet culture that I really hate is the thing that has started to be summed up as the oh so you hate waffles discourse. Yeah where this is from. I think back when it was Twitter, someone's Twitter tweets in which they talked about people saying I like pancakes and the response in places like Twitter being oh so

you hate waffles. And sometimes it feels like there is a jump to if you don't specifically mention something an assumption that you don't know or care about it, or if you say that you like something an assumption that you hate some something else, or in this case, if you list off a ton of things that are affecting your work directly, an assumption that you don't know or care about all of the other things also concurrently happening. Yes,

that's that's not the case. This happened to quite recently on the internet. Oh yeah, do you want to have detailor just yeah, just how it's going? Yeah, I mean minor. I'm unconcerned with that particular iteration. Yeah, that just made it an incredibly weird time to be working on this. This has been a weird time to be working on

this podcast. Like ye acknowledge that before, Like in the early weeks of the COVID nineteen pandemic, we talked about how incredibly bizarre it was to be working on something while clearly living through like a historic moment. This is clearly also a historic moment. I am not enjoying it. No, I'm trying to finish my work a few minutes early today so that I can get on a train and

go to a protest. It feels like every time I turn around there's yet another thing, and a lot of it is incredibly disruptive, not just to our work, but also to our work. So I had a very difficult time focusing on putting these Unearthed episodes together. And then I also felt like in some ways it was weirdly

conspiring against me to try to work on Unearthed. Like we mentioned that we have comparatively fewer than normal shipwrecks, Well there's only three in this in this episode, which is like not many compared to a lot of our Unearthed discussions. I had a whole lot more than three bookmarks about shipwrecks, but they turned out to all be about the same three things, right, But they were like written or framed or headlined in a way that they did not sound like all of the same three things.

And so it was as I was writing up the shipwreck part that I was slowly winnowing down the number of links to only be the ones that were the same three things. And I was like, do we really only have three right now? That's weird. We found all the ships? No more, there's none, none left to look at, no more ship out there. I really did not realize that the stuff that everybody was talking about regarding Jack the Ripper seems to have traced back to something that

was published in twenty nineteen something. Elderly, Yeah, yeah, I did. And here's how this came out in my life. Okay, So I have a friend who has long had like a pet project that they're working on that involves a fictional interpretation of the Jack the Ripper story and they have you know, done a ton of research and they're always you know, working with the latest of to date. And they messaged me and they were like, I don't believe this person did it. I'm so mad. And I

was like, my darling, please look at the date. It's fine, Like, it's fine, Yeah, don't sweat it. This changes nothing from yesterday, I promise you. Yeah, the various articles had just expressed it so confidently. Yeah, I was like, I was like, number one, I'm pretty sure that other sources are gonna not be so confident about it. That was not surprising to me at all. But yeah, I just I was unaware that this was really something about research that had

been done years ago. Similarly, I was really into the research into how many of the medieval illuminated manuscripts were created by women scribes. Yeah. I love those manuscripts, and you know, I like when it has come up on the show that you know, various ones that have been created by women or you know, by a religious order

that was a women's religious order. So I thought the research to try to sort of quantify, like what was the contribution of women here and something that is stereotypically thought of as like like there are even illustrations of the monks with their tonsures over or the thing drawing on them. So like the idea of like, let's quantify

just what was women's contribution here. Some of the headlines about that research made it sound like it was really women all along, and I was like, Okay, now it's still a small percentage overall that were created by women. It's not nothing. It's still important. But this did not fundamentally rewrite our understanding of illuminated manuscript production, although it

gave me a great idea for a story. Oh yeah, yeah, I want to do a fictional a movie that all of the very charming times we have seen illustrations of cats in illuminated manuscripts does seem odd and slightly out of place. Are a secret code among the women illustrators that are all communicating to one another like this is my work, this is my work, this is my work. It's their whisper campaign of kitties. They're the original cat ladies. Yeah, yeah,

that is my fanciful Blogoney. Please don't anybody take any of that as informed information. Mary Robinett khol who has been on the show before, has suggested some of the topics we have covered on the show, has a short story that is set in a world in which the giant snails that you see in illuminated manuscripts are real things that people have to contend with. Oh, it's slight story. I'm gonna sit here. I'm going to Google to see if I can google the name of it. Mary Robinet

Khalal snail story Marginalia was published an Uncanny magazine. If you want to go look that up again. Marginalia by Mary Robinett Khlole. I would like to thank Google for actually delivering a great result to me with what I put in. Mary Robinett Kohlal snail story. One of the weird rabbit hole isn't the right word. The thing that we talked about that was about the tent, the real

tent probably depicted in a fresco in Italy. The news releases about that research kept describing it as an Islamic tent and I got very tangled up in whether that is correct terminology, Like, definitely, this is a tent from the Islamic world, but like, did this tent have an Islamic religious purpose? Right? And that I did not really get to the bottom of. But boy, did I spend just an inordinate amount of time thinking about whether that was the way that made sense to describe that, because

I immediately was like, how exactly was the tent Islamic? Right? I'm trying to remember if I had anything else from our unearthed things that I really wanted to talk about in our behind the scenes today. I have two things, Oh tell me so. One is the Luxury Bathing Complex. Yeah, because it's you know, we talked about in the thing that it is off of a banquet hall, and I just had that moment of Hey, you guys, you want to come under my house and dinner and take a

bath with me? Yeah? How weird that is to me culturally? Yeah, I mean I'm not even like a spa person, Like, I don't the idea of it's going to be a very luxurious night at so and so's house, We're all going to have a spa together, And I'm like ending in a cold place. It's a hard pass no thank you. I am a small, a spa person, So the general

idea of that did not seem that strange to me. However, the fact that, like the banquet hall is connected to the changing rooms, and at least I don't recall there being it did not seem like there was a sense of privacy in the changing rooms. It seemed more like it was like a room with benches and like a big locker room like. Yeah. And I was sort of reminded of on our trip to Iceland last year when

we went to Blue Lagoon. Yeah. And the way it works at Blue Lagoon, or the at least the way it works when we were there, is that you are given your towel, like you have to go and wash your body before you get in the water. Yeah, And you are not given a towel or a rope unless you have paid extra for a robe, Like you don't have a towel or a robe or whatever. So there are just periods of time that you need to be naked. Yeah. I was not prepared to just be naked around the

people who were on the trip with them. Yeah, it was a little weird, and I was you know, I had a moment where I felt kind of hung up on it, and then I was like, we're all gonna be naked. Yeah, exactly. Listen, I'm practically a never nude right, Like, yeah,

me and Tobias get each other. I never take My feet are never uncovered, my body is never I don't want to touch the outside world with my person, right even Like having been to massage school and having practiced as a licensed massage therapist for several years, like I just I got very accustomed to nudity and bodies, but at the same time, we also took a lot of care to make sure that the parts of people's bodies that we think of as private were covered, right, and

so like there was just there was not a lot of walking around completely unclothed in front of other people. That part is actually not so bad for me. Yeah, Like the idea of modesty and nudity in front of other people. I credit this to when I was much much younger and I danced ballet, and I danced kind of as a junior member of a ballet company for

a while. Yeah, and like you just got to change backstage, and sometimes everything is coming off down to like tights or sometimes to nothing before you can whip it back on and go back on stage. And so I was a little inured to that. I just as I've gotten older. I don't know if I'm Howard hughesing out or what, but I don't want anything touch I don't want to be exposed. Yeah, it's less of like a yeah, A part of it is just like I don't I don't

want to accidentally be upbraided by anything. I don't want any discomfort to surprise or sneak attack me in any way. Yeah, when I was in high school and I did drum corps, I got very used to just like being in the locker room changing clothes in front of other people. But that was still sort of a like that was a group of people that I was used to being around in those contexts, right, Not so much the people who were on the trip with us also not so much.

If I were invited to a nice dinner at a politician's house and then everybody else from the political dinner is going to go, I would, in my modern sensibilities, be kind of like, ah, I gotta think about the fact that now we've all seen each other naked. Well, I also am like, the last thing I want to see or be around after a rich meal is the naked bodies of all those people who have eaten that rich meal. That's just not for me, makes sense? I sound so hung up? Yeah, that one just got me.

I had another big thought though, which might have more levity, or maybe that had levity, okay, ogle painting. Yeah, the idea of like, it's not clear how the theft happened. No, of course not. But having done an entire season of Criminalia about art thefts, uh huh, it's shocking how many famous art thefts literally constituted. I just took it off the wall and walked out, right, I'm like, I can tell you how it probably happened, youoin, like somebody just

walked out with it and covered a magazine print out. Yeah, this also is one of those things that gives me hope from another story that was in that particular season. Have we talked about this? Do you know that there was for a while a salad an original Salvador Dali

on display at Rikers Island. No, he did this piece of art for the incarcerated men there because he was supposed to go and give a talk to an art program that they doing, and he was sick that day, so instead he made a quick piece of art, which was an interesting choice. It's like a crucifixion piece, and sent it to Rikers with you know, his compliments to

the people who were part of that program. And it, for a long time was displayed in the mess hall over the trash can, so it got splattered with stuff, and then it got put in storage, and then someone realized, we have an original DOLLI. We should put it on display in the admin building, and they did, and then it got stolen by three of the guards. Okay, it

has never been recovered. They may have destroyed it, and that breaks my heart because like, yeah, but then we have stories like this, and I'm like, maybe maybe they palmed it off to some dude and he's got it, and one day we will find it accidentally on loan from a private collector to use, or somebody's heirs will be cleaning out their estate. I hope, I hope. There are several pieces that you know, have never been recovered, and we hope and hope. But this reminded me a

little of the DOLLI. For some reason, there's been sort of speculation on and off about whether the painting's stolen from the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum still exists or not. Did we talk about I haven't seen any updates. Several weeks before we are recording this conversation, there was some video that was all over social media of an art exhibit in I think it was in Soho in New York that was allegedly like authorities walking into the art exhibit and taking a painting off the wall because it

was Christ on the Sea of Galilee. It was that painting from the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum. But the thing is everyone was like, is this a piece of perform's art? About that theft? Is this really something happening at this gallery? Galleries wouldn't show a piece of art that they knew was famous and stolen it. I'm like, yes, they would, but but I never saw a follow up on it, and I haven't dug around, and I didn't know if you had seen that. I did not. I somehow missed

all of this. Let me see if I can look for it really quick. As as I said, I was struggling with focus while working on this, so it would not surprise me if there were a big thing that should have wound up in the episode that did not well. I mean, I think the fact that you didn't see anything of it makes it seem like that might have been a hoaxy hoax hoax. Okay, Hold on, NBC has a thing. NBC Boston says the date on it, this was just from the the Thing March seventeenth, So it's

literally in reference to that. Okay, but nobody seems to think that's really what happened. The video, it's a marketing video. The video I'm quoting from NBC Boston quote. The video, which depicts FBI agents confiscating the stolen Rembrandt masterpiece from an art gallery in New York City, is part of the marketing strategy for Eric Aronson's new movie any Day Now. Ah, Okay, that's what's up. Well, all right then, somehow that's local to you, theater od I do miss living in Summerville.

I got priced out of that place when we were ready to buy a house. Yeah, but I'm still there regularly, and I still have friends who live there. All of them are renting. I think nobody who's the house in Summerville. Everyone's all furious about a Fulbright scholar basically being snatched off the street. Yeah, of course over I have read the op ed that she co wrote. I found it

to be not even that radical. I'm not saying that people should be disappeared for radical speech at all, but I found the op ed to be a pretty even handed criticism of the Tough's administration's response to resolutions passed

by the Student Senate related to Israel and Gaza. And as I understand it, like the Student Senate debated over these things throughout the night before voting on them, and the op ed was basically like, to have gotten this, really, you know, flat dismissal from the administration almost immediately does not seem like you actually listened to what the students were saying. And while graduate students were not part of this,

we're still part of this university. It did not to me say anything that would be cause, in any circumstance for six plain clothed officers to be snatching somebody off the street. Yeah. The only circumstance I can think of that that might be appropriate would be someone making active threats of violence and a need to take that person into custody. Right now, which is not what was happening in any way. Right. So, anyway, my entire friend community

is outraged and heartbroken. That's how we're all feeling right now. Yeah, not just for that reason, but that's one of the reasons. So you're saying you hate waffles, I don't. Actually you're gonna say, I don't actually like waffles. I was trying to think of something funny to append to that, and I just I didn't. I didn't. The only waffle maker we have in our household currently is a little mini waffle maker, and that's time I make eggs in the morning. Yeah,

I have so many waffle makers. Yeah, it does mean when sometimes Patrick wants to make waffles, there's a lengthy waffle making process because of our one little mini waffle My gosh, I have so many. I have so many, it's silly. I love a novelty waffle maker I got. I got my Grogu ones, I got a million Star Wars ones, I got Halloween ones, I got hanted Mansion ones. Yeah. I think I finally re homed my Hello Kitty one that I had for a long time. I love a

waffle maker. I'm gonna tell you BB eight is maybe my favorite, very exciting. Yeah. So I can make all the waffles of all the shapes in size, but I usually make savory ones, not sweet ones. Yeah, waffles is definitely a more fun way to close out this little behind the scenes, I will just say we're recording this on April the first. It's gonna be two solid weeks before these episodes come out. Who even knows what is happening in those two weeks, Oh, there's literally no telling. Yeah. So,

whatever's happening on your weekend? Boy, do I just have thoughts of peace and love, especially for anybody who is struggling with anything. The list of people who are struggling with things just increasing for me every day. So I hope what's happening on your weekend can have a moment of like rest. You gotta take a moment of rest sometimes to keep yourself going. We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. I think I've lined up a couple of Saturday Classics that are related to things that

came up today. We will have a brand new episode on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.