Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck. Right, there's Jerry and this is stuff you should know, right, Chucker, how are you, sir? I'm good? How are you great? Just toothless and happy good. I'm halfway there to your tooth to the pre when's your next visit? Well, I go in tomorrow to make sure the implant is looking good. I can tell you that it looks great, and then in August is what
I'll actually get the post and crown. Man. I'm really sorry that you have to do all this. Thanks many, It sucks. Yeah, that's why I'm sorry you have to do it. And I can't. Not that I wear my my flipper much anyway, but right now he was like, don't even wear your flipper while the implants in there, And I was like, all right, is that why you're wearing overalls today? That's right. Uh, let's see Chuck. Chuck,
if you ever tasted human flesh? No, but I think you asked me that same question when we did our regular cannibalism episode. Yeah. Probably, but this is the subject so nice. We had to serve it twice. Well, we've actually talked about some other stuff too, like we did a whole dinner party episode. We talked about the Essex and the whaling episode. Oh yeah, Um, we've talked about cannibalism a lot. Like if there's a um, a tag
cloud would be decent size chuck, we should say. Um, if you guys didn't get this from the title, we're talking about cannibalism, and some of the stuff we're talking about gets pretty graphic and grizzly. So if you have a weak stomach or you're a little kid and you don't want nightmares, uh, maybe don't listen to this one. Very good sir, And now let's move on to Survival Cannibalism. So again, people go listen to our cannibalism episode because
it was a particularly good one. If you ask me, um, did we talk Surely we talked about the Uruguayan rugby team. I don't know if we did or not. Is it just that I'm so familiar with the story that or actually we probably did, but we're going to revisit it today. Okay, Well, let's go back way back in time and the Uruguayan National rugby team is flying through the Andies on the way to play the Chili Chilean rugby team for a match,
and they don't make it. They don't. They're plane crashes on a mountain something like thirteen thousand feet above sea level, basically in the middle of nowhere. That's right. A fair Child F two to seven of the Uruguayan Air Force had forty passengers and five crew members, including that rugby team. And you know it was pretty much mostly just the rugby team, right, Yeah, they charted it, okay, but I think there were some other folks. There were some kids there. Really,
I think I knew that. So, um, here's the deal with the Andes mountains. Uh, it's only a hundred and seventy meters wide, but they're very tall and peaky. So the tallest one, um is almost seven thousand meters and it's the highest peak on the American continent. And uh, the fair Child as a plane could only ascend a seven thousand meters, so they had to find like low spots to make that passage. It's called poor planning. Well, I would guess that the uruguayne rugby team would agree
with me that that was poor planning. No, I don't think so. Like this pilot had made this passage. I had the number in here, but many many many times before may have been eighty. UM. So I don't know if it was poor planning, but it was. Here's what happened. They're flying, they take a sharp descent at about three thirty in the afternoon, and they dipped below the clouds because of these strong air pockets. So the captain was like, everyone,
fasten your seat belts. This is a little bumpy right now. I don't think they felt like they were in real danger yet. And then it entered a strong downward air current and it said violently dropped several hundred meters. So this uh. Following that, there was a second sharp ball. And at this point people looked out the window and saw they were below the clouds and they saw mountains like you know in their face, and they realized that this is not good. They tried to gain altitude, could not.
The right wing broke off when it hit a mountain. When that broke off, it went backwards, UH, cut off the tail and then the at that point several like four or f We're just pulled out at that point and died, sucked out of the plane, sucked right out, immediately fell to their death. Uh. Then the left wing was ripped off, and what you've got is just part of the fuselage remaining, and it goes sliding down the
mountains like a like a toboggan. Um. And by all accounts, they thought they were done for, like, there's no way we're gonna stop. Um. But as luck would have it, they did slow down. They entered a valley and slowed down, but with such force that the seats like ripped from their bolts and they crashed through like the luggage compartment and came to arrest. So how many survivors there were, I'm not quite fair. Another forty people on the plane.
Seven people survived the initial crash out of the forty five. Okay, so that's bad enough, right, Yes. And they're like, okay, we're stranded up in the andies. The temperatures like negative thirty negative thirty degrees fair, right, which is negative thirty four celsius. Too bad, It wasn't just negative forty. Um. So they're they're like, but at least we have the fuselage of this plane to act as an an impromptu shelter while we figure out what's going on. Yeah, let's
take stock of our supplies. Let's see, we've got some wine and we've got some chocolate, and that's it. Yeah, but very much, it said, a few more snacks, but it was very very very very little food. Um. And then a short time after they crashed and they had taken stock and we're trying to like figure out what to do, an avalanche came and buried the plane, buried some of the people alive inside of it. Yeah, so
eight more people died, I think. Yeah. And previous to this, they actually had a working radio, uh, and there was a search party, and after ten days they literally heard on the radio that they're presumed dead and the search was called off. So your spirits broken. Then the avalanche comes and that kills eight people right off the bat, I think you said, including the guy who was the team captain, who had emerged as the leader of the survivors.
So he died in the avalanche. Yeah. So then they're trapped in there for a few days, and as as people are dying, they start making pecks. This is a There was a team. First of all, there was a rugby team, and then there were family members all among the rugby teams, so it was a very like tight right, And so they started making packs that if if if I die, you guys eat me, so that like you can try to survive. Somebody's got to make it out of here alive, so be sure to eat me. Yeah.
And they had cleverly found a way to get fresh water by melting snow, using metal from the seats um and dripping it into those empty wine bottles. So they they it was remarkable that they were surviving at all. So they were all very religious or Roman Catholic, and uh, you know, you're not supposed to eat people, so for religious reasons, a lot of them had a lot of problems with the notion of doing so. Um, but they you know, they did what they had to do in the end. So they sent out a A A I
don't know if you'd call it a search party. What's the opposite of a search party to brave dudes? Yeah, but those those were kids, um, and they went on like a ten day trek, and finally we're found by a Chilean shepherd who was working the mountain, and um who he went and got a search party. Mustard and brought him back, and they found the guys. A bunch of them survived through in part survival cannibalism, but definitely more than just that. These guys just didn't didn't just
lay down and die. It was their their spirits were still up somehow. That's right, dude. In the end, uh, sixteen people ended up surviving this ordeal amazing weeks and weeks and weeks in the Andes Mountains and freezing temperatures. And they made a great movie. I've not seen it. Is it good? Yeah? That is good? Um. Of course, you know, in typical Hollywood fashion, it was all white dudes. Yeah, isn't Ethan Hawk one of the guys. Ethan is one of the guys. Vincent Spano is Italian. Oh but hey,
you don't know the difference between an Italian and you're going. Yeah, they were all white dudes, but um, or maybe not all but the lion chair of them, of course. So um. Aside from that, it was it was a good movie. And I remember we definitely talked about this because I remember telling the story being a kid, and like the book was a really big bestseller and I thought it was a soccer teams. I didn't know the difference between rugby and soccer. If you listen to our soccer podcast,
you might think, I still don't know the difference. Uh So, up next, Chuck is Jamestown. This is actually a fairly recent revelation. Apparently, if you were a scholar and historian of colonial America, you were in the know that there was persistent legends and rumors that the people in Jamestown had resorted to cannibalism during the winner of sixteen o nine,
sixteen ten. Yeah, there were five historical accounts of of the years that people pointed to, and these are like first person diaries from the people who were there at the time, saying it was so bad that we ate anything in sight, including dead people the end, But there
was nothing to back it up. So I guess the historians were like these colonists trying to show off, or they're using hyperbole, maybe like they were saying, I was so hungry I could eat a horse, but they were using cannibalism instead of the horse, because they actually did
eat the horse. Well. Then, finally, a couple of summers ago in two thirteen, some archaeologists who were excavating Jamestown came upon a tresh heap where they found the butchered bones of horses and human teeth and a partial skull. And when they examined the teeth in the skull, they realized, like, oh wow, these are butcher marks right here. They weren't just exaggerating or showing off. They really did engage in cannibalism in Jamestown. Yeah, and this is the only artifactual
evidence of cannibalism by europe ends ever. Supposedly, that's what it says, um. And with science, it's pretty remarkable what you can do these days. They actually did three D reconstructions and examined this skull and learned a lot about this fourteen year old girl that they called Jane. Uh. She was found buried a couple of feet down two and a half feet down, but in a in a trash heap, a huge giveaway seventeenth century trash heap in
the cellar inside the site at James Fort. So these colonists died in the winter of sixteen o nine, and they found what they called multiple chop marks on the girl's skull um clearly interested in cheek, meat, muscles of the face, tongue in the brain, and they think that the person who at least was responsible for harvesting the flesh in the brain from the head was not an
experienced butcher. The marks on the forehead are hesitant, and apparently they they couldn't stand or staring at them while they were doing this, so they turned her over and then from the back of the head that's when the marks became a little more confident and where they finally
cleaved her skull open. So they've turned her over and that's when the butcher marks start to get a little more confident, and apparently that's where they were They managed to access her skull by cleaving it into from behind. That's right. They also found cuts and saw marks and stuff along her lower jaw uh that they said was made to get the meat. Who said that in this article? I read arbies from uh. But here's the remarkable thing. They use isotope studies to find out a lot about
this girl. So they know from examining examining her shinbone that she was fourteen, really sad. But the good news is like she wasn't murdered, No, she starved to death. Well goodness bad. I guess it's sad anyway you look at it, although that's not necessarily true. There were there's a lot of disease that was spreading through Jamestown at the time as well, so as possible, she died of other causes that aren't quite as bad as starvation. Where
here's the deal Jamestown was. It's not what you learned about in elementary school, like, it was doing very poorly at this point. People were starving. The local Native American tribe that were once friendly with them had cut them off and and they actually showed up in sixteen o seven or six sixteen o seven during the worst drought in the region in centuries. So it was a really
just inauspicious beginning. And they called this period, especially during the winter of sixteen o nine and sixteen ten, the starving time. It was the capital escent Capital t so you know it was significant. So, Uh, in sixteen o nine, they're already in bad shape and then three hundred new settlers show up. Uh, what's for dinner? On the six years They were in bad shape when they got there
because they had a rough crossing. And so they believe from studying isotopes in this girl's teeth that um a few things. One that is she came over on those six boats, that she hadn't been there long. Um too, that she was either a served as a maid to a family of high status, was from a family of high status, because they found that she had a lot
of protein. Um, and then they determined that she's It's amazing what they can determine that she was from probably the southern coast of England because they water that she consumes. While she's got her little baby teeth are forming an infancy, you can tell years later where that came from. Son, leave it to the Smithsonian. Those guys hats off. So after eating horses, dogs, cats, rats, mice, they ate, leather, they ate, they ate anything they could get their hands on,
they f only did resort to uh eating humans. Now we have evidence of it and by spring of sixteen, only sixty people had survived. Isn't that amazing? It is because three hundred came over on the boat, So I don't know how many are already there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, it's a bad jam. It's a bad jam, all right. Uh should we take a break. Yeah, let's take a break, all right. I need to regather myself, so Chuck. I believe we talked about this one before too, because it's
so astounding. But there was a guy named Richard Parker and he was working aboard a yacht that was sailing from England to Australia. And the name of the yacht was the Mignonette. Do you know what I was sailing there? Uh? No, A rich dude bought it in Australia and it was just like literally being delivered to him. I guess I did kind of know that. Yeah, I didn't know. I just thought it was some expedition or something like. No, I do kind of remember that from when we talked
about it before. When do we talk about this cannibalism? So the Mignonette is sailing to Australia. A couple of months in the trip, it sank because it's not supposed to sail from England to Australia. It was not built for that really. Yeah, and they even kind of fortified it apparently and didn't work. So on board there's a cabin boy, seventeen year old named Richard Parker. Have you ever seen cabin Boy? The movie? Great movie? Yeah? You kid me, Chris Elliott, Yeah, I was I think I
saw that in the theater. I was so excited. Yeah, David Letterman's in that too. Sure he is a weird cameo. Uh so cabin boy. Cabin boy Richard Parker, uh seventeen years old and he um there there's an old tradition called the custom of the sea where you are in bad shape and you draw lots, and whoever draws the short straw um says, you know, kill me and eat me. Well, they say, all right, I won't hold it against you.
When you guys, that's probably how it goes. So they considered drawing lots, and then the captain Thomas Dudley said, nah, let's not even bother. Look at Parker. It smells like onions. I don't like how the kids looked. Ever, well, it's pretty sad. They literally were like, I don't think we even need to draw lots, like he's clearly the one that needs to go. He was malnourished. He was skinny. Uh he It sounded like from the accounts I read
that he was. They were having to kind of care for him, like he fell overboard at one point and they had to rescue him. More trouble, Leny's word. He drank sea water and got himself sick, and everyone's like, you don't drink seawater, Richard. So they said, I think we're just gonna take care of this without a vote. And um, he didn't have family or anything like that. He was a kid. So Dudley jabs a pen knife in his neck. Not a good way to go, Joe
Pesci style, you're gonna dispatch be dispatched. That's not a good way to go. A pen knife in the neck. Now, I don't know how I mean on they were on a little dinghy at this point. I don't know. That's just like a seagull. And then hit him over the head and then you can stand him with the pen knife once he's out. You don't just go from zero to pen knife in the neck. Hey, I agree, Uh,
no arguments here to go. Peesci style is barbaric. So they killed him with the pen knife, ate his flesh, drank his blood, and just a few days later they were found. Um, I don't know if they would have survived those few days or if that haunted them for the rest of their lives. They're rescued ronically by a German ship called the Montezuma. It was the famous Aztec king who eight people and made me poop. That's right.
Oh really yeah, huh, that's interesting. It gets even more interesting though, while they were tried for murder I know where you're going, and found guilty, but people felt pretty bad for them. They were like, yeah, we've all met Richard Parker. He did smell like onion. Uh. And so six months later they were released from prison. But here's where it does get a little weird. Oh me, yeah, so I love this. This is eighteen eighty four, right
when this happened. Um, in eighteen thirty eight, a little guy named Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story about a boat that sank and some guys were in a lifeboat and a guy got killed and eaten, and the guy who got killed in Eaton's name was Richard Parker. In that awesome it's pretty weird. The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pim of Nantucket was the short story. And um, I saw something that pointed out like many other things didn't match up. I was like, that's really all you
need to call it a startling coincidence, you know. Apparently, also the guy who wrote the Life of Pie named the Tiger Richard Parker as well, did you know that I haven't seen that movie or read the book. I haven't read the book. Movie was really good. I heard nothing but good things. Yeah, I've just never been in a Life of Pie mood, you know what I mean? The name sort of it's kind of like, yeah, it's Pie. Do I care about his life? No? It's a good
movie though, all right. Moving on to uh, Alfred or Alfred Packer? Who knows? I heard it was Alfred, but I've seen it both ways, illiterate gold miners in the Old West? Who knows that's right? Uh, February Alfred. He's like, he's a gold miner, he's a prospector, and he wants to go to the high mountains of Colorado to find gold and apparently makes like half of the trip and then stops in the winter and stays with the Ute tribe and they're like, you need to just stay here
until spring, don't go any further. He says, no, no, no, I got this. I'm going to continue on. Thanks for the warning. So he goes on with his his friends and um eventually wanders out of the woods alone. Yeah, he went in with five other dudes, came out alone, that's right, and said who me, Oh, I'm just the sole survivor of the group. A storm hit and everybody went their separate ways. Let's not talk about it again. Yeah, he said, my feet got frozen and I couldn't keep up,
and I don't know what happened to those dudes. And they're like, oh really, He's like, okay, fine, all right, yeah I killed one of them, but it was in self defense. And they're like what He's like, all right, okay, alright, we ate some of the other dudes, but they died naturally. Well, the reason they first said, wait a minute, what's going on here? As he said that I don't know what happened to those guys, and they said, well, why do
you have their personal belongings in your pack? And he went, oh, well, I know I've got wallets full of money from these guys, right, so maybe I should come somewhat clean. So the story keeps changing every time they asked him. Uh. They eventually he's in jail. Is very kg. He's in jail at this point, um obviously while he's being questioned and all this stuff, But the jail was basically a log cabin.
No jail can hold Alfred Packer. No, especially not to jail in eighteen seventy four in Colorado, so he busted out, goes on the lamb for nine years. They catch him in Wyoming, liver under the leaving under the alias John Schwartz. Actually somebody who was part of another expedition that he was on, a guy named French. He recognized him, just happened to run cross paths with him. It was like you no way, Yeah, wow, that's bad luck. I guess,
good luck. Um. So he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to forty years, released on parole in one after yes, seventeen years. Yeah, and supposedly died of vegetarian at the age. That's what they say, and it sounds to me like, yeah, that's what I think. He Well, he's become a beloved figure there. I guess. There's a statue of him on the campus of you see it Boulder. Well, yeah, they named their cafeteria after him, and with the subheading have
a friend for lunch. Terrible. Those college students back in the sixties had a real sense of humor, and of course the South Park guys wrote cannibal the musical after him. So Alfred Packers Survival Cannibalist, what degree? We don't know? That's right, I need another break, sir, I'm hungry. Is that is that awful? We'll be back right after this. Okay, did you get to eat, buddy? No, not yet. Your forearms looking pretty good, though. I'd make I'd make a
nice meating meal. Well, you know, one of the great revelations in my adult life is that when you're eating meat, you're not eating anything but muscle. Did you realize that? When? Did you realize that? When you told me on the show? I know that I go over some stuff more than once, but it was a big revelation I know. And that's why red meat is red, because it has more red blood vessels. Those are those are muscles that you use
more often dark meat. I'm sorry. So like in in a chicken, the dark meat are muscles that the chicken uses far more frequently than say, like the breast, which is white, So there's fewer blood vessels, so it's dark compared to the white meat. Interesting, it's mind blowing. You like dark meat? I like it. I like it all. I used to just be like oh no, white meat only please, And then I like really started trying dark meat. I'm like, yeah, that's good stuff. Now I'm less like
bring it on. Right service choice, that's what I always say, wide or dark service choice. And then I'm like, no, no no, no, mixed. I'm not going to leave this in your hands. And they say this diner is so wacky. The Franklin Expedition, Yes, this one is. Uh, this is a good one. Uh, Sir John frank when at the age of sixty, had already taken too expeditions, ah, dangerous ones. Yeah sixty. Also, we're talking the eighteen fifties, forties. That's old. Yeah, that's
that's an old dude. So hats off to him for doing it again. Salty old swarthy seamen act. So. Um, they were looking for the northwest passage from Europe to Asia up in the Arctic. I guess right, going that would be going westward, westward, northwest. Oh yeah, northwest passes. I never thought about that before. But there's no southeast passage or northeast passages there. I don't know who cares, right anyway, Franklin's leading this expedition, and um, there are
a hundred thirty four dudes. Yeah, I've seen another couple of numbers, but we'll just we'll go with that and they're never heard from again. Yes, and they were not Uh, they were pros. They weren't a bunch of dummies that just said, let's you know, take a bag of rice, it's a beef turkey. They had five years of food. Uh. They went to a provision er. I didn't really know this how this worked. I figured they just went shopping.
But you would, like you would find someone to get all your provisions for the trip, like they would win the bid and you would hire them. So they hired a guy named Stephen Goldner. Uh. And he apparently was in a rush because I guess they just cut it close time wise and hastily put together, um, five years worth of food and tens soldered him shut. Eight thousand tins of food eight thousands. Uh, he soldered them shut.
Apparently that's how they say in the UK, So shout out UK, right, um, And here's the quote I saw was that, Uh, the lead dripped like melted candle wax down inside the surface. That's a bad soldering job, it is. And we just an episode on lead. So you know that if lead is in your canned goods, that is no goods. So this expedition had to uh two ships, and they were really well outfitted ships. They had internal heat. Hot water was piped throughout the cabin so they they
could stay warm. They had UM railroad engine screw propellers. They were um fitted with iron. They were iron clad in parts to break through ice. They were really nice ships. The Arabis and the Terror. Yeah, very poorly named. Yeah, the Terror is not what you want to name a ship on an expedition, right, No. And the Arabas. I looked it up because I was just curious. And apparently in Greek mythology, Uh, it's the place where you would go right after death. It's the personification of darkness. So
terrible names, the Terror and the Arabas. So chuck. They found at least one of the ships. Yeah, just two years ago. Okay, they discovered the wreck of the h M. S Erebus offshore of King William Island underwater. Is trapped in ice underwater, but they think that it was trapped in ice is how they originally because they were stuck.
There's a big mystery with the Franklin Expedition because even if they were stuck, they had plenty of supplies, five years worth the supplies to wait until it thought enough to sail at least go back. So why would they abandon these these ships. It's a it's a huge mystery, and a lot of people say, well it was the lead. Look at the behavior. They apparently took lifeboats, dragged them across the tundra. They had non essentials on board with
things like silverware. You'd have to just be totally off your nut to be on like a survival expedition to go find help, and you bring along silverware. So everybody pointed to what was the duce's named, Richard Golding's work, terrible salt soldering work, Stephen Goldner, and that his that the lead had had poisoned these guys and clouded their judgment,
that they kind of went mad. But apparently they did some They they some of the bodies have since been found, and they did some forensic analysis of it and said, actually, now these guys have lots of lead poisoning, but it's distributed evenly throughout their bones, like they were just poisoned by lead throughout their lives. It wasn't acute poisoning from this soldering work. So it just remains a mystery. I
guess it does. And some Inuit tribes reported seeing um about forty guys, forty white men that were in bad shape that they sold some seal meat too, and uh, when one of the search parties came across the Innuit tried, they told him the story. And I think over the years they've been finding, you know, piles of these bodies
in different locations. And uh, the Inuits first where the ones who said, yeah, we actually saw one of their camps, like after we ran into the guys, we think we found him again, all dead like the following year, and there was like human bones and their kettles and stuff like that. So they definitely resorted to to uh, survival
cannibalism at some point. Yeah, it said, um the direct quote was from the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles, it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative cannibalism. Kind of dramatic, yeah, for sure. So check. Let's do one more, huh. Okay, let's do our famous top ten, consisting of six tops boy, this one is super super sad like. There's not much joking about this. I mean, none of this has been funny, but we're
trying not to just depress everyone. But the Siege of Leningrad is one of the saddest moments in world history. It's when the Nazi forces uh invaded, bombarded over three years against what is now St. Petersburg, and basically for nine hundred days cut them off in an effort to starve out a city of three three point three million people. And it worked. Yeah, it's it's a great effect. Three point three million people. A million died over the three
year siege. Yeah, and eight hundred thousand of those died from starvation. Eight hundred thousand people nuts. So the government nobody could get to it. The Nazis had formed a ring around the city and we're defending it and just trying to They were bombing it every day, but they were also well aware that they were purposefully starving the population as well. Inside um, the people had a ration of bread once a day, a piece of bread about the weight of a bar of soap. Yeah, manual laborers
got two hundred and fifty grams of bread. But apparently the bread was cut with pine shavings, and they were subsisting on three hundred calories a day. Yeah, if you were in the army, you would get things like um, fern leaf soup and um cream of nettle, probably not even cream, but like broth of nettle soup. So people were joining the army just for that, just to have that every day. Yeah, here's some of the things that
they use as food substitutes. UM, cotton seed cake, uh macaroni, which is in quotes made from flax seed for cattle meat, jelly produced from boiling bones and calf skins, yeast soup from sawdust, fermented sawdust, joiner's glue, boiled and jellified, toothpaste, cold cream. Basically, it said they even licked dried pasteuff wallpaper because there was a rumor that it was potato based.
Anything for calories. I mean, that's how desperate things were. Yeah, and and not to stephen calories, but like vitamins too. Apparently they were sweeping the tobacco shavings from a tobacco factories ventilation system because tobacco is vitamin C in it unbelievable, vitamin B one of those too. So what happens is a crime wave starts breaking out, as you would expect in a city that large that's starving to death, like people literally just laying dead in the street, like everywhere
you look right. And apparently not just laying dead in the street, they were half eaten, some of them laying dead in the street. Yeah, and they they kept this under wraps for many, many years because they didn't want people to know the world to know how ugly it was. But we have a lot more information now. But um, you would have these ration cards to get this, you know, the tiny allotments of food that they had, and so if their relatives die, they would hide the bodies so
they could still use the ration card. And then these gangs, these teenage gangs of teenage boys started breaking out where they would mug you for food in your ration card. Uh. One eight year old killed his two younger brothers for their cards. Uh. One guy murdered his grandmother and boiled an eight her liver. And a seventeen year old stole a corpse from a cemetery and put it through a meat minzer. So it's like one of the most shocking things that I've ever heard in world. History, and it
isn't much talked about. I mean, you hear about the Siege of Lennon Grand, but I mean the details of it are just horrifying. Yeah, it was pretty whitewashed, I think when I studied it in college. But um, well that's because the Soviets just denied the horror of the whole thing. Two thousand people were arrested for cannibalism. Um five eighty six were executed for murdering people and eating them.
And it said most people arrested were women. Apparently mothers would smother like their youngest kids to feed to the other kids. Man, what a horrible time. Alrighty, that's a nice uplifting way to leave people. Yeah there's others one, there's others that we haven't touched upon. So if you want to learn more about it, you can just type survival cannibalism into the search bar how stuff works dot com.
And since I said that it's time for basebook questions, I can't think of a more inappropriate way to end this show into take social media questions and laugh. But maybe we need to laugh now. Let's all right, I've got a hilarious one. All Right, this is from lu Jen If you had one, if you had to eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be? Fried chicken? Oh yeah, easy, mom. Would be either a really good Indian curry or a really good
Japanese curry. Either one of those would be happy. So a curry, A curry, A good one, though, great one? Are you well? And food? Fried chicken? I'm gonna if if it's a meal, I'm gonna say fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy and corn bread or biscuit or something. What about green Yeah? I love it, um, but dealer's choice, like you said, okay, green beans, collared whatever, But that would be my meal. First good one. That was hilarious. This is from Jeff Ruth. Why doesn't John Candy get
comedic props that he's due? Great question, I agree. One of the great great comic actors of our time. Yeah, it's great. Sad, sad that we lost him. Uh. He was huge at the time. I mean, everybody knew John Candy. He was in some major, major motion pictures, many of which were surrounded by him. I think he's gotten tons of props. So what are you saying, Jeff? Wake up, Wake up? Also because he was Canadian. Okay, good answer. Uh, here's one from Lily Highum, what is it like for
Jerry producing stuff you should know? Well, here's Jerry's answer. All right, yeah, nice eliminating. That's always Russell Redman. What's your favorite breed of cat? And don't lie, because I'll know Russell. I mean, I think I'll probably go with the breeds that I have right now because they're dear to me. So I'm gonna say a tabby in a main tune. Okay, and yeah, are you ready for this question? Charlie Manson asked, Chuck always wears a baseball cap. Is
there a reason for this? Chuck? I think you should tell them right now you're not wearing a baseball cap. I'm not because, as most of you know, my beloved Last Chance Garage had that have had for twenty years was lost in Austin, Texas and is in a dumpster somewhere in Austin, Texas. I don't know if that's true. I think it's adorning the hat of a hipster in Austin, Texas. Seriously, if you're in an Austin, keep an eye off for that thing. It says last Chance garage. It's black circle
emblem smells like twenty years of Chuck. No one else would want to wear that hat. I'm guarantee you. But now I don't wear a hat that much anymore because of that. I love that hat. Okay, alright, l I p okay. Jack Mayhan says, what is your favorite automobile and why? Uh? Mine is probably the AMC Pacer, just because it's pretty cool looking. I'm not a big car guy, but I'm gonna go with the nineteen sixties VW Beetles because I drove them and I still love him. I
saw beautiful looking beetle the other day. Cherry restored that this guy was driving, and I was just like, man, I'm getting another one one day. Totally do it, Chuck, I am. I'm gonna have a real nice one. Okay. Um Bryant Tarbell, Oh Tarbell, why do you tempt me? So? Described to flate Gate in one word, we go at it a lot on Facebook. He's our friend from Boston. In one word, uh, two words, three words, Tom Brady Cheetah.
Oh moving on? Well, I think a score one for Chuck. Uh. Tara Dickinson asks this catch up a sauce or a condiment. I think it's probably both. I don't think it has to be one or the other. I did it. Don't be dumb on the origin of ketchup. Did you know it's vieting a musing origin? No idea? Really? Cat is that pounced? Really? And is that why it's spelled uh as cats up? Yes, that's exactly right, that's the tradition spelling. Yeah. And did you know like originally before tomatoes weren't introduced
until like the late nineteenth century, but they were. The British were making versions of this stuff, um, like from the like mid eighteenth century, and they were using things like walnuts and anchovies and all sorts of weird stuff mushrooms. It's more like a fish sauce. That's how catsup started. Really? Yeah? Is that why it's got vinegar in it today? Probably? Probably idea? Don't remember why. I think it might just have been originally a preservative. Gotcha? I'll do one more
for me. This is from Caleb James Wyant. Would either of you ever consider running for public office? Um? For me? Not a chance. No, never had any interest whatsoever. Um. And I wouldn't be allowed to anyway, they would expose me so quickly for past crimes against humanity, They would dig stuff up on me, and I would be disqualified. So now, for many reasons, I think that's a great way in this great If you want to get in touch with us, you can visit us on Facebook at
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