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Capoeira

The content below is from Episode 98 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

Reacher - Rotten Tomatoes
  • REACHER
    • I like to listen to audio books on occasion and the past year I listed to 2 of the Jack Reacher books written by Lee Childs.
    • I had seen the 2 Tom Cruise movies that came out featuring Reacher as the main protagonist and thought the books might be fun.
    • To my surprise the books were even more enjoyable, but I did notice something was off. While I listed to the novels I was picturing 5’7″ Tom Cruise until the books described Reacher as 6’5″ and around 250 pounds. It was annoying, but necessary to recreate my mental image of the character because it made the books more enjoyable.
    • But then I saw a trailer for Amazon Prime’s new series simply titled “REACHER.” Seeing Alan Ritchson was playing the part was a delight.
      • The great Thad Castle is perfect for the role. He is 6’2″ and his biceps are the size of basketballs. He is built like a truck.
    • I’m almost finished with the 8th and final episode of the first season. The show did not disappoint. So check it out!

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • A friend from college recently posted a meme that said “when you play a fighting game, but don’t know the controls.” The meme was a video of a guy who was seemingly dancing around a caged octagon.
    • I recognized the movements from a video game franchise I used to play as a kid called Tekken. I remembered there was a character that used a similar style of fighting. A quick google search revealed the character’s name is Eddy Gordo.
      • The character is a Brazilian capoeira fighter. Eddy made his debut in the arcade version of Tekken 3 in 1997 and his first console appearance was in the 1998 PlayStation port of the title.
      • I did remember the character was (or is) Brazilian. I’m not entirely sure if the Tekken series is still active.
  • So This week’s episode dives in to the unique form of martial arts known as Capoeira.
    • Encyclopedia Brittannica definition:
      • capoeira, dancelike martial art of Brazil, performed to the accompaniment of call-and-response choral singing and percussive instrumental music. It is most strongly associated with the country’s northeastern region.
  • The basic aesthetic elements of capoeira were brought to Brazil by enslaved people, primarily from west and west-central Africa.
    • Between 1500 and 1815, Brazil was a colony of the Portuguese Crown—an empire sustained by slave labor. The business of capturing and selling humans brought enormous wealth to the Portuguese Crown, but it brought huge numbers of enslaved Africans to the New World. Hundreds of people were packed into overcrowded, infected holds of slave ships in order to maximize profit. As a result of the perilous and unhealthy conditions during the three-month journey, more than half of the enslaved lost their lives, their limp bodies tossed overboard.
    • Upon arrival, they were sold at the Sunday market and sent to work in the hot, humid and harsh conditions of the plantations, where many would be worked to death. The high mortality rates among the enslaved populations in Brazil, along with an increased demand for Brazilian raw materials like sugar, gold and diamonds, spurred the importation of growing numbers of Africans. An estimated four million enslaved people were shipped to Brazil until the mid-19th century.
    • The enslaved resisted in various forms: armed revolt, poisoning their owners, abortion and escape. The vastness of the Brazilian inlands made it possible for individuals on the run to hide. Some escaped and formed clandestine communities in the backlands of the rainforest, independent villages known as quilombos. Here, the Africans and their descendants developed an autonomous socio-cultural system in which they could sustain various expressions of African culture. Historians surmise that capoeira emerged from these communities as a means for defense under the oppressive Portuguese regime. 
  • So you had these west and west-central African people coming to Brazil by force and despite how badly they were treated and oppressed, they brought their culutre with them. The west-African elements of culture were recombined and reinterpreted within the diverse enslaved community of Brazil to create a unique means of self defense, both driven and disguised—as merely a dance—by its musical accompaniment.
    • By the mid-1800s, the towns and cities of Brazil experienced an unprecedented urbanization. Cities grew in population but lacked adequate economic planning and infrastructure, resulting in a growing population of vagrants. The Paraguayan War between 1864 and 1870 brought a flood of veterans and refugees from destroyed quilombos into the cities. These people were attracted to capoeira not only for its sport and play but also for its powerful means of attack and defense for their survival.
    • And then in 1888, Slavery was abolished in Brazil, but capoeira continued to flourish within the Afro-Brazilian population, particularly in the northeastern state of Bahia. The government, however, recognizing the physical and spiritual potency of the art form and considering it a threat to society, continued to outlaw the practice until the early 20th century.
    • Capoeira became a widespread practice at the beginning of the 20th century—outlaws, bodyguards and mercenaries used it. Even some politicians practiced as a way to sway constituents. In this time, strong social pressure throughout the country slowly transformed capoeira into a less aggressive weekend pastime. Eventually capoeiristas were meeting in front of bars, playing an apparently inoffensive kind of dance accompanied by berimbaus.
    • The oppression of capoeira diminished significantly during the 1930s. During this time, a particular mestre—or master—had been working toward restoring the dignity and historical perspective of the capoeira of his time. Mestre Bimba was born in 1899 in Bahia, in northwestern Brazil. In 1932 he became the first master to open a formal capoeira school called Luta Regional. By 1937, the school received official recognition by the government. The course of capoeira had changed.
    • Mestre Bimba established a disciplined method of teaching and legitimized capoeira as a form of self-defense and athletics. He developed a style called capoeira regional, which emphasized the technicality of movements and a dance-like nature. When he was summoned by the government to perform in front of distinguished guests, Mestre Bimba became the first to publicly present capoeira as an official cultural practice.
    • In 1972, the Brazilian government recognized capoeira as on official sport. The regulations laid down rules, definitions, bylaws, a code of ethics, recognized movements and a graded classification chart for students. It also established rhythms for the music and guidelines for the role of the berimbaus during competition.
    • This institutionalization and systemization of capoeira did not sit well with many mestres. They were opposed to such formalizing efforts, which they saw as an attempt to remove the art from its more organic, grassroots environment. Despite their opposition, capoeira was already engaged in a tremendous process of adapting to a changing society.
      • When I read about this systemization of the capoeira I immediately drew a comparison to Yoga. Yoga started out as a small part of very complex religious practice but when it became westernized it is simply a type of workout routine.
      • I think this is what the mestres feared would happen to capoeira.
  • Now Capoeira is best described not as a dance but as a sport in which the participants—historically, sometimes with blades strapped to their ankles or held between their toes—swing their legs high in attack, perform aerial somersaults, and pass within a hairsbreadth of each other’s knees, head, groin, or stomach.
    • Flexibility, stamina, rapidity of movement, and malicia (deception) are more important than sheer muscular strength. Although marked by the use of graceful, fluid, and often acrobatic movements as a means to escape rather than block an attack, the “game” of capoeira, as it is called by its practitioners, can nonetheless be lethal when contact is actually made with a well-timed, well-placed blow.
    • In current practice, two opponents face each other within the roda—a circle of capoeiristas (practitioners of capoeira)—emulating in a stylized manner the strikes and parries of combat, in time with the rhythms of a small musical ensemble. Music is indeed integral to the practice of capoeira. The ensemble typically consists of one to three berimbaus (struck musical bows), one or two atabaques (single-headed, standing, conical drums), a pandeiro (tambourine), an agogô (double bell), and sometimes also a reco-reco (scraped bamboo tube), all of which accompany call-and-response songs, usually led by one of the berimbau players.
    • Since about the 1930s in the state of Bahia and somewhat later in Rio de Janeiro, clubs have trained students in precise kicking, passing, and strategic deception. In the late 20th century capoeira began to gain an international following, and by the early 21st century active clubs existed in many cities throughout the world. Moreover, the art has gained many highly skilled female practitioners, though in its early years capoeira was an exclusively male domain.
  • As I was looking in to this martial art I kept coming across video after video of this guy Lateef Crowder performing capoeira in various movies including the live action movie Tekken where he played Eddy Gordo.
    • After doing some digging on his IMDB page I realize Mr. Crowder has one of the most impressive modern list of stunt credits I have ever seen.
    • Crowder has credits on everything from multiple Call of Duty motion capture stunts to acting credit on a Twilight movie.
    • My thought is that yes he is talented, but the martial art he has been practicing since he was 6 years old (capoeira) is such a spectacular sport to watch. In addition to requiring incredible amounts of body control and strength, it probably caught the attention of every talent scout he came across.
    • The accolades this guy has under his belt are insane including a Primetime Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Winner
Nominee
Nominee
Nominee
To all the fans of Lateef Crowder (Santiago) | Twilight saga, Twilight breaking dawn, Twilight
Lateef Crowder Filmography
May be an image of one or more people, people standing and outdoors
  • So I just wanted to give Lateef Crowder a shout out as he is the most popular practitioner of capoeira, at least in the states.

CREDIT

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MAKE MEAD

The content below is from Episode 97 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

The audio version will be a few hours behind this blog version as I am recording with someone else. I appreciate your patience.

What Is Mead?

This week’s episode is going to be a little different. Instead of a typed-up script that I follow, I decided to have a conversation with my fiancee about our mead making. This post contains certain points we wanted to touch on during the AUDIO PODCAST, but not a full script.

How To Make Spiced Mead - 5 Best Recipes You Need To Try – Advanced Mixology
  • What is Mead?
    • Wikipedia’s Definition
      • Mead, or fermented honey water, is an alcoholic beverage, sometimes with various fruits, spices, grains, or hops. The alcoholic content ranges from about 3.5% ABV to more than 18%. The defining characteristic of mead is that the majority of the beverage’s fermentable sugar is derived from honey.
    • Honey wine
      • Simplest ingredients: Water, Honey, and Yeast
    • Oldest form of alcohol
      • It is referenced in the ancient cultures of China, India, and Egypt. The earliest documentary evidence suggest that a fermented honey beverage was drunk in India some 4000 years ago.
      • NORSE – The Norse drank their mead from intricate drinking horns or in elaborately decorated silver cups. Mead is a simple beverage brewed with honey, water, and yeast. Many regard it as the oldest alcoholic drink known to man, and it has also gone by the names honey wine, ambrosia, or nectar
      • GREEK – The history of mead may go back more than 8,000 years. The oldest known meads were created on the Island of Crete. Wine had not yet been created. Mead was the drink of the Age of Gold, and the word for drunk in classical GREEK remained “honey-intoxicated.”
Sugar substitutes - honey explained | BBC Good Food
  • Different kinds of mead
    • Acerglyn: A sweet mead made with maple syrup.
    • Rhodomel: A mead made with rose petals or rose hips.
    • Capsicumel: For the capsicum lovers, this mead is flavored with chili peppers. It doesn’t always result in a spicy mead, but can lend balance to the sweetness of honey.
    • Braggot: A braggot is a mead that’s closer in style to a beer. Braggots are mixed with beer or brewed with malt or hops. It’s a mead with an identity crisis.
      • When I first got in to mead I started to make Braggot without knowing it was a thing. I went to a local liquor store and got a cheap bottle of mead for around $18 and then I bought a case of expensive IPA’s and mixed the 2.
      • The bitter taste of the IPAs was balanced out by the super sweet mead. It was DELICIOUS… but the hangover was fearce lol.
      • Looking in to Braggot I found historians claim the Vikings used to drink it. Apparently, when a norseman was short on money, but still wanted to party he would mix the expensive mead with cheaper beer to save some coin. Funny how my experience was the opposite with the mead costing less than the IPAs.
    • Coffee Mead: A mead brewed with coffee or espresso beans.
    • Bochet: Meads made with honey that has been previously heated or toasted to add caramelized flavors.
    • Sack Mead: Sack meads, also known as great meads, contain the highest amount of alcohol (14%+) and require the largest amount of honey to produce. These meads pack a lot of flavor and can be similar to full-bodied dessert or even red wines. Because of the high level of alcohol and residual sugar, these meads are better suited to aging and can take quite some time to make! Many will get better after several months, and in some cases, years!
    • Quick Mead: Also known as small meads, are meads that ferment quickly and don’t require a long time to age. These are great when time is of the essence.
    • Hydromel: Hydromels are the lightest meads, and contain the least amount of alcohol, usually between 3.5% to 7.5%. These meads will drink like a light beer and are easy to drink. These meads may also be carbonated and sold in a can; these are commonly called session meads.
      • These meads also contain the least amount of honey. Because the yeast converts the honey into alcohol during fermentation, the amount of honey determines how much alcohol the final mead will contain. Sometimes, hydromels will be created by diluting a standard mead. (A quick side note: while in English hydromels refer to a type of mead, in France and other European countries, this word means the same thing as “mead.”)
Making Medieval Mead like a Viking - YouTube
  • Why you should make mead.
    • To make mead you have to use honey. Bees are what make honey and bees are a lot more beneficial than you might think.
      • These hymenoptera insects, besides providing us with a tasty sweetener, are the most important pollinators on the planet, ahead of birds and bats. A quarter of the flowering plant species depend on them. The overexploitation of agricultural land to feed the human population is causing a decline in the population of these insects, whereas in reality, 70% of these crops depend entirely or partly on their pollination.
      • Without bees, humans would not survive.
      • But if you make mead then you are helping the bee industry, because you have to buy a lot of honey to make mead.
      • So you are boozing it up, but for a good cause lol
    • It is completely Legal to make mead in all states. Individual states remain free to restrict or prohibit the manufacture of beer, mead, hard cider, wine and other fermented alcoholic beverages at home.
      • Now selling it is different. You need to jump through all kinds of hoops like getting a permit to sell alcohol.
      • But if you just want to drink it yourself or give away for free, that is totally legal…
        • This is because the government wants their cut of the profits if you are making money off of it.
What is Mead? "Nectar of the Gods" – Crafty Nectar
  • Why isn’t mead more popular?
    • The bee population is dwindling due to the use of pesticides and other farming techniques. So, meaderies are having to produce their own honey and that can be very tough nowadays.
      • But you can help change that by making your own mead!

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Lobster Boy

The content below is from Episode 96 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast.

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

Deep Rock Galactic Game Wiki: Requirement, Length & Characters
  • Deep Rock Galactic!
    • Playstation has a few games that are free to download each month and one of the games this month is Deep Rock Galactic!
    • Deep Rock Galactic is a cooperative first-person shooter video game developed by Danish studio Ghost Ship Games and published by Coffee Stain Publishing. 
    • The story is about The interplanetary mining corporation DEEP ROCK GALACTIC specializes in securing the most dangerous dig sites in the galaxy. When they need a team for the toughest missions, they call in the Dwarves – mercenary miners, legendary for their ability to survive underground, and infamous for their brutality in combat.
      • You play as a dwarf that works for the Deep Rock Galactic company. When you go on missions you are dropped in to a planet and tasked with extracting valuable minerals from the core. While underground you are surrounded by darkness and constantly attacked by the local insect wildlife.
    • The game uses lighting in one of the most unique ways I have ever seen and when you aren’t on missions you and your teamates can goof around back at HQ.
      • You can order all different kinds of beer, dance, kick barrels, or even play an inpromptu soccer game.
    • You can play by yourself or with others as each party can host up to 4 players.
      • Each player has to pick which class of player from either
        • Engineer
        • Scout
        • Gunner
        • or Driller (which is my favorite)
      • And apparently the class you pick as your favorite reveals something about your personality lol
  • If you have playstation plus I strongly suggest you download the game while it is still free throughout the month of January 2022.
    • If you don’t have Playstation Plus then I still recommend you buy the game and start mining.
    • ROCK AND STONE!

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • This week’s episode is of a strange and dark story.
    • It is a true story that will ellicit both intrigue and horror.
    • THIS is about Lobster Boy.
      • The boy with lobster claws.
The Killer Lobster Boy Who was Hated By the Masses | by JustAnnet 👑 | History of Yesterday

========Robster Craws audio=====

  • Grady Stiles Jr. was born on June 26th, 1937.
    • He  would grow up to become an American freak show performer and an eventual murderer.
    • His deformity was the genetic condition ectrodactyly, in which the fingers and toes are fused together to form claw-like extremities. Because of this, Stiles performed under the stage name “Lobster Boy“.
  • Throughout his life, Lobster Boy married twice and had a total of 4 children, 2 of which were born with ectrodactyly.
    • The deformity is passed genetically and Grady’s family had suffered from it for generations. According to Grady Stiles Senior, the deformity and the prevalence of it in their family dated back to 1840.
    • Grady Sr. capitalized on his disability by running a circus/carney side show known as the Lobster Family. They were an attraction in a traveling carnival. After Grady Jr. was born he was folded into his father’s sideshow act at the age of seven.
    • Later in life, when Grady Jr. became the head of the Lobster family, he reportedly made between 50 and 80 thousand dollars each season. So things weren’t too bad for the Lobster Family, at least not financially.
    • When winter rolled around each year the family would return to their home in Gibsonton, Florida, where many other carnival performers lived during the winter season.
  • Grady Stiles Jr.’s case of electrodactyly was pretty severe: In addition to his hands, he also experienced ectrodactyly in his feet, and therefore could not walk. For most of his life, he primarily used a wheelchair, but he most commonly used his hands and arms for locomotion.
    • He developed substantial upper body strength that which was pretty handy for most day-to-day tasks. But when combined with his bad temper and the alcoholism that he developed later in life, Lobster Boy’s incredible strength just made him more dangerous to others.
The Killer Lobster Boy Who was Hated By the Masses | by JustAnnet 👑 | History of Yesterday
  • Limited by his deformities, Stiles grew up confined within the carnival world. His childhood wasn’t the most glamorous or normal living the life of a carney kid.
    • But as a young man he fell in love with another carnival worker named Maria Teresa, a young woman who had run away to join the circus as a teenager.
    • Mary didn’t have a carnival worthy deformity or trick. She was by most accounts a normal person living a normal life until she ran away at the age of 19 to be amongst the carneys whom she felt more comfortable with.
    • Luckily for her, carnivals always need staff to keep things running so they welcomed her and the extra labor she was willing to offer.
    • Time passed and she noticed the boy confined to a small cubicle in the corner of the carnival who just sat there waving at paying customers all day.
    • She remembers Grady being kind as can be when they first met. But once he consumed some alcohol (of which he eventually developed a nasty addiction to) he became angry and violent. Domestic abuse became a norm at the Lobster Family household of carneys.
      • Lobster boy would use his extra strong pincers to violently pinch and tear at the flesh of his victims.
  • During one domestic abuse altercation where Grady was assaulting his wife when his pregnant daughter Kathy intervened by putting Grady’s wheelchair in between him and his wife.
    • Grady then took out frustrations on his daughter and beat her viciously enough to induce labor. His daughter gave birth to a premature baby who had the same deformity as his own grandfather.
    • Another night Grady’s violent tendencies took things even too far for Mary to tolerate.
      • In a drunken rage Grady tackled Mary to the floor, pinned her down, and with his claws removed a intrauterine device that Mary used to prevent pregnancy.
      • Horrified by this event, Mary promptly left Grady.
Grady Stiles - The Famous Lobster Boy

===========Rock Lobster audio=========

  • When Stiles’ teenage daughter, Donna, fell in love with a young man that he didn’t approve of he took matters in to his own claws.
    • Donna was somewhere between 15 and 17 at the time and her Fiancee was only 18. Lobster Boy must have been really against this union because…
    • In 1978 Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, he murdered his daughter’s fiancé in cold blood on the eve of the wedding.
    • He was convicted of Third Degree Murder.
    • At his trial, he admitted his act with no remorse whatsoever, but pointed out that he couldn’t possibly be imprisoned because no jail could properly accommodate his disability. He was subsequently let off with 15 years probation and allowed to return home.
      • This sounds bonkers to me. How is a murderer who admitted the crime going to be allowed to go practically unpunished just because they didn’t have a prison to house him in? Was this guy able to lobster pince his way out of cuffs or something? IDK
      • Also, reports say he ” shot and killed his oldest daughter’s fiancé on the eve of their wedding.” How did Lobster boy grip the gun? I would like to know the logistics of that. Did he have to use both hands? The guy only has a total of 4 fingers (2 on each hand), so how did he grip a gun? Was it a pistol or a rifle?
        • Then I read on HistoryOfYesterday.com: “He used a shotgun to kill him.” … how? How does someone with lobster hands hold and fire a shotgun?
    • I will admit, looking in to Lobster Boy I realized there weren’t many details on his life story. This is to be expected about someone who lived hundreds of years ago, but Lobster Boy lived in the 20th Century. I couldn’t help feel like some of these sources were just full of malarkey.
      • Then again these are carney people. They keep to themselves like gypsies. Not that I have any real knowledge about people who work for travelling carnivals/circuses or gypsies outside of movies and TV shows… so I’m no expert at all.
  • Stiles stopped drinking thereafter, and during this period remarried his first wife, Mary Teresa in 1989.
    • However, he soon began drinking again and his family claimed that he became even more abusive.
      • In 1992, Teresa, together with her son from a previous marriage, Harry Glenn Newman Jr., hired a seventeen-year-old sideshow performer named Chris Wyant to kill Stiles for $300.
  • According to Grady Stiles III, his mother, Teresa, and father were arguing.
    • Teresa had said ‘Something needs to be done.’ Teresa’s son overheard this, and went to a neighbor and repeated those words. Shortly after this happened, as Stiles smoked a cigarette while watching television on the sofa, the neighbor entered his home with a semi-automatic pistol and shot him in the head twice, killing him.
  • Apparently no one involved in Lobster Boy’s murder denied their role in the act.
    • During the trial, his wife spoke at length of his abusive history. “My husband was going to kill my family,” she told the court, “I believe that from the bottom of my heart.”
    • Wyant was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
    • Harry Newman was given life in prison for his role as the mastermind and Teresa was given 43 years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder.
    • Stiles was hated so much by the local community that only 10 people came to his funeral, and nobody volunteered as a pallbearer to carry his coffin.
Lobster Boy — Magwire Art

=======Dancing Lobsters audio=========

CREDIT

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Hawaiian Pizza

The content below is from Episode 95 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

Click the link above to go to the audio podcast version.

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

Here's All The Outstanding Concept Art From The Book Of Boba Fett Episode 1 Credits
  • I recommend you check out The Book of Boba Fett currently available on Disney +
    • The show is about he famous Bounty Hunter from the original Star Wars trilogy and it picks up right after Boba Fett’s fall in to the Sarlac pitt.
    • The reason I wanted to recommend this show is because the first episode isn’t great. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t impress. I almost gave up on the show and I think a lot of other people did too.
      • But episode 2 and 3 were a BLAST!
    • Check out The Book of Boba Fett on Disney + and you will be a Tusken Raider fan in no time lol.
The Book of Boba Fett' episode 2 kicks the live-action show up a gear and then some | Space

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • The topic for this week is Hawaiian Pizza, but it is important we break down that term before jumping right in. Let us examine Pizza a bit.
    • You see, pizza isn’t what you think it is.
    • If I asked you: “where does pizza come from? where did it originate?” – You would most likely reply “Italy.” But like most things I find worth talking about: IT’S COMPLICATED (one of my favorite phrases). Here’s a brief history of Pizza:
      • In the 6th century BC, Persian soldiers serving under Darius the Great baked flatbreads with cheese and dates on top of their battle shields.
      • In Ancient Greece, citizens made a flat bread called plakous (πλακοῦς, gen. πλακοῦντος – plakountos) which was flavored with toppings like herbs, onion, cheese and garlic.
        • Sounds like my favorite kind of pizza (white pizza) since I’m not real big on tomatoes.
      • Another precursor of pizza was probably the focaccia, a flatbread known to the Romans as panis focacius, to which toppings were then added.
      • The word pizza was first documented in 997 AD in Gaeta[3] and successively in different parts of Central and Southern Italy. Pizza was mainly eaten in Italy and by emigrants from there.
      • Modern pizza evolved from flatbread dishes in Naples, Italy, in the 18th or early 19th century
      • Pizza being something that was only consumed in Italy changed after World War II when Allied troops stationed in Italy came to enjoy pizza along with other Italian foods. WW2 helped spread pizza to America where it met with America’s multitude of diverse cultures.
      • SalernosPizza.com writes about the origin of the Modern Day Pizza: Pizza was first invented in Naples, Italy as a fast, affordable, tasty meal for working-class Neapolitans on the go. While we all know and love these slices of today, pizza actually didn’t gain mass appeal until the 1940s, when immigrating Italians brought their classic slices to the United States.
      • Pizza is one of the first International dishes. The Pizza is a symbol that unites us all. Here’s how
    • Who doesn’t like pizza?
      • Ok, I should admit, Pizza is not my first choice. If I’m with a group of ppl and they all decide to order Pizza I usually abstain and just order a sub for myself. That being said, I don’t dislike pizza… I just think sandwiches/hoagies are much better.
        • I might have to do an episode on sandwiches at one point. I really think they are the best form of food on this planet.
        • BUT I DIGRESS!
      • Nobody dislikes pizza. There are so many different kinds of pizza that it is virtually impossible for someone to dislike all variations of pizza.
        • You have your classic cheese, pepperoni, meatlovers, veggie, Chicago style, thin crust, stuffed crust, pan pizza, dessert pizza… the list goes on and on. With all the countless toppings possible there are about infinite variations of the pizza
    • The world’s cultures created pizza.
      • Yes, we established the guy who thought up Modern pizza was in Italy, but the ingredients were from all over the world.
        • People don’t usually think about this but Before 1492, tomatoes, potatoes, wild rice, salmon, pumpkins, peanuts, bison, chocolate, vanilla, blueberries and corn, among other foods, were unknown in Europe, Africa and Asia.
        • Without Christopher Columbus crossing the ocean blue there would be no pizza… just just that cheesey shield baked bread the persians made.
      • Think about all the different types of pizza I mentioned earlier like Chicago style pizza. It isn’t for everyone with its exceedingly deep dishness and bizarre order of ingredients. If the guy who invented pizza in Naples saw Chicago Pizza he wouldn’t recognize it.
        • But that is the beauty of it. When you say pizza, most people automatically picture the original pizza. But that isn’t all there is. NO, the world’s cultures took the framework of the original pizza and made it in to whatever they wanted.
    • The Pizza is a beautiful representation of humanity and how wonderfully diverse we are as a species.
A Visual Guide to What Makes Chicago Deep-Dish Pizza Great
Chicago-Style Deep Dish Pizza | How To Feed A Loon
Chicago Pizza
  • HAWAIIAN PIZZA
    • One of the most controversial versions of pizza is the Hawaiian pizza.
    • Some memes on the internet would suggest this dish a monstrosity.
      • I, however, find it to be not that bad. It isn’t my first choice, but I’ve tried it and like it.
    • Why is Hawaiian Pizza so controversial? Well, it incorporates a certain topping seen on no other verion of pizza.
      • Here’s a definition: Hawaiian pizza is a pizza topped with tomato sauce, cheese, pineapple, and back bacon or ham. Some versions may include peppers, mushrooms, bacon or pepperoni.
      • Yeah, the pineapple part is usually what people freak out about. Many say pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza. But I disagree. I say ANYthing belongs on a pizza. If it suits just 1 person, than it is a pizza topping… I mean… anchovies on pizza is a thing for crying out loud lol.
Hawaiian Pizza - Sally's Baking Addiction
  • Chonday.com writes
    • Pineapple as a pizza topping divides public opinion: Hawaiian was the most popular pizza in Australia in 2012, accounting for 15% of pizza sales, and a 2015 review of independent UK takeaways operating through Just Eat found the Hawaiian pizza to be the most commonly available. However, a 2016 survey of US adults had pineapple in the top three least favorite pizza toppings, ahead of anchovies and mushrooms.
      • Here is how this bizzare pizza variant came to be:
    • Greek-Canadian Sam Panopoulos created the first Hawaiian pizza at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, Canada in 1962. Inspired in part by his experience preparing Chinese dishes which commonly mix sweet and savory flavors, Panopoulos experimented with adding pineapple, ham, bacon and other toppings which were not initially very popular. The addition of pineapple to the traditional mix of tomato sauce and cheese, sometimes with ham or sometimes with bacon, soon became popular locally and eventually became a staple offering of pizzerias around the world.
  • Whichever side of the fence you fall on when it comes to the taste of Pineapple Pizza, I’m hoping you will see why I love it for what it represents.
    • I’ve said how Pizza is a shared love by the world over and we as humans have shaped it in to so many different and wonderful things. But Hawaiian Pizza is the epitome of that idea. It is an international connection that spans the globe.
    • Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada by a Greek immigrant, who was inspired by Chinese food to put a South American ingredient on an Italian dish, that went on to be most popular in Australia.
  • So if you are one of those people who find the idea of pineapple on pizza disgusting to your palate, I don’t blame you. We like what we like and the opposite is just as true.
    • But don’t knock it until you try it.
    • Don’t shame those who do enjoy it (because shaming someone for harmlessly liking something is selfish and childish).
    • And perhaps now I hope you can appreciate what Hawaiian Pizza represents: the result of an international cullinary phenonema that spread out across the globe indoctrinating different cultures unique spin on Pizza until it reached its height: the Hawaiian Pizza.

THANKS FOR LISTENING WHO’D A THUNKERS!

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DART, Webb, and Other STEM Updates

The content below is from Episode 94 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

Click HERE for the audio veriosn

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

What Is Mead?
  • I recommend make some MEAD!
    • I’ve recommended mead before, but now I’ve actually started to make some of it, thanks to a mead making kit from my mother-in-law.
    • Mead is wine made from honey. It is the oldest known form of alcohol made by humans.
      • Probably the world’s oldest alcoholic drink, mead is essentially fermented honey and water and has a long and glorious history. It is referenced in the ancient cultures of China, India, Greece and Egypt. The earliest documentary evidence suggest that a fermented honey beverage was drunk in India some 4000 years ago. – That was from the IrishExaminer.com
    • With Shannon’s help, I was able to put 2 gallons of mead together. I will check on them in a month or so, but they won’t even be close to ready until the earliest 3 months. Mead takes a long time.
      • I hope these go well, but they are my first batches and I wouldn’t be surprised if they kind of suck.
      • The idea is to get relatively good at making mead so I can start using honey from my sister’s bee hive.
    • Making mead is quickly becoming my next obession and I’m talking the ears off of my friends and family about it.
  • Here is a link to the next recipe I am going to try for Acerglyn which is a Maple Mead (made with maple syrup) https://myfermentedfoods.com/how-make-maple-mead/

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

Moon, Mars and asteroid missions are the top space goals for 2022 - Axios
  • This week I wanted to highlight some of the major scientific happenings of this year 2022.
    • I was able to watch with great amazement and glee as the James Webb Space Telescope launched from  Arianespace’s ELA-3 launch complex at Europe’s Spaceport located near Kourou, French Guiana.
      • I found out that It is beneficial for launch sites to be located near the equator – the spin of the Earth can help give an additional push.
    • But that sparked an ever present curiousity in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (all the things thrusting our species in to the future.
DART timeline: What's next for NASA's asteroid-smacking mission after launch | Space
  • First I would like to talk about the DART project, because even though it is just as complex as any other operation out in space, it is also totally possible to simplify the operation so much that an elementary school sutdent would understand.
    • DART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test
      • Simply put: NASA is going to launch a missile at an asteroid to see if we can move it.
      • Why? Well in case one asteroid is ever headed to Earth to wipe us all out like the dinosaurs, we want to know if we stand a chance to do anything about it. Yep… that is real.
    • Netflix recently released their hit movie “Don’t Look Up” on December 5th of 2021.
      • I watched the entire movie. All 2 and a half hours of it.
      • Starring Leonardo Dicaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, the movie was about Two low-level astronomers who must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth.
      • The movie’s overall message that Creator Adam McKay was trying to get across was that the world’s media and information managers have polluted the waters so bad that the general public wouldn’t beleive the world’s scientist warning about a planet killing asteroid until they saw it with their own eyes in the night sky.
      • I loved the movie. My fiancee thought it was a bit too long and drawn out, but she didn’t hate it. However, the world’s media and information managing organizations shit all over it with bad reviews because it made them look bad. Meanwhile, the audience scores were pretty good.
  • Anyway, the reason I bring this movie up is because it brought up some very real topics that about our world that pertain to science and not just media/politics.
      • For one: The Planetary Defense Coordination Office From “Don’t Look Up” Is a Real Thing.
      • They do stuff like protect Earth from potentially dangerous asteroids, just like in the movie, and one mission they will be completing this year is DART.
    • Here is how NASA breaks it down:
    • DART is a planetary defense-driven test of technologies for preventing an impact of Earth by a hazardous asteroid. DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space.
    • DART is a spacecraft designed to impact an asteroid as a test of technology. DART’s target asteroid is NOT a threat to Earth. This asteroid system is a perfect testing ground to see if intentionally crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid is an effective way to change its course, should an Earth-threatening asteroid be discovered in the future. While no known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth for the next 100 years, only about 40 percent of those asteroids have been found as of October 2021.
      • To summarize: chill. DART is just a test to see if we have the power to slightly change the trajectory of an asteroid while it is still really far from earth, just enough to have it miss us. BUT it is in no way an actual danger. As far as we can tell, there are no big planet-killers headed towards Earth… that being said, we only found about 40% of them sooooo we still are willing to crash hundreds of millions of dollars of space tech to see if we have the power to deter one of these sonsofbitches if need be.
    • The binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos is the target for the DART demonstration. While the Didymos primary body is approximately 780 meters across, its secondary body (or “moonlet”) is about 160-meters in size, which is more typical of the size of asteroids that could pose the most likely significant threat to Earth. The Didymos binary is being intensely observed using telescopes on Earth to precisely measure its properties before DART arrives.
      • What we are aiming at is a 2 parter. That’s why it is called DOUBLE Asteroid Redirection Test. There is an asteroid called Didymos and it has a 2nd little asteroid buddy orbiting it. We are targetting the smaller asteroid buddy with DART.
    • The DART spacecraft will achieve the kinetic impact deflection by deliberately crashing itself into the moonlet at a speed of approximately 6.6 km/s, with the aid of an onboard camera (named DRACO) and sophisticated autonomous navigation software. The collision will change the speed of the moonlet in its orbit around the main body by a fraction of one percent, but this will change the orbital period of the moonlet by several minutes – enough to be observed and measured using telescopes on Earth.
      • Here are some specifics about the DART spacecraft: Cost: $308 million. Weight: 1,345 pounds (610 kilograms) at launch / 1,210 (550 kg) pounds at impact.
Nasa Dart asteroid spacecraft: Mission to smash into Dimorphos space rock launches - BBC News
  • The DART was launched on November 24, 2021 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. After separation from the launch vehicle the DART spacecraft will intercept Didymos’ moonlet in late September 2022, when the Didymos system is within 11 million kilometers of Earth, enabling observations by ground-based telescopes and planetary radar to measure the change in momentum imparted to the moonlet.
      • So we launched this thing with help from Elon Musk and it is going to slam in to the little asteroid moonlet guy in September of this year.
      • All of the science makes sense to me, but it still feels like some comedic joke that we humans are shooting $308 million USD worth of equipment at an asteroid to see if we have even the slightest chance of diverting our own apocalypse and we called it DART…
Don't Look Up: Is The Planetary Defense Coordination Office Real?
This is a screenshot from the movie Don’t Look Up.
Photo gallery of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope | Popular Science
  • Now let us briefly revisit a past episode topic: The James Webb Space Telescope.
    • Space.com live update site:
      • Overview – NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the agency’s successor to the famous Hubble telescope, launched on Dec. 25, 2021 on a mission to study the earliest stars and peer back farther into the universe’s past than ever before.
        • JWST will also have the most advanced technology in space for searching exoplanets for alien life.
        • I woke up Christmas morning and watched the live stream from my living room. I felt like a kid again. I was elated the rest of the day. As I saw all my in-laws that day they asked me how I was doing and Merry Christmas. I must have told each and every one of them about the Webb Telescope launch.
Webb telescope launches on daring quest to behold first stars - Los Angeles Times
  • January 09, 2022 – “With the James Webb Space Telescope now fully deployed, work is expected to begin today to start aligning the 18 individual mirrors that make up the observatory’s primary mirror. It is not a fast process.”
      • January 10, 2022 – “The observatory continues its trek out to its station orbiting Earth-sun Lagrange point 2, or L2, which is located about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth on the side opposite the sun. As of today (Jan. 10), the telescope is more than 78% of the way to orbit, having traveled more than 700,000 miles (1.1 million km) from Earth, according to NASA’s observatory tracker.”
Why the James Webb Space Telescope's sunshield deployment takes so long | Space
  • Here are some OTHER updates in the world of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
    • After a multi-year shutdown and extensive maintenance work, the Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to restart operations at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland, in June. The LHC’s major experiments ATLAS and CMS were upgraded and expanded with additional layers of detector components. This will enable them to collect more data from the 40 million collisions of protons each of them produces every second.
      • CERN’s main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research – as a result, numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN through international collaborations.
      • CERN’s biggest discovery was the Higgs Boson particle in 2012. In the 1960s, British physicist Peter Higgs hypothesized the existence of a field through which all particles would be dragged — like marbles moving through molasses — giving the particles mass. Higgs thought this field would have a particle associated with it — one that is thought to give all other particles their mass. This particle became known as the Higgs boson. It was nicknamed the “God particle” after a 1993 book by physicist Leon Lederman and science writer Dick Teresi, but many physicists — including Higgs himself — reject the term as being sensational.
Cern hopes to start building £18bn Large Hadron Collider replacement that could smash particles together with vastly more force | The Independent | The Independent
CERN
  • After their own upgrades, the world’s four gravitational-wave detectors — one in Japan, one in Italy and two in the United States — will begin a new observing run in December.
      • Gravitational wave detectors like LIGO (the biggest grav wave detector) exploit the physical properties of light and of space itself to detect and understand the origins of gravitational waves (GW).
      • Detecting and analyzing the information carried by gravitational waves is allowing us to observe the Universe in a way never before possible, providing astronomers and other scientists with their first glimpses of literally un-seeable wonders.
LIGO's Dual Detectors | LIGO Lab | Caltech
LIGO
  • At Michigan State University in East Lansing, the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams is expected to start operations in early 2022. The US$730 million multi-stage accelerator aims to synthesize thousands of new isotopes of known elements, and it will investigate nuclear structure and the physics of neutron stars and supernova explosions.
      • The point of Rare Isotope Beams is to better understand the physics of nuclei, nuclear astrophysics, fundamental interactions, and has various applications for society.
Facility for Rare Isotope Beams '92 percent complete' at MSU
Facility for Rare Isotope Beams
  • A veritable armada of orbiters and landers from space agencies and private companies is scheduled to leave for the Moon in 2022. NASA will launch the Artemis I orbiter in the first test of the long-overdue launch system that is intended eventually to take astronauts back to the surface of the Moon. And the agency’s CAPSTONE orbiter will conduct experiments in preparation for the Gateway, the first space station to orbit the Moon.
    • India’s third lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3, aims to be its first to make a soft landing (one that doesn’t damage the craft) and will carry its own rover. Japan will also attempt its first soft landing on the Moon, with the SLIM mission, and Russia is aiming to revive the glory of the Soviet lunar programme with the Luna 25 lander. The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will inaugurate South Korea’s own Moon exploration.
    • On the private side, Tokyo-based company ispace is launching the Hakuto-R lander, which will carry the United Arab Emirates’ Rashid Moon rover. Two US companies, Astrobotic Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Intuitive Machines in Houston, Texas, are readying probes that will carry NASA instruments to the lunar surface.
South Korea joins space race with its first lunar mission slated for 2022
  • Another epic space journey to watch will be the joint Russian–European ExoMars mission, which is scheduled to blast off in September and will carry the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars, where it will search for signs of past life. The launch was originally scheduled for 2020, but was delayed partly because of issues with the parachutes needed to touch down safely.
    • China also plans to complete its space station, Tiangong, and has lined up more than 1,000 experiments for it, ranging from astronomical and Earth observation to the effects of microgravity and cosmic radiation on bacterial growth.
  • The worlds progess in STEM endeavors hasn’t stopped. We as humans are still blazing forward towards discovering the answers to the Universe’s secrets.
ESA's Mars Rover has a Name: Rosalind Franklin - LPIB

CREDIT:

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Grigori Rasputin

The content below is from Episode 92 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast.

This week’s episode won’t have an audio version until a later date. I got the covid and it sucks.

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

Hell boy illustration, Hellboy, comic art, demon, black background, HD wallpaper
  • I recommend you watch the 2004 Hellboy movie.
    • Here’s the Plot: At the end of World War II, the Nazis attempt to open a portal to a paranormal dimension in order to defeat the Allies, but are only able to summon a baby demon who is rescued by Allied forces and dubbed “Hellboy” (Ron Perlman). Sixty years later, Hellboy serves as an agent in the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, where he, aided by Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), a merman with psychic powers, and Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), a woman with pyrokinesis, protects America against dark forces.
    • It is based on the comics written by Mike Mignola and published by Dark Horse comics.
    • Directed by Guillermo del Toro and starrying Ron Pearlman as Hellboy, this movie kicks ass! It is dark and twisted, yet there is genuinely good humor throughout. Plus all the side characters are fantastic as well. The performances were spectacular and the head of photography on set knew what he or she was doing.
    • If you have already seen this gem of a movie I suggest you go back and watch it. I loved it as a 12 year old kid and I loved it even more as a dude in his late 20’s.
Why doesn't Hellboy's Rasputin get his eyes back? - Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange
This is Rasputin in the Hellboy movie after he is resurrected in blood. It was the coolest shot my little pubescent eyes had ever seen. The contrast of the blue environment to Rasputin covered in hyper red blood stuck me with terrible wonder.
Karl Ruprecht Kroenen: Hellboy Villain In Comics, Original Movie & Reboot
This is Karl Ruprect Kroenen , definitely one of the coolest evil henchmen to grace the screen and page. In the movie he was played by a badass actor named Ladislav Beran.
Without his iconic gas mask, Karl looks like this.
And here is a hardcore wallpaper I found.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

Official Rasputin Dance Video | The King's Man | 20th Century Studios - YouTube
Rasputin in the new King’s Man movie.
  • I thought about doing an episode about the time Atilla the Hun (AKA the scourge of god) was trampling through 5th century Europe until he set his sights on Rome and the unexpected happened. He agreed to meet with legendary Pope Leo I and after a relatively brief meeting Atila and his army left without laying a finger on Rome. No idea what was said, but it must have been respectable as all hell.
    • Yeah, I thought about doing that episode, but then I saw the trailer for the new Kingsman movie coming out set in WW1 era and I decided I HAD to do an episode on Rasputin.
    • The tail of Atila and the Pope can wait for another day. Put that away in my handy list of potential episodes.
    • Because this episodes going to be about the bad guy from the first Helboy movie.
      • oh and disclaimer: I am going to have some fun as I fumble through the onslaught of Ruskie names in this episode.
Just to explain that Hellboy reference: Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin is the main antagonist in the 2004 film Hellboy and was portrayed by Karel Roden.
Biography of Grigori Rasputin
ew
  • Rasputin was a Russian dude from the lat 19th and early 20th century. He was perhaps the toughest son of a bitch on the planet during a time when the world was full of tough sons of bitches. He slept with countless women (most of whom he definitely should not have been sleeping with like royalty), he claimed to be the second coming of Christ, and was basically a cult leader that was able to win the trust of one of the most powerful families on the globe.
  • Born in January of 1869 during the heart of winter in a place called Povskrovskoye located in Russian Siberia. In the middle of summer, the hottest this place ever gets is like 70 degrees and that is very rare. In winter it is about 5 degrees Fahrenheit on average… for like 3 months straight.
    • Legend says that when it gets to like 45 degrees Fahrenheit all the local women go topless and start sunbathing in the street. That is how cold this place usually is!
      • JK
    • To survive in a place like Pokskrovskoye you have to be tough as nails.
  • Although he attended school, Grigori Rasputin remained illiterate, and his reputation for licentiousness earned him the surname Rasputin, Russian for “debauched one.”
    • Licetiousness means:: 1 : lacking legal or moral restraints especially : disregarding sexual restraints licentious behavior licentious revelers. 2 : marked by disregard for strict rules of correctness.
    • Even at a very young age, Grigory Rasputin had his infamous gaze. If you see a picture of Rasputin (go ahead and google if you are listening), you will see that even after being dead for over 100 years this guy can still stare directly in to you soul via a pixelated image.
      • He used this death stare, toughness gained from his upbringing, and natural gnack for idetifying people’s weaknesses to get ahead in life… and it worked… eventually.
    • He evidently underwent a religious conversion at age 18, and eventually he went to the monastery at Verkhoture, where he was introduced to the Khlysty (Flagellants) sect.
      • A Flagellant is a person who subjects themselves or others to flogging, either as a religious discipline or for sexual gratification.
    • Rasputin perverted Khlysty beliefs into the doctrine that one was nearest God when feeling “holy passionlessness” and that the best way to reach such a state was through the sexual exhaustion that came after prolonged debauchery.
      • This sounds A LOT like Drupka Kunley from episode #22.
        • He was a 15th century Yogi who brought enlightenment to women with his legendary phallus that the people called the “Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom.” In return he asked to be paid in booze…
    • But unlike Drupka Kunley, Rasputin did not become a monk. He returned to Pokrovskoye, and at age 19 married Proskovya Fyodorovna Dubrovina, who later bore him four children. Marriage did not settle Rasputin. He left home and wandered to Mount Athos, Greece, and Jerusalem, living off the peasants’ donations and gaining a reputation as a starets (self-proclaimed holy man) with the ability to heal the sick and predict the future.
      • Sounds like a cult leader to me, but then again I never met the dude.
Grigori Rasputin - Wikipedia
No one in their right mind would pick a fight with this person.
  • Rasputin’s wanderings took him to St. Petersburg (1903), where he was welcomed by Theophan, inspector of the religious Academy of St. Petersburg, and Hermogen, bishop of Saratov.
    • Ben Thompson from one of my favorite history blogs BadassOfTheWeek.com writes:
      • When he entered the gates of Saint Petersburg in 1903, Rasputin was an illiterate peasant nobody who had spent his entire life randomly wandering around the Russian countryside searching for God one horny, sex-crazed maiden at a time (or sometimes two or three at a time, depending on how energetic he was feeling).  Carrying only a Bible and a backpack and wearing little more than beat-up, tar-covered boots and a cheap gray overcoat, this impoverished, half-insane priest decided to settle down in the capital city of Imperial Russia and enter the country’s most prominent monastery.  It wasn’t long before his powerful, commanding personality and creepy-weird magical powers asserted themselves among Rasputin’s holy brothers – even the fucking Archbishop of Imperial Russia was convinced that this crazy mysterious monk had the power to control the weather and call down thunderstorms at his whim.  Rasputin grew in power, was introduced to a Countess in the imperial court, and immediately started humping every hot aristocratic babe in sight.
"Do you know that I shall soon die in terrible pain? But what can I do?  God has sent me to save our dear sovereign and Holy Russia. Despite my terrible sins, I am a Christ in miniature."
This one really cracked me up. He looks like a 1990’s cult leader lol.
  • The court circles of St. Petersburg at that time were entertaining themselves by delving into mysticism and the occult, so Rasputin—a filthy, unkempt wanderer with brilliant eyes and allegedly extraordinary healing talents—was warmly welcomed.
    • In 1905 Rasputin was introduced to the royal family, and in 1908 he was summoned to the palace of Nicholas and Alexandra during one of their hemophiliac son’s bleeding episodes.
      • hemophilia, also spelled haemophilia, hereditary bleeding disorder caused by a deficiency of a substance necessary for blood clotting (coagulation). The increased tendency to bleeding usually becomes noticeable early in life and may lead to severe anemia or even death. Large bruises of the skin and soft tissue are often seen, usually following injury so trivial as to be unnoticed. There may also be bleeding in the mouth, nose, and gastrointestinal tract. After childhood, hemorrhages in the joints—notably the knees, ankles, and elbows—are frequent, resulting in swelling and impaired function.
      • It is believed that little Alexei Nikolaevich had haemophilia due to generations of inbreeding that was common among European royalty.
Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia - Wikipedia
Alexei Nikolaevich the little bleedy boy.
  • Rasputin succeeded in easing the boy’s suffering (probably by his hypnotic powers) and, upon leaving the palace, warned the parents that the destiny of both the child and the dynasty were irrevocably linked to him, thereby setting in motion a decade of Rasputin’s powerful influence on the imperial family and affairs of state.
Who Was Grigori Rasputin? The Bizarre Story Of Russia's 'Mad Monk'
work it queen!
  • In the presence of the royal family, Rasputin consistently maintained the posture of a humble and holy peasant.
    • Outside court, however, he soon fell into his former licentious habits. Preaching that physical contact with his own person had a purifying and healing effect, he acquired mistresses and attempted to seduce many other women. When accounts of Rasputin’s conduct reached the ears of Nicholas, the tsar refused to believe that he was anything other than a holy man, and Rasputin’s accusers found themselves transferred to remote regions of the empire or entirely removed from their positions of influence.
How author Douglas Smith discovered the real Rasputin - Macleans.ca
Not the sexiest of harems, but what can one do… it is Russia!
  • By 1911 Rasputin’s behaviour had become a general scandal.
    • The prime minister, P.A. Stolypin, sent the tsar a report on Rasputin’s misdeeds. As a result, the tsar expelled Rasputin, but Alexandra had him returned within a matter of months. Nicholas, anxious not to displease his wife or endanger his son, upon whom Rasputin had an obviously beneficial effect, chose to ignore further allegations of wrongdoing.
    • His near-limitless influence and ‘access’ the Empress whenever he felt like it led to quite a bit of prestige for Rasputin (and when I say he had access to the empress, I mean in more ways than one).  Foppish courtiers hung on his every word, desperate nymphomaniac babes flung themselves at him every time he stepped foot outside his house, and pretty much everybody wanted to invite him to all their totally sweet house parties.  But Rasputin didn’t morph in to one of them – he did his own thing, and didn’t cater to the prissy bullshit of the aristocracy.  He wore his regular old clothes, talked to nobles the same way he spoke to peasants, and generally did whatever the hell he wanted all the time and anybody who didn’t like it made no difference to him.
    • He had a Voldemore affect in that people referred to him as “The Unmentionable” or “The Nameless One.” With rumors circulating about Rasputin sleeping with not only the empress, but her daughters and every other woman in Russia, a certain body part of his began to get rumors of its own. The locals thought he had a 13″ schlong. Although there is a pickled penis about aht size that actually exists, “experts” aren’t sure if it is Rasputin’s.
  • Rasputin reached the pinnacle of his power at the Russian court after 1915.
    • During World War I, Nicholas II took personal command of his forces (September 1915) and went to the troops on the front, leaving Alexandra in charge of Russia’s internal affairs, while Rasputin served as her personal advisor. Rasputin’s influence ranged from the appointment of church officials to the selection of cabinet ministers (often incompetent opportunists), and he occasionally intervened in military matters to Russia’s detriment. Though supporting no particular political group, Rasputin was a strong opponent of anyone opposing the autocracy or himself.
These 9 Pictures Prove That Rasputin Was An Absolute Monster – ViralNova
Rasputin nap
  • Several attempts were made to take the life of Rasputin and save Russia from further calamity
    • The many attempts on his life and the variety of attempted assassination techniques is one of Rasputin’s biggest claims to fame.
    • In 1914 he survived being stabbed in the stomach by a crazy woman. There were many other attempts that never made contact. But in 1916 his assassins were successful.
    • A group of extreme conservatives, including Prince Feliks Yusupov (husband of the tsar’s niece), Vladimir Mitrofanovich Purishkevich (a member of the Duma), and Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich (the tsar’s cousin), formed a conspiracy to eliminate Rasputin and save the monarchy from further scandal.
    • On the night of December 29–30 (December 16–17, Old Style), Rasputin was invited to visit Yusupov’s home, and, according to legend, once there, he was given poisoned wine and tea cakes.
      • He ate the cyanide laced tea and cakes and simply burped.
    • When he did not die, the frantic Yusupov shot him in the back at point blank range. Rasputin collapsed but was able to get to his feet and start strangling the Prince who shot him. Then he was able to run out into the courtyard, where Purishkevich shot him again 3 more times.
    • The conspirators then clubbed and bound him and threw him through a hole in the ice into the Neva River, where he finally died. When they found his body evidence suggested he had freed himself and had begun to swim himself to safety when he succumbed to hypothermia.
      • The tough son of a bitch that Rasputin was, even he was no match for the cold of Russia’s winters.
    • The murder merely strengthened Alexandra’s resolve to uphold the principle of autocracy, but a few weeks later the whole imperial regime was swept away by revolution.
      • Oddly enough, while Rasputin’s death was celebrated by the aristocracy, it pissed off the common people of Russia.  They saw him as one of them – an oppressed peasant who had clawed his way to power only to be assassinated by the so called elites of their society.
    • and… well… the Bolsheviks arrived and the world was introduced to a nice little thing called Communism.
What You Never Knew About Rasputin
до свидания
do svidaniya… that’s goodbye in Russian. Google Translate said so

And on that note, I’ll end let The Red Army Choir take this one away.

Sing loud and sing proud you commie bastards!

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Bounty Hunting

The content below is from Episode 91 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast.

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

Arcane (TV Series 2021– ) - IMDb
  • I recommend you check out ARCANE: League of Legends on Netflix.
    • It is based on the video game League of Legends, but I knew NOTHING about that game before watching the series and I didn’t feel as if I missed out on anything.
    • The animation style is so sleak and a delight to watch. The character development is very impressive for a video game adapted in to a series as well. The character Jinx is so complex and probably most people’s favorite.
    • Imagine Dragons actually did the soundtrack for the series and the opening song Enemy. It is a banger. Check it out.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • HISTORY
    • The modern understanding of Bounty hunting originated in England hundreds of years ago. Back in the 13th century, bail was a person, not an amount of money. An individual was designated custodian of the accused, and if the accused did not return to face his penalty, the custodian could be hanged in his place.
      • That is totally unfair by today’s standards. And YES, it is “hanged” and not hung when talking about a person.
      • In 1679, the British Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Act, which for the first time guaranteed that an accused person could be released from prison on monetary bail.
    • The bounty hunter was given broad authority starting in 1873 with the U.S. Supreme Court case, Taylor v. Taintor.
      • The case gave bounty hunters the authority to act as agents of bail bondsmen. Bounty hunters on the trail of a bail jumper could “pursue him into another state” and, if necessary, “break and enter his house for that purpose.” Today, states have their own restrictions when it comes to bounty hunting, but most states give bounty hunters the freedom to pursue and arrest bail jumpers within and across their borders.
    • Historically, Bounty Hunters were often stereotyped as a group of renegades. 
      • When I think of a Bounty hunter I either picture something like Boba Fette from Star Wars or Lobo from the DC comics, a cosmic bounty hunter tracking down fugitives across the stars. OR I picture gritty rough men on horseback with 6-shooters holstered to their side while they traverse the Wild American West in search of their bounty.
      • But real-life bounty hunters weren’t as glamorous. An individual or group of individuals would track wanted fugitives and collect a cash reward in return for this particular runner, dead or alive.  In past year’s law enforcement did not have the resources to skip trace wanted fugitives across the thousands of miles that make up the United States. As a result, officials of the law put a bounty on the criminal that they wanted detained.  With increasingly high stakes growing with the danger of the outlaws, these unofficial law enforcement agents soon realized that Bounty Hunting could become a prosperous business.
    • Since Taylor vs. Taintor, however, new laws, such as the 1966 Bail Reform Act, have changed the terms of Bounty Hunting. 
      • Bounty Hunters are no longer allowed free reign to detain fugitives in any way they please.  Now, Bail Enforcement Agents must abide by state and local laws while seeking a deserter.  And now, with over 30,000 criminals being detained by Bounty Hunters every year, more bail bond companies than ever are looking to hire fugitive recovery agents.  Nevertheless these bond companies will not just hire any person who wants to become a Bounty Hunter.  The rapid return of criminals is necessary for bail companies to receive bond money, and this takes highly skilled Bounty Hunters.  Bounty Hunting has become a highly specialized occupation with specific training and skills.
  • WHAT – what do bounty hunters do, what is their life like?
    • Bounty Hunting primarily involves skip tracing and apprehending bail fugitives for a reward from a bail bondsman. 
      • Skip Tracing: A day in the life of a Bounty Hunter consists of whole lot of “skip tracing”, a tactic used to trace a fugitive who skipped on a bail bond and is working hard to avoid the Bounty Hunter.
      • Before a defendant has been charged with failure to appear in court, the defendant (soon to be fugitive) signed a bail bond agreement and gave a deposit–on average ten percent–and the bail bondsman then pays the difference for the release of the defendant until the court date.  If the subject fails to attend the court date the bail bonds company will then contract a Bail Enforcement Agent, also known as a Bounty Hunter or Fugitive Recovery Agent.  The agent is assigned to the case to skip trace, make an arrest, and return the defendant to the justice system.
  • WHERE
    • I’m mainly discussing bounty hunting in the United States with the exception being it’s roots from British Parliament.
    • When it comes to US bounty hunting, it is a National matter only.
      • The one thing a bounty hunter can never do is take the hunt outside of the United States. Bounty hunters can be arrested — even shot — if they stray across international borders. 
    • Oregon, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Illinois – ban the practice of bounty hunting altogether so those states are out.
      • Because of Supreme Court Case Taylor vs Taintor (1872), a bounty hunter’s right to recover a suspect is a federal law.
      • But lets say a bounty hunter’s is after a suspect that has cleverly fled to Chicago (a major city in Illinois, a state where it is illegal to conduct bounty hunting). And lets say the bounty hunter ignored that state law.
      • Because America’s laws are set up this way, that bounty hunter would be arrested and put in jail. He or she would eventually be set free because federal law allows them to recover suspects across state lines. But at the same time Chicago PD are allowed to enforce local law.
        • Federal, state, and local laws have weird blurred lines that are confusing as all hell even to those of us who live in this country. I can’t imagine how foreign people feel lol. A good example is: Is Cannibis legal in the US? the answer is NO… and yes kind of depending on the state or city your are in.
    • Other than those few places that outright ban bounty hunting, there is no jurisdiction. They can chase you from Maine to Florida and over to California.
  • WHO
    • Bounty Hunters are NOT Police Officers.
      • In general, they have greater authority to arrest than even the local police.
        • Now that’s a pretty substantial claim, but it is true. All the bounty hunter needs to make an arrest is a copy of the “bail piece” (the paperwork indicating that the person is a fugitive) and, in some states, a certified copy of the bond. He or she doesn’t need a warrant, can enter private property unannounced and doesn’t have to read a fugitive his or her Miranda Rights before making the arrest. 
        • That being said, there are rules and regulations to the job. The bail bond contract gives bounty hunters the right to enter the home of a fugitive, but only after establishing without a doubt that the person lives there or is inside a structure. They cannot enter the homes of friends or family members to look for the fugitive on a hunch.
      • Bounty hunters are private operators. They are like freelance workers trying to run their own business… that business just so happens to enforce the law, but they are NOT public servants like the police.
      • A bounty hunter has to abide by Bail Law and it is very different from the laws that govern what the Police (public servants) can do.
      • Police have to get warrants signed by judges to search your property without probable cause (example: hearing a person scream help or seeing a live fire in your house or car).
      • Bounty hunters have to make sure a fugitive is living in a house or owns a car to search it… but they don’t need a signature from a judge or a warrant.
        • This fact tends to surprise fugitives.
      • Once that bail contract is signed, by the defendent or co-signer, a bounty hunter does not need permission to enter their home AT ANY TIME.
        • REMEMBER that if you ever post bond.
      • When the defendant signs the bail bond contract, they do something very important. They waive their constitutional rights. They agree that they can be arrested by the bail bond agent. And they waive extradition, allowing bondsmen to take them to any state.
    • Let’s say you robbed a liquor store and you posted bail. You signed the bail contract. You skip your court date and are now on the run. The bounty hunter can search your crib, we’ve already established that.
      • But let’s say you run in to your sweet old grandma’s house. She doesn’t have anything to do with your crimes, she’s just a nice cookie-baking grandma… but the people looking to collect your bounty saw you enter her home OR physically see you on the premises… guess what… those big tough bounty hunters can knock down Grandma’s front door with sledge hammers and drag your ass out of her house (this applies to vehicles too). And they will do it without hesitation because the longer they wait the greater the chance some other bounty hunter will get the money.
      • These dudes see fugitives like property and the law supports that. They get your ass or they don’t get paid.
    • Another main difference between cops and bounty hunters is the training
      • Now, this varies state-to-state, but places like Ohio only require that bounty hunters have licenses… they don’t require any tactical firearm training or siege training or anything. Once you have that license you get out there and start hunting people.
        • This can lead to unneccesary injury or death by both fugitives and bounty hunters.
        • On the other side, police are required to go through all sorts of training and there are entire academies set up to make sure those trainings are completed before a person becomes a police officer
      • There are states like Texas and Virginia that teach bounty hunters how to properly arrest someone and how to act tactically in dangerous situations.
    • Then of course, Bounty hunters aren’t cops in that they aren’t going to just arrest people that see doing crimes in front of them. Their job is to arrest specific individuals that have signed bail contracts and have failed to appear in court.
      • They can do a citizen’s arrest if they chose to, but they typically don’t. The exception being if they are trying to collect a bounty and someone is getting in their way committing crimes like slashing the bounty hunters tires or committing felonies that piss off the bounty hunter, that bounty hunter knows what he can and cannot do. He or she may detain that person and call the cops to come arrest them even if they aren’t their bounty.
      • Cops also usually are out doing their job and are tasked with arresting people they’ve never seen before and have no background knowledge of.
      • Whereas bounty hunters have an entire biography of their bounty mark. They know prior arrests and living habits of the person they are looking to hunt.
        • Most bounty hunters believe the job of a police officer is more dangerous than their own because of this fact.
  • REAL BOUNTY HUNTERS THROUGH HISTORY(and I’ll admit, I took these straight from a History Channel article called 5 Famous Bounty Hunters)
The Most Badass Bounty Hunters in History (List25)
  • Rome’s Barbarian Hunter: Charietto 
    • Charietto was an Ancient German headhunter and bounty hunter who worked for the Romans. He operated on the Rhine frontier near Treverorum. According to Zosimus, Charietto saw barbarian raiders crossing the Rhine and determined to take action. Going out into the forest at night he would kill a number of the raiders, sever their heads and bring them into the town come daytime. Charietto was joined by other men, and eventually their success earned him the admiration of Julian, who was commander in the region and later became the Emperor known as Julian the Apostate. Charietto was encouraged by Julian to attack the barbarian raiders at night, while Roman regular forces would confront them by day. After a long period of such activities, the raiders surrendered.
  • John of the Priests
    • The 1709 Penal Act demanded that all Catholic priests take the Oath of Abjuration and recognise the Protestant Queen as Supreme Head of the Church of England and Ireland. Any cleric who refused was sentenced to death. John Mullowney was arrested as a horse thief in Castlebar, Ireland in the early 1700s. He was offered a choice: hang or become a Priest Hunter. He chose the latter. A “talented rogue”, John excelled at clergy hunting, being paid as much as £100 for the capture of an Archbishop or Bishop. His favourite method of ensnaring priests was to feign a deathbed confession then pull out a concealed weapon and do for the Holy Man. Mullowney was fatally stabbed in the act of killing the last remaining Catholic priest in his parish. His body was thrown into a lake by local Catholics. John’s body was eventually retrieved and buried in un-consecrated ground, nearby. There is a tree near the spot which local legend says has grown but never blossomed since.
Thomas Tate Tobin (1823-1904) | WikiTree FREE Family Tree
  • The Mountain Man: Thomas Tate Tobin
    • In 1863 three Mexican National cousins, the Espinosas, went on a killing spree, murdering more than thirty English-Americans in the San Luis Valley, Colorado in retaliation for relatives killed in the Mexican-American War. When the authorities failed to capture these men – Wanted: Dead or Alive – they called in renowned adventurer, tracker, trapper, mountain man, guide, and US Army scout, Tom Tobin. Tobin was given fifteen men to assist him but went out alone instead. Upon returning he was asked how his trip went. Tobin is said to have replied “So-so”, before throwing down a sack which contained the severed heads of all three Espinosas.
Pat Garrett - Wikipedia
  • Patrick Floyd “Pat” Garrett
    • In November 1880, the sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico resigned and the county appointed Pat Garrett – a man well known for his skills with a gun – as his replacement. A  former saloon owner, Garrett was charged with tracking down an old acquaintance from his bar-keeping days. Twenty-one year old Henry McCarty had escaped from prison and was said to have murdered as many men as years he’d lived. McCarty was better known then, as now, as Billy the Kid. New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace offered a $500 reward for the Kid’s capture. After a bloody game of cat and mouse in which members of the Kid’s gang were gradually killed or arrested by Garrett, the lawman finally did for the outlaw; ambushing him in the dark and killing him with a single blast from his Sharps rifle. Garrett never received the reward as it was conditional of Billy being captured, not killed. To this day there are some who still maintain that Billy the Kid did not die that night, and that Garrett staged the whole thing so that his old friend could disappear once and for all.
Ralph Edgar “Papa” Thorson Jr. (1926-1991) - Find A Grave Memorial
  • Ralph “Papa” Thorson
    • Said to have apprehended more than twelve-thousand fugitives, Ralph “Papa” Thorson’s life as a Bounty Hunter was the basis for Steve McQueen’s final film “The Hunter” (1980).  Sometimes using the somewhat eccentric method of utilising astrological charts to locate criminals, Thorson also favoured the use of non-lethal force in the form of his self designed and built “Prowler Fowler” which fired buckshot filled beanbags at assailants. He was killed in 1994 by a car bomb, presumed to have been placed by one of the more than twelve-thousand enemies he’d made during his career. 
Domino Harvey: Model/Bounty Hunter
  • Domino Harvey
    • Domino was born in 1969 to actor Laurence Harvey, and fashion model Paulene Stone. Always a “tomboy” Domino had an interest in martial arts and action figures which was not shared by many of the other girls at her upper-class English boarding schools. Domino attended four such schools being expelled from more than one for her “unladylike” conduct. Dropping out of education, initially to pursue a career in modelling, Domino eventually found herself living in the USA. In 1993, having unsuccessfully applied to the Los Angeles Fire Department, she enrolled in a short course to become a bail recovery agent, or bounty hunter. Domino primarily went after drug dealers and thieves, but also tracked murderers during her time as a Bounty Hunter. She was incredibly good at her job and earned as much as $40,000 per year. Tragically, Domino became addicted to drugs and died of an overdose in 2005.
    • The same year as her death, a movie that was loosely based on her life title “Domino” starring Keira Knightly and Mickey Rourke came out. The movie isn’t remembered well, or remembered much at all, but I saw it years ago and I didn’t think it was too bad.
Domino - Rotten Tomatoes

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The Blood Countess

The content below is from Episode 90 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

Recommendation Segment

  • I got Shannon to do another recommendation segment so enjoy Audio Podcast listeners!

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • The past few episodes have been about different milestones in technology, but this week I wanted to take a different rout. This week I wanted to learn about something dark and twisted. This story takes place in 16th and 17th century Hungary, near Transylvania… but this isn’t about Count Dracula. no…
Dracula (Dover Thrift Editions) - Kindle edition by Stoker, Bram. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
  • This episode is about Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess!
    • Her name in her native Hungarian form is: Ecsedi Báthory Erzsébet
      • Although some speculate that Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula was inspired by the Blood Countess, none of the authors notes indicate as much.
    • She was born in August of 1560 and died of natural causes in August 1614, just two weeks after her 54th birthday.
    • Her family was a very well connected bunch. Her uncle was King of Poland. She had Dukes, Barons, Baronesses and so forth. 
    • Born into a privileged family of nobility, Elizabeth was endowed with wealth, education, and a prominent social rank. It is safe to say that Elizabeth was relatively well-off for the time period.
    • Báthory was raised a Calvinist Protestant. As a young woman, she learned Latin, German, Hungarian, and Greek.
Death of Countess Elizabeth Bathory | History Today
Supposedly she was a beautiful young girl, but she just looks like a depressed middle schooler to me.
  • She may have been well-off financially, but Elizabeth’s child hood was grim
    • As a child, she suffered multiple violent seizures that most believe were caused by epilepsy. During the late 1500’s, symptoms relating to epilepsy were diagnosed as falling sickness and treatments included rubbing blood of a non-sufferer on the lips of an epileptic or giving the epileptic a mix of a non-sufferer’s blood and piece of skull as their episode ended… fun.
      • Some historians believe that her parents being first cousins may have contributed to her poor health.
    • There is no hard evidence of this, so it could be just rumors, but it is said that little Elizabeth witnessed various horrors of man within her families estate.
      • Stories include a young Báthory witnessing brutal punishments executed by her family’s officers, and being taught by family members involved with Satanism and witchcraft.
      • She witnessed the punishment of a man caught stealing. As she played spectator to a man being sewn in to the body of a horse while still alive, she reportedly laughed at the sight.
      • It was common for her to see the harsh beatings of her family’s servants.
      • Instead of looking away from all this violence, she seemed to be drawn to it.
Ferenc Nádasdy - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia
Ferenc Nadasdy looks like a real douche in this painting.
Ferenc Nádasdy - Wikipedia
  • At the age of 11, Bathory, who was considered a beautiful and well-educated girl, became engaged to Hungarian Count Ferenc Nadasdy. 
    • Elizabeth promply moved in to her future husbands house… well, more like an estate with a castle and everything. There she was educated on how to run the estate of her future mother-in-law.
    • At the age of 13, before her first marriage, Elizabeth allegedly gave birth to a child. The child, said to have been fathered by a peasant boy, was supposedly given away to a local woman who was trusted by the Báthory family. The woman was paid for her actions, and the child was taken to Wallachia.
      • Legends says her betrothed fiance Ferenc Ndasdy found out about Elizabeth’s affair and took action. He had the peasant boy castrated and then executed by feeding him to wild dogs.
      • A 15-year-old Bathory married Frerenc Nadasdy on May 8, 1575 (some sources say 1574). The wedding was a massive banger with over 4 and a half thousand guests in attendance and it went on for 3 days. It was at their wedding when Ferenc Ndasdy gave his wife a castle just for her. It was Castle Cachtice, a grim and forboding stucture.
        • The surrounding village and farmland is where Elizabeth committed the many acts that gave her the gruesome moniker: The Blood Countess!
Cachtice Castle-The Home For The Nr.1 Female Killer Ever.
Čachtice Castle
Fictional reconstruction of Cachtice Castle in modern-day Slovakia (formerly in Hungary) in the film Bathory (2008). | Castle, Elizabeth bathory, Castle ruins
Čachtice Castle reimaged to look like what it did back in its prime.
  • The couple’s first child was born 10 years after their marriage, in 1585. Elizabeth Bathory gave birth to five children. Two died as infants, but two daughters and a son survived.
    • As her husband was a soldier who was often off fighting Ottoman Turks, the couple spent most of their marriage apart. Ferenc was brutally effective on the battlefield and was called the Black Knight of Hungary.
      • When they were together, Ferenc educated his wife in techniques of torture.
        • He taught Elizabeth the fun little game of placing oiled paper inbetween the toes and fingers of servant girls then lighting them on fire. He also gave Elizabeth a clawed metal glove so she could scratch and permanently scar the faces of servant girls that displeased her.
      • When the Turks invaded Hungary in 1591 it kicked off the Long War. This is when Ferenc’s talent for combat scared his enemies and allies alike.
      • This war was sapping the Hungarian empire of its economic resources, but Ferenc, the Black Knight, never stopped sending his spoils of war back home to his wife. She was showered in wealth from the Ottoman empire. This steady flow of wealth made the sinister couple so rich that they leant money to the Hungarian Hapsburg Empire to keep the country afloat.
      • During the long war, while Ferenc was out fighting, Elizabeth was learning how to effectively run her estate. She defended the castle Cachtice against the Turks and gave shelter to surrounding peasants.
The Legend of Elizabeth Báthory: The Blood Countess - Medical Bag
  • Ferenc did teach his wife how to torture her servants, but he wasn’t the biggest influence.
    • In 1601 Elizabeth met Anna Darvolya. Darvolya was thought to be a witch by the community and her sadistic nature was well known. She took Elizabeth from a torturer that mamed her victims, to a full blown torturing serial killer.
    • Elizabeth would take servant girls, torture them for as long as she wanted and then murder them. No one ever came looking for them because that is how lowly peasants were thought of in those days… at least in Hungary. She and her family name were so powerful that she could kill all she wanted without any fear of reprocussions.
      • One of the very few people to even acknowledge the deaths was a local priest that had grown weary of performing an unusual amount of burrial rights for young servants girls in Elizabeth’s charge.
      • The priest basically pulled Elizabeth aside and said: “Look, I know what you are doing. You might want to think about stopping. This sort of stuff, like mass murder, tends to piss off God. You keep telling me these girls have died from various illnesses, but you and I know damn-well that if any of these bodies are exumed they will find all sorts of evidence that points to torture and mutilation.”
      • Elizabeth threatened the priest and asked her hubby to shut him up.
The Real-life Countess Dracula Who Murdered Over 600 Girls | by Anita Durairaj | Medium
She looks like a salamander.
  • After Ferenc Nadasdy had fallen ill in 1601 which paralyzed him from zthe waste down, he died in January 1604. That is when Elizabeth Bathory took control of her extensive estates.
    • She was accused of a haunting litany of crimes against both female servants and minor noblewomen who’d come to her for training and education. Most of her alleged assaults and murders took place after she was widowed in 1604.
    • Some of Bathory’s victims were covered with honey and left outside for insects to devour. During colder parts of the year young women might be stripped naked and forced into deadly ice baths. Bathory sometimes tortured girls by driving needles into their fingers, cutting their noses or lips or whipping them with stinging nettles. She would bite shoulders and breasts, as well as burning the flesh, including the genitals, of some victims. The intimate nature of Bathory’s attacks suggests a sexual motivation, though it’s impossible to know with certainty what compelled her to act.
    • She had hundreds of peasant girls to torture and kill. When she was done torturing her victims she often threw their remains over the castle wall to be eaten by wolves… so at the very least she was an animal lover. How nice.
    • Elizabeth didn’t do all of this on her own, she employed the help of Anna Darvolya and other servants.
      • Some were happy to join Elizabeth and others were threatened with torture if they didn’t help with the torturing themselves.
    • All of these atrocities were carried out on peasants because peasants couldn’t bring charges against a noble at the time. Hell, some of the peasant parents were fine with the arrangement because it meant Elizabeth would give them some money in exchange for their daughter.
    • In 1609, Anna Darvolya, Elizabeth’s most influencial torturer and accused witch died.
Elizabeth Bathory - Death, Children & Facts - Biography
What a charming young woman! …. jk
  • But when Elizabeth began to target girls from noble houses, her crimes quickly caught up with her.
    • Apparently another of Elizabeth’s accomplices who dabbled in witchcraft convinced Elizabeth to start targetting Noblegirls. She told Elizabeth that if she spilt noble blood instead of peasants it would solve her financial issues at the time.
    • On December 29, 1610, Count György Thurzó, who oversaw judicial matters as the lord palatine of Hungary, arrived at Bathory’s Castle Čachtice to investigate the countess’ alleged crimes against women of noble birth (any mistreatment of servants was not a concern to authorities).
      • Elizabeth was appauled that she was being investigated and insisted that she was innocent. She claimed her servants were going mad. She told Thurzo and the local community that her servants would kill each other in a fits of murder suicide…. sounds like a sick game that would only be fabricated by such a twisted mind of Elizabeth.
    • When Thurzo went unannounced to investigate Cachtice Castle one day he opened the door to find the mutilated body of a servant girl right by the door. He went in further and found 2 more bodies. Thurzo reportedly surprised Elizabeth Bathory and her team of accomplices in the middle of tormenting a victim and in response immediately imprisoned her in her home (her high status meant she would not be jailed as a common criminal).
    • Some of Elizabeth Bathory’s servants were then arrested, questioned, and subjected to torture.
      • The accmplices’ court proceedings began early in January 1611. These servants denied their culpability in the murders but admitted to burying multiple victims, though the number in their accounts varied between 36 and 51. In addition to shifting blame to their mistress and each other, they also implicated a deceased servant, the wicked Anna Darvolya, who’d served as a maid and governess.
      • Four servant accomplices were punished harshly. Their fingers were slowly torn out by iron tongs. This was a fatal form of torture due to blood loss. Once they died their bodies were placed on a bon fire.
      • One of the accomplices, a young boy named Fizcko, was spared torture because of his young age. Instead of torture, he was beheaded and then burned.
      • Another accomplice named Katalin was spared death. Elizabeth’s surviving victims and witnesses said Katalin would sneak food to victims being starved for fun. It was believed Katalin was forced to help her fellow torturers. Even though she wasn’t killed, she was sentenced to life inprisonment.
    • After these executions Thurzó continued to investigate the countess. One witness stated that Elizabeth Báthory herself had listed 650 victims in her papers, though the number of victims varied in other testimonials and the countess’ exact death toll remains unknown. The evidence gathered by Thurzó also included 289 witness statements.
    • As a member of a powerful family, Elizabeth Bathory was not put on trial. Instead, she was isolated — perhaps walled up — in Castle Čachtice, where she remained.
      • While in custody, basically on house arrest, Elizabeth would constantly claim she was innocent and that her servants were all to blaim. She hated them and hated Thurzo.
      • Many priests would visit Elizabeth, but she would never acknowlege the horrible things she had done.
    • In 1614, Elizabeth complained to a guard that her hands were cold. He told her to lie down and get some rest… She never woke up. The body of a 54-year-old Bathory was found on August 21, 1614, in Castle Čachtice (located in present-day Slovakia), where she’d been imprisoned since 1610. She was initially buried in the crypt on her estate, but her body was likely moved afterward.
Guys, do you think Elizabeth Bathory really killed women and children or was she victim of a big conspiracy?? : r/creepypasta
  • Today there is Doubt that Elizabeth was guilty. Some now think she may have been the victim of a 17th century witch hunt.
    • The evidence against Bathory has flaws: Of 289 witness accounts, more than 250 offered either hearsay or no information whatsoever. The testimony that Bathory had listed 650 victims was a secondhand accounting of what a court official had discovered — yet the official who’d supposedly seen this information didn’t testify. Many of the witnesses who spoke against Bathory were beholden to Thurzó, who oversaw the entire investigation. And the fact that Bathory’s servants were tortured makes their confessions unreliable.
      • Some believe that Elizabeth was a victim of a witch hunt, orchestrated by her family to take control of her estate and wealth. They believe it was a conspiracy backed by the powerful Hapsburg family who felt threatened by a family so rich they could afford to loan money to their empire to stay afloat.
    • In 1989, writer Michael Farin stated the accusations against Báthory were supported by testimony from more than 300 individuals, some of whom described physical evidence and the presence of mutilated dead, dying and imprisoned girls found at the time of her arrest. 
    • In a 2018 article for Przegląd Nauk Historycznych (Historical Science Review) Aleksandra Bartosiewicz stated that when Báthory was persecuted, the accusations were a spectacle to destroy her family’s influence in the region, which was considered a threat to the political interests of her neighbors, including the Habsburg empire.
    • Legends describing Báthory’s vampiric tendencies, such as the tale that she bathed in the blood of virgins to retain her youth, were generally recorded years after her death and are considered unreliable. Stories about Báthory quickly became part of national folklore. Nicknames and literary epithets attributed to her include The Blood Countess and Countess Dracula.
  • Doubt the Doubt
    • It is unlikely Elizabth Bathory was completely innocent. In 1602 a priest wrote a letter that discussed the excessive cruelty exhibited by Bathory and her husband towards their servants. The testimony against Bathory could have included true tales about how harshly she acted with lower classes. Such acts weren’t illegal at the time — Bathory was only punished because her victims were said to have included noblewomen — but would still make Bathory responsible for many ruined lives.

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Xenobots: First Living Robots

The content below is from Episode 89 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast.

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week’s recommendation segment is brought to you by Shannon and therefore will only be on the audio version. Click the link above to listen!

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • This past weekend I opened instagram to see comedian, fight commentator, and podcaster giant Joe Rogan had posted a screenshot of a CNN article.
    • The headline read “World’s first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say.”
    • Right there in the middle of Sunday brunch I knew I was going to try and wrap my head around this Headline that alleged nothing short of a scientific miracle.
  • I read a few articles and watched a bunch of videos and a lot of them seemed to just be regurgitating information that was said on headlines. I didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere.
    • That is until I came across a video by a YouTube channel called AsapScience. The video title is “This is the First LIVING Robot and it’s Unbelievable” and you should check it out.
  • They broke down the experiment that lead to these “living robots” to the essential components and started explaining from there.
    • Their method worked as this was the first source that got me to understand this project, so I’ll try and do the same.
  • First thing you’ll notice about these Xenobots (X-E-N-O-B-O-T-S) is that they are not made of metal or plastic… nope. They are made of organic material. Living Cells to be exact. Cells from an embryo of an African clawed frog species with the scientific name Xenopus Laevis.
    • That’s why they call then XenoBots
African Clawed Frog - Xenopus laevis
African clawed frog in water with gravel underneath
  • These little suckers are less than 1 milimeter in size.
    • That is smaller than the head of a No. 2 pencil.
    • Their functioning is quite limited.
      • They can’t connect to the internet like your smart phone and they can’t do parkour like the robots coming out of Boston dynamics.
      • All they do is move forwards, backwards, spin in circles, and right themselves when they’ve been tipped over…. oh and they can reproduce… sort of, but we will get to that later.
    • These Xenobots are living robots.
      • The concept is hard to grasp, because they aren’t AI (artificial intelligence) like computer code that has become sentient.
      • No, they represent a completely new form of life. These things are a whole new category that has never existed before. They are programmable lumps of mass that just so happen to also be made of living organisms.
      • And before I get in to how they reproduce, I feel it is necessary to unpack that a bit.
  • The word ROBOT is defined
    • by Merriam&Webster as:
      • a machine that resembles a living creature in being capable of moving independently (as by walking or rolling on wheels) and performing complex actions (such as grasping and moving objects)
      • This definition doesn’t quite fit our topic for this week, but ok…
    • by Wikipedias as:
      • A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the control may be embedded within.
      • Surprisingly, wikipedia has the broader definition that fits out Xenobots a lot better
    • One of my first thoughts when I was learning about these little buggers is “wait… if that is a robot, then what exactly does the word robot mean?”
      • well the Xenobots, being in a category all their own, sort of stretch the meaning of robot to its limits.
      • When the researchers who made these things called them robots, they were referring to the fact that they are
        • 1. made up of other components (in this case living cells instead of metal),
        • 2. they were placed together in a very particular way (with a microscope and not a welding torch),
        • 3. they were programmed by a computer,
        • 4. and they were meant to perform a task in the real world (not just a computer program performing task on a computerized world).
    • The material these researches used was made up of living cells, specifically they were skin cells and heart cells from that African Clawed frog.
      • You see the heart cells contract. Like they move naturally, I assume it is related to how the heart beats. While skin cells do not contract.
      • So in the pursuit of their goal: Put living cells together to make them act a certain way… they thought “can we put a bunch of heart cells and skin cells together in a carefully constructed clump to make them move?”
      • In a crude example I came up with, the skin cells would act as the frame of the car, while the heart cells would act as the motor.
Meet Xenobot, an Eerie New Kind of Programmable Organism | WIRED
  • In order to come up with a functioning structured that moved the way they wanted it to, the researchers had a super computer run evolutionary algorithms to test out a butt-load of different structures. Some were shaped like pac-man. Some were shaped like little cheerios and some were just sphericle blobs.
  • The evolutionary algorithms acted sort of like natural selection, but in a super-sped up way.
    • It tested each structure to see which accomplished the specified goal the best.
    • The structure that accomplished the goal of “move” sort of looks like a human brain to me. There is a cool image of it on my blog post.
Xenobot - Wikipedia

For you blog readers: the gif below shows the “move” structure doing its thing. Above is the computer-generated model and below is the actual Xenobot chugging along! HOW COOL!!!

Here is the “transport” xeno bot structure, designed to transport other cells
  • Once the super computer found the best structures for each goal, the researchers then had to get their hands dirty.
    • This next step surprised me as to how simple and menontanous it sounds… The researchers took the computer generated structures and had to hand splice these cells togther to best resemble the model created by the computer.
Apparently this process took a long time, but luckily cells naturally group together. This fact helped the process along tremendously.
  • So first the researchers think of a function: move, transport, manipulate, spin in circle, etc.
    • Then the super computer (known as Deep Green Super Computer cluster located at the University of Vermont’s advanced computing core) through super fast trial and error type simulated evolution comes up with the best possible structure or model to complete said function.
    • These little clumps of frog heart and skin cells are torn apart and put back together and molded in to that model by tiny hand-held tweezers and tools weilded by the researchers. A Xenobot is composed of about 3,000 cells.
    • In a round about way, these clumps of living cells are being programmed by humans to complete certain tasks. THAT is what makes them robots.
      • … you still with me on this?
  • The idea behind these Xenobots is that right now they may only be programmed to simply spin in a circle, but maybe in the future a whole army of them can be contstructed of a person’s own cells and deployed inside the body to remove harmful plague from our arteries.
    • Instead of nanobots made of metal that could potentially be seen as a threat by our bodies and therefore be rejected, these Xenobots would be made up of our own cells and have a high chance of being able to do their programmed functions without being attacked by our bodies.
    • In the future they could be contstructed using cells from our eyes that detect light to do all sorts of functions. They could be constructed to zoom through the air and consume excess carbondioxide that is polluting our planet, or even designed to eliminate plastics floating in our oceans.
Xenobots 2.0: Scientists Create the Next Generation of Living Robots
  • At this point in my light research I thought these Xenobots were cool, and I could see how one might refer to them as robots. They are programmed and do stuff in the real world… not to mention they have some amazing potential… but they didn’t seem THAT special…. until they started doing stuff on their own…. like reproducing…
    • It is called Emergent Behavior
      • What is Emergent Behavior? it is the wild card that comes along with dabbling in life. When you mess around with life, things get kind of … unpredictable.
      • As Dr. Ian Malcom said:

=input first audio clip “Life, uh, finds a way.” =

  • LET me explain: While a single living cell is quite predictable, multiple cells grouped together tend to display unpredictable behavior.
    • an extreme example of this is you… YEAH YOU! The sexy son-of-a-bitch listening (or reading) this.
      • Your cells aren’t too remarkable on their own. They don’t move too much. They don’t compose music, or even think for themselves. But as a collective they make up you, a fully functioning human being… or at least semi-functioning ammIright? lol
    • When we humans make a robot to work on an assembly line, welding parts on to a Ford Focus as it gets ready to be sold on the market, we aren’t worried the arm is going to start a conga line on the factory floor with all it’s robot arm buddies. No, that would be ridiculous and impossible unless of course a human programmed it to do so.
      • That type of robot is made up of inorganic and non-living material. The robotics community sometimes call them “dumb parts.” A robot made of Dumb Parts isn’t going to evolve on its own.
      • It may have a part breakdown and the robot may malfunction, but it isn’t going to go on strike and start murdering its human coworkers in a fit of concious rage.
    • However, the Xenobots do just that. *sort of*
      • they aren’t complex enough to become concious (these tiny microscopic cells aren’t going to form a conga line or start murdering people), but they are alive. They do evolve like all living things and that is why researchers have observed them doing things they were not programmed to do…
      • The researches started to notice there little Xenobots were moving in ways they weren’t programmed and teaming up in a swarm-like behavior.
  • The most notable emergent behavior was that some Xenobots started to gather up cells and clump them together to resemble themselves… like making offspring. They didn’t birth their next generation, no they contructed it.
    • The team at UVM team (University of Vermont) that first created the xenobots back in 2020 teamed up with a team at Tufts University in Medford Massachusetts. Together they realized they could cut a wedge out of the xenobots to make them sort of look like a microscopic pac-men. This allowed the xenobots to corale a lot more pellets than before, while using less energy.
      • Before Xenobots only live for about a week to at-most 10 days, but with This Pac Man move by the researchers allowed the Xenobots to live much longer as they now weren’t using as much energy.
      • Up until now, the Xenobots were placed in this aquatic environment and only given non-living pellets to push, corale, and transport.
      • But someone on the research team thought “lets put Xenocells in the environment instead of pellets and see what happens!”
      • The result was that the Xenobots started clumping the xenocells together and they started to form structures that resembled the xenobots that created them.
The red arrow is pointing to a programmed Xenobot. The Blue arrow is pointing to the clump of cells that the Xenobot gathered. The black lines are supposed to show the direction the Xenobot is spinning.
  • The Researchers watched with glee as their living robots created a generation of Xenobots that, after a brief incubation period, functioned just like the original generation.
    • But don’t lose your mind over a new species created by man that can replicate and terrorize the Earth!!! … because that isn’t what this is. These things can’t exist without outside assistance. So it isn’t like a petri dish somewhere could be spilt in to a drain and a new life form would start populating the globe… at least that is insanely unlikely to happen.
  • But then there is the ethical dilema
    • Right now science is still in the mess-around/baby phase of this new type of robotic life form. These things are only 3,000 cells a piece and they only live for like 2 weeks, but when we start talking about the future implications of this tech it gets a bit morally foggy.
    • What happens when we humans design a robot to clean our oceans of microplastics, but we find that if we design it to feel pain it will do its job with a lot more efficiency? Do we design it for pain? Or do we realize how ethically messed up that would be to design a life form that can feel pain?
    • I understand the excitement and sense of accomplishment that must come along with this sort of discovery. These researchers must be elated to know their creation has the dictionaries re-writing all sorts of definitions like the word Robot now, but at what cost is all of this?
    • Have they opened pandora’s box?
    • I’ll end this one with yet another Jurassic Park quote from Dr. Ian Malcom:

=play 2nd audio clip – “your scientists were preoccupied with if they COULD they didn’t stop to think if they SHOULD.”===

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James Webb Space Telescope

The content below is from Episode 88 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast.

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

Netflix & Mark Millar Unveil Slate Of Super Crooks Debut, New Spy Series, Prodigy Scribes + More – Deadline
  • Netflix has a new series out called Super Crooks. It is based on the popular graphic novel of the same name written by legendary Scottish comic writer Mark Millar and illustrated by Filipino artist Leinil Francis Yu.
    • The story follows a band of super powered people who chose to use their powers for heists instead of being heroes. The try to steal jewels and super powered artifacts while battling the Union of Justice (which are basically the knock off Justice League).
    • This story is definitely meant for adults and not kids as there is plenty of gore, substance abuse, sexual content, and cursing lol.
    • Out on Netflix now so check that out.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • As you are about to find out: I am a total freaking nerd for astronomical discoveries.
    • Space exploration really tickles all of my fancies. Learning about what is out there in the final frontier of space… it just matters.
    • The older and more mature I become I find that a lot of what I thought mattered as a child doesn’t hold much meaning. But when it comes to exploration. That I think is a major part of what makes us human. We are explorers.
    • That’s why this week’s topic really makes my eyes twinkle with wonder.
    • It is time for humanity to dredge up a few more of the universe’s secrets and put them on display for the world to see!
See the source image
  • The James Webb Space Telescope (sometimes called JWST or Webb) is a space telescope being jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. It is planned to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA’s Flagship astrophysics mission.
    • The telescope will be a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror. The telescope will be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana (South America) in 2021. 
      • The current launch date is set to December 22, 2021 – but as you will see soon, that date is not set in stone.
    • The Webb telescope will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.
    • The Webb telescope was formerly known as the “Next Generation Space Telescope” (NGST); (which sounds like a Nerdy Star Trek reference to me). it was renamed in September 2002 after a former NASA administrator, James Webb.
    • NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is managing the development effort. The main industrial partner is Northrop Grumman; the Space Telescope Science Institute will operate Webb after launch.
    • Several innovative technologies have been developed for Webb. These include a primary mirror made of 18 separate segments that unfold and adjust to shape after launch. The mirrors are made of ultra-lightweight beryllium. Webb’s biggest feature is a tennis court sized five-layer sunshield that attenuates heat from the Sun more than a million times. The telescope’s four instruments – cameras and spectrometers – have detectors that are able to record extremely faint signals. One instrument (NIRSpec) has programmable microshutters, which enable observation up to 100 objects simultaneously. Webb also has a cryocooler for cooling the mid-infrared detectors of another instrument (MIRI) to a very cold 7 kelvins (minus 447 Fahrenheit) so they can work.
      • Thats right the optimal operating temperature of these mid-infrared detectors is negative 447 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • Cost: 10 billion USD (2016)
    • Why so pricey? well Webb’s stewards believed the telescope could do more than originally envisioned, so they expanded its parameters overtime. As the years passed and the scope of the mission swelled, so did the cost. … Another reason is that Most of the telescope its gold-plated mirrors and scientific instruments. If you google a quick image of the telescope you are sure to see all the pretty gold plating.
    • The massive telescope weighs 14,000 pounds according to arizona.edu
      • the photos do NOT do the size justice. This thing is the size of a tennish court
See the source image
  • There have been some major development issues
    • NASA’s latest big astronomy mission has been in the works for about 25 years now. When the concept was first proposed in 1996 as the successor to the famed Hubble Space Telescope, scientists estimated it would cost $500 million and fly by 2007. But… we know it didn’t go down that way. As scientists worked on the telescope’s design, the world around them began to change. Astronomers were making exhilarating discoveries about the cosmos, and engineers were inventing the technology needed to study them. 
      • To give you a better idea of just how much our understanding of the universe has changed since this project started:
      • 1992: Astronomers didn’t even know for sure that there were planets outside our solar system until 1992. THINK about that. It seems like that discovery is OLD news, but thats just 30 years ago.
      • 1998: Astronomers discover the expansion of the universe is accelerating
      • 2001: The Hubble Space Telescope detected the presence of sodium in the atmosphere of the exoplanet HD 209458 b.  That was the first Atmosphere of an exoplanet detected
      • 2002: Mars Odyssey mission detects presence of water on Mars. This is one of my favorite discoveries as water is main ingredient for life and we found evidence of it on another planet. HOW COOL!
      • 2003: WMAP mission confirms existence of dark matter and dark energy
      • 2006: IAU introduces new definition of planet – that’s when we lost Pluto as a major planet and it got downgraded to a Dwarf Planet.
      • 2016: Gravitational waves from colliding black holes – The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States with the Virgo observatory in Europe announced the measurement of gravitational waves from colliding black holes. This was direct confirmation of an important prediction from Einstein’s general theory of relativity, that gravitational disturbances send out ripples in spacetime.
      • 2019: The historic image of the supermassive black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and released in April 2019. The image does not actually show a black hole, which are known for sucking up light, but rather its shadow, a glowing orange ring of ultra-hot gas.
      • So with all those new discoveries, the people behind the Webb project had to keep changing what it was they wanted to observe. They didn’t want their expensive telescope to become obsolete just months after launch, so they kept changing gears so they could get the most out of the James Webb Telescope launch.
Here's the first picture of a black hole | Science News for Students
  • But growing pains weren’t the only reason for developmental issues. Back in 2018, the Webb Telescope project announced that instead of being launched that year it would probably take until Spring of 2021 (which they didn’t make that deadline either). With this delay the cost grew again. The new total meant that Webb had breached a cap set by Congress in 2011, when lawmakers had begun to worry in earnest about the mission’s ballooning costs. Back in 2018 if Webb wanted to leave Earth, it needed Congress to approve an extra $800 million for the mission.
    • And while I don’t typically approve of how things are funded via tax dollars, I am almost always pro-space exploration. I think we humans will never know all the secrets of the Universe, but striving to do so, just might be one of our greatest purposes.
    • Of course they got the money. Even the stingiest of politicians realizes that once you’ve sunk $8Billion into a project you can’t just simply pull the plug on it. You might as well go all in.
  • What is this thing made of? Why is it so expensive? well…
    • Piggy-backing off the hard work of a paid journalist named Gerri Miller from TreeHugger.com who interviewed an important figure of Webb’s construction I stole a few quotes:
    • “To go to the earliest galaxies, we needed a bigger mirror, and that bigger mirror had to look at a bigger frequency of light,” says astrophysicist Blake Bullock, who is a director at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, the contractor on the project. “It also had to be kept cold — minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit — so it has a sun shield the size of a tennis court that acts as a giant beach umbrella,” she adds. “It’s like SPF 1 million, blocking the sun’s light.”
    • “It is the biggest, most powerful telescope ever to be put in space. There are big telescopes on the ground but nothing of this nature and complexity in space. Hands down, it’s the most powerful thing out there,” Bullock says.
    • “Hubble, when pushed to its maximum, could see galaxies that were teenagers in terms of age. We want to see babies,” Bullock says. “With the Webb, we will be able to see back in time to the earliest objects in the universe for the first time. Also for the first time, we will be able to characterize other planets going around other stars, distant exoplanets, and see if there are oceans, an atmosphere, what chemical elements are there.”
    • “It has the potential to fundamentally rewrite our textbooks because of how dramatically it will increase our view of the cosmos,” Bullock says. “We will be able to get a much better grasp of the universe we live in. Technology-wise, we are already seeing the implications.”
    • “The technology we invented is being used by eye surgeons, so there are tangible benefits. We’re also learning things on the computer level. We’ve made huge advances in understanding deployables — how we take this giant sun shield the size of a tennis court and fold it up.”
Blake Bullock Civil Air and Space Director for Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems
Blake Bullock, Northrop Grumman
I totally pictured Blake Bullock as this scruffy old nerd… but turns out it is this pretty lady.
  • The Webb is the successor to Hubble, and it’s 100 times more powerful.
    • “It has the potential to fundamentally rewrite our textbooks because of how dramatically it will increase our view of the cosmos” … that is the most exciting part of this entire project for me. It is one of the most vague claims made by the Webb project team, but they sure-as-shit can back it up.
    • To give you a bigger picture of how Webb is going to rock the world’s astronomical minds: Let me take a step back and explain just how monumental Hubble has been.
      • From NASA: When the Hubble mission launched in April 1990, it was meant to spend at least 15 years probing the farthest and faintest reaches of the cosmos. Hubble has far exceeded this goal, operating and observing the universe for over 30 years. During its time in orbit, the telescope has taken more than 1.5 million observations, and astronomers have used that data to publish more than 18,000 peer-reviewed scientific publications on a broad range of topics. 
      • With any piece of machinery that’s 30 years old comes some aging parts. No more servicing missions are scheduled to repair or replace equipment on Hubble. However, a dedicated team of engineers and scientists are continuously working to keep Hubble operating for as long as possible.
      • While nearly impossible to provide a comprehensive list of all the scientific contributions Hubble has made so far during its career, the telescope’s observations have contributed to the understanding of the development and growth of galaxies, the presence of black holes in most galaxies, the birth of stars, and the atmospheric composition of planets outside our solar system. Hubble’s explorations have fundamentally changed our perception of the universe and will continue to reveal new insights for many more years.
    • Now let me say again: The Webb is the successor to Hubble, and it’s 100 times more powerful.
Image of Hubble over Earth
Hubble
  • I am ecstatic for this telescope to reach it’s orbit destination.
    • Webb will orbit around the second Lagrange (L2) point, which is about 1 million miles (1.5 million km) away from Earth, and it takes about a month to travel this distance.
    • After reaching its orbit, Webb undergoes science and calibration testing. Then, regular science operations and images will begin to arrive, approximately six months after launch.
    • So if this bad boy does finally launch in late December of 2021, we still won’t get any results until as early as late June 2022.
    • But that 6 month waiting period is nothing compared to the 25 years of development.
      • Like I said. I am ecstatic!!! When these huge discoveries about the cosmos are made I am transported from my day-to-day life and my mind soars among the stars.
      • When we as humans make these discoveries, I feel less like a passenger on Earth, and more like a crewman alongside 7 billion of my fellow crewmates.
      • It truly is a unifying feeling that makes me proud to be human.

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