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Where does our Poop go?

The content below is from Episode 87 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • I recommend you go out in to the woods and enjoy a book or comic book.
  • Embrace the quiet nature has to offer, clear your mind an. Just read.
  • This past weekend I did just that and I read DC comic’s Dark Nights Metal. It is a comic book about Batman’s worst nightmares coming true and attacking the justice league.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • Modern plumbing is nothing short of a miracle.
    • We take it for granted and I do mean WE as I myself rarely think about how the unbelievably convenient process that is in-door plumbing makes my life so much easier.
    • We wake up, turn on the faucet to brush out teeth, use the toilet and flush, and then we use the kitchen sink for food prep and sanitation purposes throughout the day.
      • Now I know this isn’t the norm all around the world. Infact, according to the CDC:
        • Globally, more than 785 million people did not have access to at least basic water services in recent years and more than 884 million people did not have safe water to drink.
      • But I personally don’t have any experience with life without convenient water so I can’t say much else about it.
    • For the majority of us, water and plumbing is provided to us at a very cheap cost.
      • Yet the system is so complex it will boggle the mind.
    • For this episode we are going to be tackling a question I’ve had since I was potty trained at the age of 2: What Happens to Our Poop?
      • It should be noted that a lot of organizations and agencies tasked with processing our shit tend to come up with all sorts of different names for it to make their jobs sound less… well… shitty. LOL see if you can count how many different terms are used for Shit during this episode.
        • I’m not going to give you a prize at the end for getting the right number. I just think it is funny how people naturally come up with so many different names for shit.
  • People of the world produce roughly 1,043,000 tonnes (that’s 2,299,421,390 lbs) of crap each day. For the record, that’s approximately 114 Eiffel Towers made of excrement.
    • To explain modern sewage treatment we will be looking at one of the world’s most famouns cities, London.
  • London’s sewage…
    • gets flushed down the toilet, travels through ever-enlarging pipes through a system designed back in the 1800’s by a dude named Sir Joseph Bazalgette.
    • The sewage then enters the Sewage Treatment works in east London. It is the largest sewage treatment plant in Europe.
      • Back in the 1800’s the Brits simply stored all the sewage in tanks and then pumped it out in to the river during high tide to make it the Ocean’s problem. But that is against the law in many countries.
        • Fun Fact: The US banned solid sewage dumping only as far back as 1992. Yeah… not that long ago. Up until then places like New York would take their solid waste about 12 miles out to sea and just dump it… and it would usually just wash right back up on shore lol.
      • Now they treat sewage for a 4 hour process until it is safe enough to return to the watershed system.
      • The Sewage Treatment Works of East London takes on the crap of over 3 and a half million people. It is tasked with processing over 35 olympic swimming pools of sewage ever hour.
      • First, the raw sewage is sent through a large sifter that takes out all the big chunks like paper, bricks, twigs, and any other unsavory debris.
        • This debris is washed and sent to a landfill
          • While looking in to this topic I learned about New York city’s sewage system which is relatviely similar to London’s. Vice’s reporter interviewed someo of the sewage treatment guys who said their rake catches things like cocaine bags, counterfit money, and hospital biohazard bags regularly. *bit of a trigger warning here* But NY’s sewage rake has also caught things like live dogs and as aborted fetuses a few times in the past.
      • Secondly, the sewage is sent to a big tanks where it sits while a large metal contraption the size of a bus essentially works as a rake. It skims the top for any floating material while simultaneously dregding the bottom for heavier material… it is basically a big-ass poop comb.
        • (by now you should know that Organic Material basically means shit)
        • The skimmed and dredged organic material is sent to a filter press where it is dehydrated and incinerated.
          • Incineration is complete combustion, which is the rapid exothermic oxidization of combustible elements in sludge. Dewatered sludge will ignite at temperatures of 420 to 500°C (788 to 932°F) in the presence of oxygen.
          • The London Sewage Treatment Works uses the filtered and incinerated poop (which they call sludge) to power their plant. It provides over 75% of the power needed to keep the Works running.
          • Not all Sewage systems of today incinerate their sludge. Some them use centrifuge technology to separate water molecules from the sludge.
            • They call this centrifuged sludge “cake.” LOL
        • In most modern sewage systems this sludge is examined by scientists with PhD’s. Agencis like the US’s Environmental Protection Agencies make sure there aren’t potentially harmful toxins in our sludge that might cause a pandemic.
          • Nations around the world monitor their own organic material much closer than the average joe realizes.
          • The people in these labs tend to refer to it as “bio solids.”
      • Thirdly, the sewage that is left is taken to another tank where tons of bacteria is added to literally eat away at the organic material left. At the same time, oxygen is pumped in to the tank at the bottom to make sure every part of the sewage is dissolved by the added bacteria. This oxygen accelerates the biological breakdown.
      • And at last the left over sewage is tested to make sure it is safe to return to the Thames river.
  • Now I’d like to give a little tip of the hat to the world’s sanitation workers.
    • You know even during a crisis like 9/11 or Covid-19 our sanitation needs do not stop. And these people don’t do the most desireable jobs.
      • I mean they literally have Shitty jobs.
  • So I’ve talked about how the poop is processed, and I did say where the filtered sewage goes: the filtered and cleaned sewage goes back in to the world’s rivers and oceans… but what about the solids. London uses it to power their sanitation plants (so they claim), but what about the rest of the world?
    • When Vice tried to follow sewage waste in New York from Flush to “Question Mark,” they were met with a lot of secrecy and paranoia. It seemed very few people wanted to answer their simple question of “Where does the poop end up?”
    • They finally got a paranoid trucker to tell them about a company called We Care Organics.
      • This company is paid by the city of New York to take the city’s “bio solids” off their hands. Then We Care Organics takes the bio solids and sells it as fertilizer for farms, large landscaping projects, and even personal gardens.
      • Yup, that’s right. Our shit fertilizes our crops and city flower gardens.
      • And it works out for We Care Organics and companies like them (of which there are lots) because they get paid at both ends. They get paid by municipalities to take shit off their hands AND they get paid by people looking to fertilize and grow plants.
    • I actually knew this. I knew our food was grown with human waste. Well at least some of it is. Some is still fertilized with animal waste. But when I was a kid in junior high I took a bunch of agricultural classes.
      • I grew up in a farming community. Like 25% of the curriculum was “how to be a farmer.”
      • I vaguely remember going to tour a large farm on a class trip and the farmer explaining that he used human waste to fertilize his crops. He even showed our class the giant pile of super filtered and incinerated human shit he used.
        • Our teacher told us not to touch the pile, not because he himself was weirded out by it (no likely used the same kind of fertilizer on his farm at home). No he told us not to touch it out of fear that one of our parents might sue him or something.
        • But by the time he was warning us i had already had a handful of it falling through my fingers. I remember the stuff was brown, cold, and almost like wet dust… but not like mud. It smelled SOOOO much better than the stuff other farmers used like cow and pig shit fertilizer. It just smelled like dirt. I think that is because processing plants and these fertilizing companies are slapped with so many more regulations for their fertilizer than the fertilizer companies that use animal waste.
    • These companies take human shit and turn it in to a treasure that grows our food.
      • They have some of the best PR people on the planet. I’m not kidding. Think about it. They sell human shit to farmers lol.
      • One PR staff at We Care Organics explained that they sell the highest and most sanitized grade of human waste: grade A.
      • His clients swear by the quality of the fertilizer. Apparently it is less acidic than other fertilizers
    • Fun Facts about sewage products:
      • An estimated 10million chinese farmers use raw sewage to fertilize their crops and have been doing so for thousands of years.
      • LOTS of vineyards use biosolids to grow their grapes
      • A ski resort in Arizona uses poop water to make snow
About Biosolids — NEBRA
  • Now there are critics:
    • some scientists pointed out there are chemicals like arsenic and mercury in the fertilizer and that bacteria from pneumonia and encephalitis also lurk in our shit fertilizer.
    • But no studies have show these harmful chemicals and bacteria make it in to the food that it grows. But there have been a limited number of studies on the matter. The scientific community at large hasn’t drawn a conclusion on the matter.
    • Places like Whole Foods has gone public with the fact that they do NOT sell any products grown from bio solids.
      • Also the state of Virginia (one of the US’s biggest Tobacco producers) has warned against using bio solids to grow tobacco… as if they really care about our health lol
  • So what happens to our poop? Where does it go?
    • EVERYWHERE. It is in the food we eat, the flowers we smell, and even the snow we play in.
      • Where did you think it went?
      • We live on just this one big rock afterall. We aren’t shooting it out in to space. It is just like water. Chances are you have drank a glass of water that was once pissed out of Alexander the Great lol.
      • So don’t take life so seriously. It’s all shit anyway…
  • Now I was going to end the episode there, but I had to bring up this little side story I found about another city’s sewage system:
  • While I won’t be going over every major city’s sewage treatment process, I do feel I need to mention Hong Kong’s.
    • Cities like London and New York use treated wastewater for sewage, or desalinated seawater, but Hong Kong is the only large city in the world that has built a whole sewage system around the use of minimally treated water drawn from the sea that surrounds it. It is a remarkable achievement that began back in the 1950s.
    • Hong Kong realized that their old resevoirs were going to become too small as their population increased and their contruction kept cutting in to the resevoir areas.
      • Also, if you know anything about the geo-political climate surrounding Hong Kong, they constructed this modern marvel that is their sewage system to be independent. They are a city isolated from allies up against a hostile mainland that is the Communist Party of China. A mainland that could have held their fresh water hostage.
      • In similar situations places like Israel or Gibraltar have also developed innovative solutions to prevent being held hostage over water supply. Hong Kong came up with the idea of reservoirs built into the sea, wastewater treatment and using seawater for flushing toilets.
    • I bet you didn’t expect that. If you’ve made it this far in my 2nd episode in a row about literal shit, then I bet you didn’t expect to feel all patriotic and proud of democracy over the innovation shown by the Free People of Hong Kong.
Hong Kong's flag: How the bauhinia flower became the target of protest - CNN Style
  • I don’t mean to diminish the plight of the people of Hong Kong.
    • I actually feel very passionately about their struggle.
    • But I also see the humor in how I started to write an episode about shit and wound up reading an article about Hong Kong’s remarkable sewage system and how that sewage system was a big middle finger to the Community Party of China.
    • and as a tribute to Hong Kong, you beautiful freedom fighters, I’ll end this episode with your song: Glory to Hong Kong!
      • I was going to play the English Version, but I thought the native spoken version would be better. But look up these lyrics. They are badass.

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That Thing That Happened in Erfurt

The content below is from Episode 86 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

I purposefully made this episode’s title super non-descriptive on purpose. I want to see if you Who’d a Thunkers can guess what happened in Erfurt.

Recommendation Segment

  • Shannon recorded this week’s recommendation segment so that means it is only available on the audio version. Click the link above to listen.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT!

File:Peterskloster.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
Artist Postcard Erfurt in Thüringen, Peterskloster in | akpool.co.uk
  • In July 1184, Henry VI also known as King Heinrich part of the Hohenstaufen dynasty was King of Germany (later Holy Roman Emperor). He held court at a Hoftag in the Petersberg Citadel in Erfurt.
    • On the morning of 26 July, King Heinrich called a bunch of noblemen to join him at this big old Monestary. He was attempting to squash some beef (a term I love to hate).
      • Side note: In case you’ve never heard that phrase: The rest of the world seems to associate “Squash the Beef” or “Squashing Beef” as a fun term used for ‘settling disputes’ or ‘resolving conflicts.’ But personally, I’ve always sort of hated the term because it puts a very distinct image in my mind. But we will cirlce back to that later.
Henry VI Hohenstaufen, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Sicily - Best of Sicily Magazine
King Heinrich VI, Holy Roman Emporer
  • I said I want you to try and guess what happened in Erfurt Germany on that day so I’ll try and paint a picture for you:
  • Let us examine the setting of this tale!
    • The German city of Erfurt has existed since the 8th century, and it was formerly part of the Holy Roman Empire. The legendary Petersberg Citadel is deeply intertwined with the history of the city.
    • Among the structures that survived the citadel’s early period was the St. Peter’s Church. By the 1100’s it was already very old.
  • Now, Let us explore the characters shall we?
    • You see, back in the 1100’s Monarchy was all the rage. It meant the king was the divine ruler chosen by God to rule over his or her kingdom as they saw fit.
    • But by now human society was getting pretty good at trading and doing businessy stuff that some non-royal noblemen could weild quite a lot of power. Of course the royals and heads of church tend to become quite jealous of this non-divine power.
      • In this particular part of the world during these “middle ages” a conflict erupted between Conrad of Wittelsbach, who was the Archbishop of Mainz (also known as Conrad I), and Ludwig III, the Landgrave of Thuringia.
      • What were they fighting about? No body knows, but it was most likely money… or land… or overall power.
    • Our good ol’ King Heinrich VI wanted to settle the conflict between the two men once and for all. As he made his way through the territory, he called for a meeting involving a number of the region’s nobles and high-ranking officials. Some may have been expected to act as mediators during the negotiations.
      • How many nobles did King Heinrich call upon that day? No idea. That number is but a detail lost to history it seems. But it is safe to say that at least 100 people gathered there.
        • Fun fact: historians can’t even agree this meeting was held at St. Peter’s Church. But to move this episode along we are going to say that it was.
  • Now we’ve got over 100 persnickity noble guys gathered at a church all with the same goal of squashing some noblemen level beef.
    • They were on the 3rd floor of this old monestary gathered upon its old wooden floors, huge dusty wooden support beams above their heads. King Heinrich is seated upon the windowsill… he is the only one to do so.
      • …
      • Can you guess what happens next? I’ll give you a few seconds to think.
      • ===play 96 west===
    • The combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor of the Peterskirche to collapse and most of them fell through into the latrine cesspit below the ground floor, where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement. This event is called Erfurter Latrinensturz or the Erfurt Latrine Disaster.
      • … did you guess that? Did you guess they fell through the floor in to a giant shit pit?
      • King Heinrich the VI was one of the only survivors of the incident as he was sitting on a window sill when the floor collapsed. Because the window relied on the stone walls for support and not the floor, he didn’t fall stories down in to an old mideival poop pit and drown.
The Medieval Toilet And How Bathrooms Worked In The Middle Ages
  • The old monestary’s support beams had become rotten and were not equip with supporting this many nobles.
    • Some historians believe that King Heinrich the VI was behind this disaster, but that is all but impossible to prove now.
    • Plus, it wasn’t like King Heinrich was the only to survive. There was an Archbishop present who survived by clinging to a metal railing attached to the wall. He and a few other guests clung for dear life until rescue came.
  • At first this drowning to poop sounds funny. I’ll admit I laughed when I first saw the history meme on reddit. But when you stop to think about it, you realize this kind of death is pure nightmare fuel.
    • You see medieval plumbing was quite crude.
      • While people such as myself (middle class that is) would simply make do with a bucket or “close stool” that was emptied in to the local stream daily, the castle fold did it a bit differently.
      • If you were inside your local castle during medieval times you sat on a stone or wooden board with a hole in it, and the poo (or gong as it was called) dropped through. In castles, loos (also called gongs) were often made to overhang an outside wall, and the poo fell either into the moat (if there was one), into a pit outside the wall or just onto the ground.
    • These people just shit in to a hole that lead to a shaft that usually emptied in to a pit… a big dark pit in the ground meant to do 1 thing… hold human shit.
      • This pit wasn’t drained like modern sewer systems and it wasn’t emptied like septic tanks today.
      • Once that pit was full or over flowing they’d just top it off with some soil and dig another pit. … how splendid.
      • And these shit pits were quite deep. So you know if someone where to fall in to one such pit… a pit that had been built for one of the largest Citadels in the area and had been around for hundreds of years it makes sense why so many drowned.
    • Can you imagine going to an office meeting to try and do business and all the sudden the floor gives out. You plunge 2 or 3 stories down (all the while floor beams and rock rubble is raining down next to your falling body). Only to land in a very deep and dark pit full of ancient shit. No… you can’t imagine that. No one can imagine a pit full of hundreds of years of shit.
    • The 60 or so who drowned in the human waste died on the spot, but there were plenty of noblemen who died from infections contracted by human shit and piss getting in to various orifices that day.
      • All while King Heinrich was sitting, now stories above this carnage, on a windowsill safe as could be.
  • King Heinrich’s goal was to settle a dispute that had arisen in his kingdom.
    • And although this conflict wasn’t resolved the way most conflicts are resolved. The Erfurt Latrine Disaster caused the death of pretty much everyone involved so… the “beef was squashed” (a term I hope at least some of you now associate with dozens of people drowning in a giant cesspit).
  • After the Erfurt Latrine Disaster, King Heinrich the VI went on to conquer Poland and become Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
    • So at least things worked out for him. Nice ending… nice little cherry on top of the shit pit sundea for ya!
      • =–=whomp=–=
  • So this episode was about poop. And next week’s episode will also be about poop.
    • But instead of a historical tale I will be answering a questions that has plagued my mind since I was about 2 years old: where does our poop go?
    • I’ll be typing it up in advance since I will be away on vacation in the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon hunting black bear and yugging beers with my dad and his old buddies.
  • Thanks for listening Who’d a Thunkers!
    • Until next week.

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Queen of the Pirates

The content below is from Episode 85 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast.

This week’s episode is all about Pirates! ARRRGH!

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • One Piece
    • One Piece is an anime series.
    • I know I recommend anime stuff a lot on here and I realized I’ve never fully explained what anime is…
      • It is Defined as: a style of Japanese film and television animation, typically aimed at adults as well as children.
      • They typically start out as Manga or Japanese comic books. So it is only natural that I am obsessed with the genre since I’ve been in love with American Comic books since as long as I can remember.
      • But Japanese Manga and Anime are different. They don’t just aim for the child audience and because their culture is so different they have a completely different feel to them.
        • I’ve always said that Japanese storytelling doesn’t rush things. I’m always impressed with how Japanese writers wield the element of suspense.
    • This anime, One Piece, ties in nicely with this episode’s main event AND this is one of the longest running animes of all time.
      • One Piece began on October 20th 1999 and it is still going. There are still episodes coming out now.
      • One Piece is about a poor kid who lives on an island. He is a simple guy who loves to eat meat, and wants to become king of the pirates.
One Piece Color Walk Art Book, Vol. 2: Eiichiro Oda, Eiichiro Oda: 9781421541136: Amazon.com: Books

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • Back in Episode 73 I covered Mansa Musa: the African King who was the wealthiest person in history.
    • Today’s episode is about the most successful pirate in history, because pirates are cool. Her name was Ching Shih – Also known as Zheng Yi Sao or simply “Madame Zheng”
    • This is a true story.
  • Our story starts on a floating whore house… they were called Flower Boats … how nice
    • Yes that is a boat brothel. Where the signs read “if the boat is a rockin’ don’t come a knockin'” but in Chinese.
    • Apparently Ching Shih was very *cough* skilled at her job because she first is noted in history in the year 1801 when she made such an impression on the local captain Zheng Yi that he chose to marry her.
      • At first this sounds like a Pirate version of the Knight in Shining armor story where the fair maiden was left to a life of prostitutions until her hero arrived to take her away. But that isn’t how things played out.
      • Ching Shih (now Madame Zheng) wasn’t just a free-loafing captains wife. She got to work.
See the source image
See the source image
Flower Boat on the Pearl River
See the source image
Another flower boat
  • But let’s take a quick side step to explain the geo-political climate of the the Guangzhou area (where Madame Zheng and Captain Zheng Yi met).
    • You see Guangzhou was a bit of a hazardous place.
      • Aside from the floating sex businesses that Madame Zheng found work there was casual piracy.
      • The fisherman of Guangzhou took up arms and looted passer-by vessels in the off season. They had to feed their families… even when there were no fish.
      • So there were already amateur level pirates in the area
    • Then in the late 1700’s there was a peasant uprising in nearby Vietnam.
      • There were these 3 brothers from the village of Tây Sơn who started an uprising against the Confucian dynasty ruling over Vietnam. The Tây Sơn rebellion really shook things up in Guangzhou area.
      • You see the Tây Sơn brothers were victorious in overthrowing the government, but quickly found themselves up against an invasion from China and fending off the very government they had just beaten once.
        • In a desparate attempt for support they hired the Guangzhou fisherman pirates to raid their enemies as much as they could. They became privateers for the new Tây Sơn dynasty.
      • This new cause strengthened the Guangzhou pirates such as Captain Zheng Yi and his new wife Madame Zheng.
      • Instead of rag tag pirates, they were motivated by a greater cause than to just fill their own stomachs.
  • But in 1802 the Tây Sơn Dynasty was overthrown. It only lasted for 13 years.
    • This meant the pirate bands of Guangzhou such as the Zheng pirates could no longer seek refuge in Vietnam, as they no longer had a friendly government there.
    • And here is where the truly unique occurred. Rebellions happen, dynasty rise and fall, but very rarely do individual criminals band together.
      • Instead of scattering and going back to amateur fisherman pirates, the Zheng pirates joined up with the rest of Guangzhou pirates.
      • They then met up with rival Cantonese pirates and made a terrifyingly strong pirate alliance.
      • at the height of their power they had about 70,000 sailors, 1,000 smaller vessels, and 800 large junks.
        • A junk is a type of Chinese sailing ship with fully battened sails
      • This large pirate alliance was divided up in to 6 different fleets marked by different colored flags
    • Unlike other Privateers such as pirates in the Carribean, the Zhengs were acting with a large unified pirate force that did NOT have to answer to any government or kingdom. They made their own rules.
  • At this point the Zhengs were riding high.
    • not literally as they were pirate sailors so the highest they ever got was like a couple dozen feet off of sea-level, but you know what I mean. They were successful as hell.
    • But one day Captain Zheng died.
      • Zheng Yi died suddenly in Nguyễn Vietnam in 16 November 1807, sources varied as he died in a typhoon or in an accident, falling overboard and some even pointed at his wife, or his new heir.
  • Whether Madame Zheng was to blame for her husband’s death we will never know. That is lost to history and left to the speculators.
    • What we do know is that she kicked ass. She didn’t let all of her and her husband’s hard work go to waste. She used her diplomatic prowess and unique charm to keep the confederation together and eventually under her singular rule.
    • She simply pointed out that it was in the captains’ best interests to stick together and remain the formidable fighting force it had been instead of divide itself and be conquered.
    • Then she picked Zhang Bao (ol’ Captain Zheng’s right hand man and protege) to be the commander of the the Red Flag Fleet.
      • The red flag fleet was the strongest of all colored flag fleets.
      • It wasn’t long until Zhang Bao was doing more then commanding Madame Zheng’s strongest fleet… the two were bumping uglies on the regular and before long they even made it official and got hitched.
      • You can see why some historians believe Madame Zheng and/or Zhang Bao had somethign to do with Captain Zheng’s death. The guy died and it didn’t take long before his wife was in control of his entire estate and banging his best friend… but those could just be coincidence.
Mistress Ching is a character who appears in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. She is a blind woman who serves as the Pirate Lord of the Pacific Ocean. This character was inspired by Madame Zheng.
  • Although her rags to riches story and massive amount of power she wielded was enough to be written down in the history books, it wasn’t simply that Madame had so much power that makes her stand out. It was HOW she wielded it.
    • This seemingly pleasant little woman knew how to keep her men in line with strict military discipline. She cracked the whip and for it her men both feared and respected her.
    • Madame Zheng wrote down laws for her massive pirate empire.
      • Any captured females were to be spared of sexual assault
        • -that may seem like a no brainer to us today, but but to early 19th century pirates living outside the law that was practically unheard of-
      • However, pirates under Madame Zheng were permitted to marry captured women… just so long as they didn’t abuse them or commit unfaithful acts, lest yee be sent to Davey Jone’s Locker!
    • Although her method of ruling was uncommon for the times, it did work. Their success spoke to that.
      • The red flag fleet alone attained 200 cannons and 1,300 guns under the Madame’s rule.
      • Out of the 135 military vessels that patroled Guangdong Province, the red flag fleet sunk 63… that is nearly half the of their enemy force. These weren’t just pesky criminals, they were an enemy force to be respected and feared by military adversaries.
      • It was common for military commanders charged with apprehending Madame Zheng to stay ashore and sink their own vessels rather than face the ruthless Madame Pirate of the Red Flag Fleet.
Guangdong | Province, History, Map, Population, & Facts | Britannica
  • Madame Zheng’s Red Flag Fleet was so successful in raiding towns and markets that they started to look to racketeering as their next financial conquest.
    • The Madame had proven before that she could use politics and diplomacy to get large masses to do as she pleased. It wasn’t long until the Red Flag Fleet had offices all over the Guangdong province.
      • these offices squeezed the surrounding communities for protection money and were ALWAYS on time paying their master Madame Zheng.
    • Now the Red Flag Fleet had overwhelming control over both sea and land of the area. They had basically created their own state.
      • her fleet didn’t only stand up to the Chinese government, but within just 1 day was able to escort 5 American scooners to safety to nearby Macao, capture a Portugese brig, and blockade a naval mission from Thailand.
      • The Red Flag Fleet didn’t just patrol the south china sea. They were WORLD WIDE.
      • Madame Zheng taunted the world’s super powers with her badass fleet of battle hardened and business savvy pirates.
        • Hell, she probably ran her empire better than most world governments at the time.
    • I bet living in this little unofficial state of hers wasn ‘t all that bad you know. Yeah you’d be living in an organized crime government,
      • but I’m a bit of a Libertarian anyway so I already feel like I’m living in a state controlled by organized crime sometimes.
      • And at least there wasn’t hardly any freelance crime. Remember how they punished rape and domestic abuse?
        • A crime that is punished with death on the spot within a community is a crime that happens VERY little.
  • By 1810, Madame Zheng was still pretty well off as a pirate, but there was trouble brewing.
    • the foundation that the South China Sea Pirate Confederation was founded on was started to crumble.
    • Where the 6 fleets of different colors would once respect one another’s boundaries, now they started to grow greedy and forget what made them powerful to begin with.
    • Madame Zheng’s Red Flag Fleet started to get in to too many scuffles with the Black Flag Fleet and it worried Madame Zheng
    • But she wasn’t without options.
      • About this time the Chinese Government made an offer that they had made before. In desparation they asked Madame Zheng to surrender, but this time they offered amnesty.
    • With a smile on her face she accepted their offer… but only on her terms.
      • That very year of 1810 the entire confederation was dismantled… peacefully.
      • Zhang Bao (Madame Zheng’s now husband) got off with a fat retirement plan of 120 of his own personal Junks and went on to be an officer of the Chinese navy.
        • Being a pirate himself for so many years and now being asked to take down pirates, Zhang Bao was very good at his new job. he rose through the ranks fo the Chinese Military.
        • Madame Zheng reaped the benefits of Zhang Bao’s prestigious naval title
    • When Zhang Bao died in 1822, Madame Zheng returned to her home town of Guangzhou where she showed her son her old stomping ground on the Flower Boat… Just Joshin’ ya. She didn’t do that.. not as far as we know. that would be kind of messed up.
      • No, she opened up a boss-ass casino and sat back collecting all the profits.
      • Where most pirates die horrific and violent deaths at the hands of disasters out at sea, executions by various world governments, or at the hands of their fellow swash bucklers, Madame Zheng died a most enviable death.
      • She died peacefully as a successful business woman survived by her son.
        • she was 69…. nice

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Cowboy Amongst Thieves

The content below is from Episode 84 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast.

  • This week I welcome you to join me as I explore the life and legend of Ralph Lamb. A true cowboy who lived amongst theives.
    • But before we get in to that, let’s do the recommendation segment.

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

9 More Excellent Classic Movies to Watch After Casino
  • Casino
    • This 1995 mobster film is one of the coolest movies ever made.
      • Here’s what it is about:
    • In early-1970s Las Vegas, low-level mobster Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) gets tapped by his bosses to head the Tangiers Casino. At first, he’s a great success in the job, but over the years, problems with his loose-cannon enforcer Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), his ex-hustler wife Ginger (Sharon Stone), her con-artist ex Lester Diamond (James Woods) and a handful of corrupt politicians put Sam in ever-increasing danger. Martin Scorsese directs this adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi’s book.
    • Casino is the movie that made me really understand the acting chops that Joe Pesci has. You love to hate his character so much.
Top 3 Best Casino Movies! - Movie Blog

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVEN

  • Lamb was born in Alamo, Nevada in 1927 as a poor 4th generation farmer, and He was one of 11 kids growing up.
    • His father, William Grainger Lamb died in a rodeo accident when he tried to stop an uncontrollable horse from heading through the crowds on July 3, 1939 in Fallon, Nevada. When he died, William Lamb was 46 years old, and his song Ralph was only 12.
    • Ralph’s father was buried at the Alamo Cemetery. Lamb and his siblings took odd jobs to help make ends meet during the Great Depression.
    • Then one day Ralph enlisted in the Army and served in the Pacific Theater during World War II. He returned to Nevada and took a position as Clark County Deputy Sheriff. Lamb said he walked in to the sheriff’s office and was put to work that very afternoon. He was given no formal training and had to just learn as he went. He left in 1954 to start his own private detective agency.
They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To: Sin City Sheriff Ralph Lamb
  • But he came back and in 1958, he ran for election as Sheriff of Clark County… and he lost to a tough old school son of a bitch named Butch Leypoldt.
    • Leypoldt served until 1961, when he resigned and was appointed to the Nevada Gaming Control Board. And wouldn’tcha know it, Lamb was named his successor by the Clark County Commission and served until 1979. As Sheriff of Clark County Lamb doled out his own brand of justice over the increasingly corrupted and crime filled city of Las Vegas at the time.
      • Lamb spearheaded the charge against the mafia moving into post WWII Las Vegas.
      • Coinciding with Lamb’s initiation into the force was the Mob’s arrival in Las Vegas. In 1945, the notorious “Bugsy” Siegel moved to Vegas to gain control of the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, though his outrageous spending is believed to be the reason he never made it to the opening of his grand achievement, having been shot to death a few months earlier in 1947—the year Lamb signed on.
        • Lamb once said in a television interview: “People … think the only time I was there was from 1960 to ’80, but I’d been there a long time before that,” “I’d been working on these ‘hoods,’ watching them and keeping records on them. Then I got to be sheriff, and I got my own crew there, and we continued right on doing what we’d been doing before.”
    • To put Lamb’s time in law enforcement in to perspective, let me throw a few numbers at you:
      • In 1945 (the year WWII ended) Clark County was home to just 15,000 people. Today Clark County is home to over 2.3 million residents.
      • The time period in which that population saw the most growth was during Lamb’s law enforcement career. Even without the influence of the mob Lamb’s job would still have been a nightmare with all that explosive change brought on by that insane population boom.
Star power: Lamb was a longtime lawman — but also did stints as a bounty hunter and private eye.
  • This time period is what took Las Vegas from a humble watering hole to the Mega Resort and global destination spot.
    • Here’s some quick history of the city of Las Vegas because it interests me like mad. If you’ve ever been to Vegas you know it is a BIG BRIGHT AND SHINY sin playground surrounded by nothing but dust. I have family out in Vegas so I’ve been going there since I was a little boy and for as long as I can remember I’ve always wondered: “what is the story behind this bizarre place?”….
    • When talking about the history of ANY place in the Amercias I like to give as much info on the people who lived there long before it was called the Americas:
Paiute | people | Britannica
  • Then a few hundreds years after all the white people started showing up from the Atlantic some 2,000+ miles away on boats the history of Las Vegas gets a whole lot more detailed:
    • The name Las Vegas was given to the city in 1829 by Rafael Rivera, a member of the Spanish explorer Antonio Armijo trading party that was traveling to Los Angeles, and stopped for water there on the Old Spanish Trail from New Mexico. At that time, several parts of the valley contained artesian wells surrounded by extensive green areas; Las Vegas means “the meadows” in Spanish. The flows from the wells fed the Las Vegas Wash, which runs to the Colorado River.
    • John C. Frémont traveled into the Las Vegas Valley on May 3, 1844 while it was still part of Mexico. He was appointed by President John Tyler to lead a group of scientists, scouts, and spies for the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which was preparing for a possible war with Mexico. Upon arriving in the valley they made camp at the Las Vegas Springs, establishing a clandestine fort there. A war with Mexico did occur, resulting in the region becoming United States territory. The fort was used in later years by travelers, mountain men, hunters, and traders seeking shelter, but never permanently was inhabited.
      • After the end of the Civil war in 1865, Octavius Gass, with a commission from the federal government, re-occupied the fort. The Paiute nation had declined in numbers and negotiated a new treaty with the United States, ceding the area around the fort to the United States in return for relocation and supplies of food and farming equipment.
      • Did the deal go down that way in reality? Maybe. Although a lot of deals brokered between the white men and native peoples didn’t go so smoothly, some deals were done fairly.
    • Consequently, Gass started irrigating the old fields and renamed the area Las Vegas Rancho. Gass made wine at his ranch, and Las Vegas became known as the best stop on the Old Spanish Trail.
      • Las Vegas was purchased in 1902 by the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad, then being built across southern Nevada. The railroad was a project of Montana Senator William Andrews Clark. Clark enlisted Utah’s U.S. Senator and mining magnate Thomas Kearns to ensure the line’s completion through Utah to Las Vegas. The State Land Act of 1885 offered land at $1.25 per acre ($3.09/hectare).
        • As a reference: I read a small part of an article that said the land purchased in and around Las Vegas during the year of 2015 went for an average of $317,000 per acre.
    • Clark and Kearns promoted the area to American farmers who quickly expanded the farming plots of the areas. Not until 1895 did the first large-scale migration of Mormons begin in the area. Through wells and arid irrigation, agriculture became the primary industry for the next 20 years and in return for his development, the farmers named the area Clark County in honor of the railroad tycoon and Senator.
      • By the early 20th century, wells piped water into the town, providing both a reliable source of fresh water and the means for additional growth. The increased availability of water in the area allowed Las Vegas to become a water stop, first for wagon trains and later railroads, on the trail between Los Angeles and points east such as Albuquerque, New Mexico.
      • The settlement of Las Vegas, Nevada was founded in 1905 after the opening of a railroad that linked Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. Urbanization took off in 1931 when work started on the Boulder Dam (now the Hoover Dam), bringing a huge influx of young male workers, for whom theaters and casinos were built, largely by the Mafia. Electricity from the dam also enabled the building of many new hotels along the Strip. The arrival of Howard Hughes in 1966 did much to offset mob influence and helped turn Las Vegas into more of a family tourist center, now classified as a Mega resort.
        • And as this episode will show, not just Howard Hughes, but also rough and tough law enforecment such as the Cowboy Sheriff Ralph Lamb.
  • Our Cowboy Sheriff Lamb was in the thick of it as a law officer from 1947 to 1979, going head-to-head with Mobsters, biker gangs, and whoever else thought they could operate outside the lines of the law. When they did, Lamb was quick to rectify their misgivings, and had no problem getting tough if that’s what the situation called for.
    • There are many stories from Lamb’s career.
    • One of them was in the paper and said the sheriff had just got done “slapping the cologne” off revered gangster and former handyman to Al Capone, “Handsome Johnny” Rosselli, before sending him to jail.
    • Lamb had little direct trouble with mobsters after his go-round with Rosselli. Others also learned the hard way that Lamb wasn’t to be messed with.
    • Lamb himself has told reporters of being threatened by the Mob, only to let them know if they hurt his family, he would personally kill 10 of them each day. Amazingly, Lamb claimed to have never shot anyone in his years at the department, preferring to convey his messages with his fists.
    • Once, in the mid-1960s, Lamb reportedly greeted a rolling herd of Hell’s Angels by first destroying some of their motorcycles, then giving the men haircuts.
24 Las Vegas 1960s Stock Photos, Pictures & Royalty-Free Images - iStock
Calling for photos that show Las Vegas in the 1960s through 1990s | KLAS
  • Although the story about Lamb “slapping the cologne” off of Handsome Johnny Roselli was the most well known story, it wasn’t nearly the best.
    • the sheriff says the dapper gangster was a creampuff compared to a few other tough guys. “Rosselli was the kind of guy who would hire someone to take you out,” Lamb said. “But there was another guy who would have done that kind of thing himself. Johnny Marshall was the probably the toughest mob guy I ever tangled with.”
    • Marshall was one of the aliases used by one Marshall Caifano, a Chicago killer who was sent to Las Vegas to watch over Mafia interests, an earlier incarnation of rackets boss Tony Spilotro. Lamb says he personally arrested Caifano a couple of times and tried to question him, but the only reaction he ever got was a stone-cold death stare and a demand that he be allowed to call his lawyer.
    • In addition to facing down and arresting Caifano multiple times, Lamb said he single-handedly confronted six mob guys and ordered them to get out of town. It was Ralph on one side and six Chicago hoods, including Momo Giancana and Big Tuna Accardo, on the other. They left.
Ralph Lamb, The Cowboy Sheriff | American Cowboy - American Cowboy | Western Lifestyle - Travel - People
  • The Cowboy sheriff’s style of law enforcement was very much like what you might see John Wayne do in an old western. And just like the actions in an old western movie, what Lamb did sometimes would NOT fly today.
    • Now, Sheriff Lamb didn’t tolerate his officers abusing suspects during interrogation or anything like that, but a lot of what he did would land his ass in jail today.
    • Gene Perry, a lifelong friend to Lamb, says the sheriff went to Lincoln County to help a friend of his catch some rustlers who had been stealing livestock. When Lamb caught the two thieves, he’s said to have dished out on-the-spot punishment: Using a red-hot branding iron, he burned a brand on both of their bare asses.
    • Williams remembers a time in the early ’70s when Las Vegas got an influx of flashy pimps who drove up and down the Strip in fancy pimp-mobiles. Lamb reportedly authorized his men to kidnap the pimps, put a hood over their heads, and haul them out into the desert to a spot where a grave had already been dug. When the hoods were pulled off, the pimps were given a choice of leaving town or staying in the hole.
Who was Ralph Lamb? - Las Vegas Weekly
  • George Knapp, a good friend of Lamb’s, recounted many of these stories on Nevada Public Radio article. But because he was such a good friend he also got to know some personal sides to the Cowboy Sheriff.
    • Like how he was a total chick magnet.
    • Ralph Lamb was tall, tanned, strong as an ox, impeccably dressed and movie-star handsome. For 18 years, he reigned over Las Vegas, more powerful than any casino boss or mobster or elected official. That kind of power reportedly can be attractive to women.
    • Rae Cornell Lamb, still petite and striking today, recalls the first time she saw Ralph Lamb in person. It was 1973 at a tack store. He spotted her. She looked at him. Sparks.
    • “He was tall and strong and had these piercing blue eyes,” she said. “I didn’t talk to him that day, but he tracked me down and that was it.”
    • Rae would learn that the sheriff was still married at the time. Each of his three marriages proved tumultuous, in part because Ralph had a weakness for women. Lamb would never reveal anything about his liaisons, but others who knew him have dropped hints about his “friendships” with some of the most famous women of the 20th century … singers, starlets, you name it.
Former Sheriff Ralph Lamb's old-school manner inspires TV character - Las Vegas Sun Newspaper
  • Ralph Lamb may have known as a tough son of a bitch, but wasn’t all brawn. He was smart as a tack and his contributions to Las Vegas law enforcement are commendable.
    • “A few people over the years heard him speak with that slow cowboy accent and then made the mistake of thinking he was a dumb hick,” says businessman Kevin Buckley, one of Lamb’s closest friends. “They were in for a big surprise.”
    • During one interview session, Lamb told us about a fugitive he had busted Downtown in the early ’60s. He spotted the guy because he’d read the man’s license plate on a bulletin issued days earlier. To everyone’s amazement, during one interview, he rattled off the plate, though the arrest had occurred five decades earlier. He likewise remembered the name of a sleazy bar from arrests he made decades ago, and many other minor details from long ago events.
    • Like most intelligent men, Lamb knew the power of information. He had his own spy ring amongst the blue collar workers in Vegas
      • Lamb developed a network of eyes and ears by befriending bartenders, casino dealers, bellmen, taxi drivers and working stiffs. When they saw something of interest, they let the sheriff know.
      • His two sons Cliff and Clint (some of the 2 most cowboys names I have ever heard lol) would try to get into mischief when they were youngers.
        • As any young man would do living in Vegas.
      • But Lamb’s bartenders, bellmen, and casino dealer spies would rat them out at the first sight of them.
Ralph Lamb | Las Vegas Review-Journal
  • In his years as sheriff, he is credited with creating the modern police force Las Vegas now knows by organizing a merge of the city and county police departments, bringing a forensics team to Las Vegas, hiring the department’s first minorities (female and ethnic), putting the first computers in police cruisers, and, among other improvements, introducing motorcycles to the fleet, even though he probably wouldn’t have been able to handle the 250 head of cattle that escaped the corral behind the Stardust Hotel the same way on a motorcycle as he once did from his horse.
    • Yeah, Lamb was a bonafide cowboy. He strode around Las Vegas on horseback, wearing a 10 gallon hat, and rifle in hand.
      • Ralph didn’t just ride a horse around town to look the part of Cowboy. He had grown up on horseback and had a ranch in the area. He’d host ropings and rodeos on the grounds, competing with local cowboys and even the likes of hotel and resort mogul, Steve Wynn, who kept his horses at the ranch. Rodeo remained a constant in Lamb’s life and he was competing into his 83rd year, when loss of eyesight forced him to quit.
    • In 1977 Sheriff Ralph Lamb was indicted for tax evasion for somewhere around $30,000 that he took from a fellow cowboy, entreprneur, and old friend Benny Binion.
      • Lamb was acquitted of all charges, but not before his reputation was dragged through the dirt. The Judge decided the loans were gifts from a friend and not subject to taxation, but Sheriff is an elected position. And elected officials don’t usually survive such a scandal. When the Clark
        County Sheriff elections were held in 1978 Lamb lost. He would give up the badge the following year in ’79.
      • The next decade would see Metro Police, state gaming investigators and federal agents chip away at the Mob’s presence in Southern Nevada.
  • On September 25, 2012, a show titled Vegas was aired on CBS, based on Lamb’s time as Sheriff. Dennis Quaid portrayed Lamb. The show was cancelled after one season on May 10, 2013.
    • I have not seen the show, but I’m going to have to check it out.
Ralph Lamb's Legacy As Sheriff During Las Vegas' Mob Years | Nevada Public Radio
  • Lamb died on July 3, 2015 at Mountain View Hospital of complications from surgery in Summerlin, Las Vegas, Nevada, at the age of 88
    • For years after he left Metro, Lamb worked for Steve Wynn and must have seen a lot of crazy stuff. This was during the time the dapper young casino magnate was a rising star. But if he did, Lamb never told his friend Knapp who wrote a story about Lamb’s life. He never spilled about any of it. Several times Knapp returned to the subject of Wynn, asked about the people around him, associations he may have had, women he chased. If Lamb knew anything juicy — and he always did — he never gave it up. Not even a tidbit. He never revealed anything that might have been embarrassing to a friend of his.
Former Clark County Sheriff Ralph Lamb poises with is service revolver and badge at his northwest Las Vegas home, Friday, Aug. 3, 2012. The upcoming television series,"Vegas," scheduled … | Las Vegas Review-Journal
  • Just a year before Lamb passed away in 2014 the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement in Las Vegas—or, The Mob Museum, as it’s more commonly known—honored Lamb with an exhibit featuring the toughest law enforcer in the history of the city.
    • I toured this exhibition years ago while visiting family members who live in Las Vegas. Out of all the exhibits, Lamb’s stuck out to me most. That visit to the Mob Museum is why I decided to do this episode.
    • The exhibit included Lamb’s custom saddle and gear, cowboy boots, photographs, and awards, celebrating the cowboy cop who forged a modern police force with his Old West ways.
Las Vegas says farewell to legendary Sheriff Ralph Lamb

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Russian Sleep Experiment

The content below is from Episode 83 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

ANNOUNCEMENT

  • This is the 4th and final episode of this year’s Fright Fest! Where all episodes during the month of October are creepy, spooky, or down right scary.

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

How On Earth is Supernatural Still Going? - Den of Geek
  • Super Natural
    • The first episode aired in September of 2005 and the final episode aired in November of 2020.
    • Starring Jensen Ackles as Dean Winchester and Jared Padalecki as Sam Winchester.
    • This haunting series follows the thrilling yet terrifying journeys of Sam and Dean Winchester, two brothers who face an increasingly sinister landscape as they hunt monsters. After losing their mother to a supernatural force, the brothers were raised by their father as soldiers who track mysterious and demonic creatures. Violent memories and relationship-threatening secrets add additional burdens on Sam and Dean as they investigate all things that go bump in the night. As old tricks and tools are rendered useless and friends betray them, the brothers must rely on each other as they encounter new enemies.
    • I remember the first few seasons as being very episodic meaning each episode had very little impact on the next episode, but when season 4 rolled around the show really found its groove and started a massive narrative that flowed really well.
    • The show has a great cast and soundtrack and the car that Dean drives is actually listed on Google as a major element to the show. It is a 1967 Chevy Impala
Russian Sleep Experiment: How scary Creepypasta stories go viral | news.com.au — Australia's leading news site
  • The story I’m about to tell was first shown to me by my cousins Ryan and Anj when I went to visit them years ago. It scared the ever-living-shit out of me.
  • I didn’t write this story. It is from the website Creepy Pasta.
  • Enjoy:

Russian researchers in the late 1940s kept five people awake for fifteen days using an experimental gas based stimulant. They were kept in a sealed environment to carefully monitor their oxygen intake so the gas didn’t kill them, since it was toxic in high concentrations. This was before closed circuit cameras so they had only microphones and five inch thick glass porthole sized windows into the chamber to monitor them. The chamber was stocked with books, cots to sleep on but no bedding, running water and toilet, and enough dried food to last all five for over a month.

The test subjects were political prisoners deemed enemies of the state during World War II.

Everything was fine for the first five days; the subjects hardly complained having been promised (falsely) that they would be freed if they submitted to the test and did not sleep for 30 days. Their conversations and activities were monitored and it was noted that they continued to talk about increasingly traumatic incidents in their past, and the general tone of their conversations took on a darker aspect after the four day mark.

After five days they started to complain about the circumstances and events that lead them to where they were and started to demonstrate severe paranoia. They stopped talking to each other and began alternately whispering to the microphones and one way mirrored portholes. Oddly they all seemed to think they could win the trust of the experimenters by turning over their comrades, the other subjects in captivity with them. At first the researchers suspected this was an effect of the gas itself…

After nine days the first of them started screaming. He ran the length of the chamber repeatedly yelling at the top of his lungs for three hours straight, he continued attempting to scream but was only able to produce occasional squeaks. The researchers postulated that he had physically torn his vocal cords. The most surprising thing about this behavior is how the other captives reacted to it… or rather didn’t react to it. They continued whispering to the microphones until the second of the captives started to scream. The two non-screaming captives took the books apart, smeared page after page with their own feces and pasted them calmly over the glass portholes. The screaming promptly stopped.

So did the whispering to the microphones.

After three more days passed. The researchers checked the microphones hourly to make sure they were working, since they thought it impossible that no sound could be coming with five people inside. The oxygen consumption in the chamber indicated that all five must still be alive. In fact it was the amount of oxygen five people would consume at a very heavy level of strenuous exercise. On the morning of the 14th day the researchers did something they said they would not do to get a reaction from the captives, they used the intercom inside the chamber, hoping to provoke any response from the captives they were afraid were either dead or vegetables.

They announced: “We are opening the chamber to test the microphones; step away from the door and lie flat on the floor or you will be shot. Compliance will earn one of you your immediate freedom.”

To their surprise they heard a single phrase in a calm voice response: “We no longer want to be freed.”

Debate broke out among the researchers and the military forces funding the research. Unable to provoke any more response using the intercom it was finally decided to open the chamber at midnight on the fifteenth day.

The chamber was flushed of the stimulant gas and filled with fresh air and immediately voices from the microphones began to object. 3 different voices began begging, as if pleading for the life of loved ones to turn the gas back on. The chamber was opened and soldiers sent in to retrieve the test subjects. They began to scream louder than ever, and so did the soldiers when they saw what was inside. Four of the five subjects were still alive, although no one could rightly call the state that any of them in ‘life.’

The food rations past day five had not been so much as touched. There were chunks of meat from the dead test subject’s thighs and chest stuffed into the drain in the center of the chamber, blocking the drain and allowing four inches of water to accumulate on the floor. Precisely how much of the water on the floor was actually blood was never determined. All four ‘surviving’ test subjects also had large portions of muscle and skin torn away from their bodies. The destruction of flesh and exposed bone on their finger tips indicated that the wounds were inflicted by hand, not with teeth as the researchers initially thought. Closer examination of the position and angles of the wounds indicated that most if not all of them were self-inflicted.

The abdominal organs below the ribcage of all four test subjects had been removed. While the heart, lungs and diaphragm remained in place, the skin and most of the muscles attached to the ribs had been ripped off, exposing the lungs through the ribcage. All the blood vessels and organs remained intact, they had just been taken out and laid on the floor, fanning out around the eviscerated but still living bodies of the subjects. The digestive tract of all four could be seen to be working, digesting food. It quickly became apparent that what they were digesting was their own flesh that they had ripped off and eaten over the course of days.

Most of the soldiers were Russian special operatives at the facility, but still many refused to return to the chamber to remove the test subjects. They continued to scream to be left in the chamber and alternately begged and demanded that the gas be turned back on, lest they fall asleep…

To everyone’s surprise the test subjects put up a fierce fight in the process of being removed from the chamber. One of the Russian soldiers died from having his throat ripped out, another was gravely injured by having his testicles ripped off and an artery in his leg severed by one of the subject’s teeth. Another 5 of the soldiers lost their lives if you count ones that committed suicide in the weeks following the incident.

In the struggle one of the four living subjects had his spleen ruptured and he bled out almost immediately. The medical researchers attempted to sedate him but this proved impossible. He was injected with more than ten times the human dose of a morphine derivative and still fought like a cornered animal, breaking the ribs and arm of one doctor. When heart was seen to beat for a full two minutes after he had bled out to the point there was more air in his vascular system than blood. Even after it stopped he continued to scream and flail for another three minutes, struggling to attack anyone in reach and just repeating the word “MORE” over and over, weaker and weaker, until he finally fell silent.

The surviving three test subjects were heavily restrained and moved to a medical facility, the two with intact vocal cords continuously begging for the gas demanding to be kept awake…

The most injured of the three was taken to the only surgical operating room that the facility had. In the process of preparing the subject to have his organs placed back within his body it was found that he was effectively immune to the sedative they had given him to prepare him for the surgery. He fought furiously against his restraints when the anesthetic gas was brought out to put him under. He managed to tear most of the way through a four inch wide leather strap on one wrist, even through the weight of a 200 pound soldier holding that wrist as well. It took only a little more anesthetic than normal to put him under, and the instant his eyelids fluttered and closed, his heart stopped. In the autopsy of the test subject that died on the operating table it was found that his blood had triple the normal level of oxygen. His muscles that were still attached to his skeleton were badly torn and he had broken 9 bones in his struggle to not be subdued. Most of them were from the force his own muscles had exerted on them.

The second survivor had been the first of the group of five to start screaming. His vocal cords destroyed he was unable to beg or object to surgery, and he only reacted by shaking his head violently in disapproval when the anesthetic gas was brought near him. He shook his head yes when someone suggested, reluctantly, they try the surgery without anesthetic, and did not react for the entire six hour procedure of replacing his abdominal organs and attempting to cover them with what remained of his skin. The surgeon presiding stated repeatedly that it should be medically possible for the patient to still be alive. One terrified nurse assisting the surgery stated that she had seen the patients mouth curl into a smile several times, whenever his eyes met hers.

When the surgery ended the subject looked at the surgeon and began to wheeze loudly, attempting to talk while struggling. Assuming this must be something of drastic importance the surgeon had a pen and pad fetched so the patient could write his message. It was simple. “Keep cutting.”

The other two test subjects were given the same surgery, both without anesthetic as well. Although they had to be injected with a paralytic for the duration of the operation. The surgeon found it impossible to perform the operation while the patients laughed continuously. Once paralyzed the subjects could only follow the attending researchers with their eyes. The paralytic cleared their system in an abnormally short period of time and they were soon trying to escape their bonds. The moment they could speak they were again asking for the stimulant gas. The researchers tried asking why they had injured themselves, why they had ripped out their own guts and why they wanted to be given the gas again.

Only one response was given: “I must remain awake.”

All three subject’s restraints were reinforced and they were placed back into the chamber awaiting determination as to what should be done with them. The researchers, facing the wrath of their military ‘benefactors’ for having failed the stated goals of their project considered euthanizing the surviving subjects. The commanding officer, an ex-KGB instead saw potential, and wanted to see what would happen if they were put back on the gas. The researchers strongly objected, but were overruled.

In preparation for being sealed in the chamber again the subjects were connected to an EEG monitor and had their restraints padded for long term confinement. To everyone’s surprise all three stopped struggling the moment it was let slip that they were going back on the gas. It was obvious that at this point all three were putting up a great struggle to stay awake. One of subjects that could speak was humming loudly and continuously; the mute subject was straining his legs against the leather bonds with all his might, first left, then right, then left again for something to focus on. The remaining subject was holding his head off his pillow and blinking rapidly. Having been the first to be wired for EEG most of the researchers were monitoring his brain waves in surprise. They were normal most of the time but sometimes flat lined inexplicably. It looked as if he were repeatedly suffering brain death, before returning to normal. As they focused on paper scrolling out of the brainwave monitor only one nurse saw his eyes slip shut at the same moment his head hit the pillow. His brainwaves immediately changed to that of deep sleep, then flatlined for the last time as his heart simultaneously stopped.

The only remaining subject that could speak started screaming to be sealed in now. His brainwaves showed the same flatlines as one who had just died from falling asleep. The commander gave the order to seal the chamber with both subjects inside, as well as three researchers. One of the named three immediately drew his gun and shot the commander point blank between the eyes, then turned the gun on the mute subject and blew his brains out as well.

He pointed his gun at the remaining subject, still restrained to a bed as the remaining members of the medical and research team fled the room. “I won’t be locked in here with these things! Not with you!” he screamed at the man strapped to the table. “WHAT ARE YOU?” he demanded. “I must know!”

The subject smiled.

“Have you forgotten so easily?” the subject asked. “We are you. We are the madness that lurks within you all, begging to be free at every moment in your deepest animal mind. We are what you hide from in your beds every night. We are what you sedate into silence and paralysis when you go to the nocturnal haven where we cannot tread.”

The researcher paused. Then aimed at the subject’s heart and fired. The EEG flatlined as the subject weakly choked out, “So… nearly… free…”

Russian Sleep Experiment, Spazm monster" Photographic Print by ArtisMortis | Redbubble
  • Snopes: Fact Check
    • A popular creepy online tale of a “Russian Sleep Experiment” (with the improbable title tag of “Orange Soda”) involves Soviet researchers who kept five people awake for fifteen consecutive days through the use of an “experimental gas based stimulant”
    • This account isn’t a historical record of a genuine 1940s sleep deprivation research project gone awry, however. It’s merely a bit of supernatural fiction that gained widespread currency on the Internet after appearing on Creepypasta (a site for “short stories designed to unnerve and shock the reader”) in August 2010.
  • Cleveland Clinic: What Happens When You Don’t Sleep
    • Lack of alertness. Even missing as little as 1.5 hours can have an impact on how you feel.
    • Excessive daytime sleepiness. It can make you very sleepy and tired during the day.
    • Impaired memory. Lack of sleep can affect your ability to think, remember and process information.
    • Relationship stress. It can make you feel moody and you can become more likely to have conflicts with others.
    • Quality of life. You may become less likely to participate in normal daily activities or to exercise.
    • Greater likelihood for car accidents. Drowsy driving accounts for thousands of crashes, injuries and fatalities each year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
    • If you continue to operate without enough sleep, you may see more long-term and serious health problems. Some of the most serious potential problems associated with chronic sleep deprivation are high blood pressure, diabetes, heart attack, heart failure or stroke. Other potential problems include obesity, depression, impairment in immunity and lower sex drive.
    • Chronic sleep deprivation can even affect your appearance. Over time, it can lead to premature wrinkling and dark circles under the eyes. There’s also a link between lack of sleep and an increase in the stress hormone, cortisol, in the body. Cortisol can break down collagen, the protein that keeps skin smooth.

CREDIT

https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/The_Russian_Sleep_Experiment

snopes.com

ClevelandClinic

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Uncategorized

Operation Wandering Souls

The content below is from Episode 82 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

ANNOUNCEMENT

  • Welcome Who’d a Thunkers!
    • You made it back for another Who’d a Thunk It? Fright Fest Episode.
    • This is the 3rd episode of October 2021 where all episodes of this particularly spooky month have topics based on the macabre!
    • I hope you are ready. Strap in!

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

-don’t worry… no spoilers here- I really want you to watch this for yourself!

Midnight Mass - Rotten Tomatoes
  • Midnight Mass
    • It hard for me to put in to words just how much I love this limited series.
    • Director and Creator Mike Flanagan knocked it out of the park once again with this 7 episode story. It will take you on a roller coaster ride!
    • The first episode beautifully establishing the run down but still hopeful small island town while listening to Neil Diamond. Then by the end of the series you’ve watched many a very deep and engaging existential monologues and enjoyed some of the most exciting horror scenes to have ever been on a television series.
      • The final scene of the show coupled with the final song was so moving I cried. Which I totally did not expect to do at all, but it calls for it.
    • The setting, soundtrack, writing, and premise were all so well done that I have to say it beats out my now 2nd favorite works of Mike Flanagan’s, that being Season 1 of Haunting of Hill House.
      • That show felt so fresh and engaging it revived my love for the horror genre.
      • And while looking in to Mike Flanagan for this recommendation I found out he directed the Shining sequel movie Dr. Sleep. Shannon and I saw that in theaters and it was a fun film.
      • Bravo Mr. Flanagan. I’m excited to see what you come up with next.
What Makes 'Midnight Mass' One of the Best New Shows of the Year - The Ringer

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • The 2nd Indochina War started in November of 1955 and lasted until April of 1975.
    • The conflict was in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam.
    • In March of 1965 President Johnson launched a three-year campaign of sustained bombing of targets in North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Operation Rolling Thunder. The same month, U.S. Marines landed on beaches near Da Nang, South Vietnam as the first American combat troops to enter Vietnam.
      • I once knew a Vietnam Veteran named Howard. He was a retired marine in his late 60’s and I was 16. I met him at my first ever job renting out rowboats and canoes on a Pennsylvania state park lake, Lake Pinchot.
      • We both made minimum wage. It was my first job and it was Howard’s last.
      • Looking back now I think I took Howard’s company for granted. I’d like to think he is still around somewhere, but the old man smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish, and by his own admission only ever ate steak and potatoes, so chances are Howard met his maker years ago.
      • I know that’s a blunt way to talk about someone, but that is just how Howard was. That’s how he himself talked about life. He was a dirty old man who hit on all the young girls at the lake, girls young enough to be his granddaughter. He never was without his Vietnam Veteran hat. Now that I’m older I realize he was one of the most interesting people I have ever met.
      • I like Howard a lot but it was clear to everyone the man had his demons. He didn’t try to hide them. He spoke very little of his service and I knew better than to ask about it. But what details he did share horrified me.
The True Story Behind an Iconic Vietnam War Photo Was Nearly Erased — Until Now - The New York Times
  • Back in 2003 The New York Times reporter John Kifner was covering a story surrounding some Vietnam veterans.
      • “Quang Ngai and Quang Nam are provinces in central Vietnam, between the mountains and the sea. Ken Kerney, William Doyle and Rion Causey tell horrific stories about what they saw and did there as soldiers in 1967.
      • The fighting was intense and the results, the former soldiers say, were especially brutal. Villages were bombed, burned and destroyed. As the ground troops swept through, in many cases they gunned down men, women and children, sometimes mutilating bodies — cutting off ears to wear on necklaces.
      • They threw hand grenades into dugout shelters, often killing entire families.
      • Mr. Doyle said he lost count of the people he killed: ”You had to have a strong will to survive. I wanted to live at all costs. That was my primary thing, and I developed it to an instinct.'”
The Vietnam War, Part I: Early Years and Escalation - The Atlantic
  • In the midst of this kind of chaos the US military resorted to many different tactics to combat their enemy. One tactic was psychological. It was called Operation Wandering Souls.
    • The name of the Operation: Wandering Soul came from the Vietnamese holiday of the same name.
    • A WordPress blog called Vietnam Travel & Visas For Indians writes:
      • Also known as the Trung Nguyen, the holiday takes [place] every 15th day of the 7th lunar month in the Buddhist calendar. The Wandering Soul’s Day is basically the Buddhist version of the All Soul’s Day of the Christian religion.
      • According to Vietnamese belief, each person has two souls, the material soul, and spiritual soul. The material soul is known as Via while the spiritual soul is Hon. Once a person dies, his soul will be taken into a tribunal in hell to be judged. After the judgment is rendered, the soul will either go to heaven or hell, depending on how the person behaved while still on Earth.
      • Locals believe those sinful souls can still be saved from hell by the prayers of the living relatives, which is done during the 1st and 15th of every month. During the Wandering Souls, locals believe that this is the best time for the relatives of the deceased to pray and ask forgiveness on behalf of these sinful souls. It is their belief that the gates of hell will be opened during the sunset and the souls would fly towards it hungrily and unclothed. Some souls would head home to their homes and villages, which is why relatives would cook plenty of food and place on their altars.
      • Those whose souls don’t have any home to go to or the ones that have been forsaken by the living would be wandering helplessly into the air of black clouds and over rivers, from one tree to another. Basically, these “wandering souls” are the ones who are in need of prayer the most. This is why locals would place additional altars filled with offerings in some public places.
    • The American Military caught wind of this holiday and sought to exploit it. For decades after the war families searched for missing Vietcong soldiers. It was a common sight to see Vietnamese mothers scouring the jungles for their lost sons. They mourned their loss and worried for their sons’ souls. They hoped to find their lost bones, wash them, and re-burry them as such is their tradition.
    • The US Military estimates that some 300,000 soldiers are still uncounted for.
Ken Burns Vietnam War Film Glosses Over Huge Civilian Toll
  • The US used the Wandering Souls holiday by pleading to the Vietnamese north over the radio and by dropping leaflets out of planes that said:
    • “Comrades, demand that the communist party stop its war of aggression in the south so that no more innocent souls have to join the already great number of innocent souls now wandering in this war-torn country of the south.”
  • On February 10th 1970, Vietcong soliders had been hiding deep in the forest of the Hau Niga Province in South Vietnam. When all the sudden a shrill loud noise is heard. It was being blasted from the Chamberlain Fire Support Army Base.
  • The following recording is of a “Wandering Soul.” Its official title is Ghost Tape Number 10.
    • It was created by the US Amry’s 6th Psychological Operations Battalion in cooperation with the US Navy and is meant to sound as if a dead Vietcong soldier is wandering through the Vietnamese jungle at night.
    • The American military used this tactic because they found out the Vietnamese believe the souls of their unburied comrades would wander aimlessly forever in pain and suffering.
    • At first you will briefly hear musical tones. This is supposed to be music from a Buddhist funeral. And then the soldier speaks…
  • The dialogue heard in the recording was first the voice of a small girl calling out “Daddy, Daddy! Come with me. Come home. Daddy!”
    • Then in reply the Vietcong ghost answers “Who is that? Who is calling me? My wife? My daughter? Your father is back home with you, my daughter! Your husband is back at home with you my wife. But my body is gone. I am dead, my family. Tragic… how tragic.” and he goes on to tell all his friends and family that he is now dead and that he is in hell. He says how senseless his death was. He pleads with his friends to give up and be reunited with their own loved ones to avoid the regret he is feeling now. “Go home! Go home friends before it is too late!”
  • To our ears this recording is obviously fake.
    • But this was over 50 years in the past. People weren’t quite as used to hearing altered audio as we are today.
      • Engineers gathered for weeks in a studio located in Saigon to record this tape and south Vietnamese voice actors were hired to play the soldiers. They did their recordings in an echo chamber.
    • That being said, most American troops didn’t think Operation Wandering Soul would be believed by the enemy. They thought the Vietcong would see right through their deception.
    • Whether it was believed or not, the audio did manage to terrify troops on both sides of the conflict.
      • And can you blame them.? In a pitch dark jungle in the midst of a war I imagine even the fakes of of horrors would still manage to creep you out.
      • The US played these tapes in the trees near enemy troops for HOURS.
      • Even if the Vietcong didn’t believe the ruse, they did believe that their souls might be cursed to wander forever in pain as that was their religion. So they might not think it was an actual wandering soul crying out, but it did remind them that they might end up that way.
      • Near by civilians who heard the tapes often were fooled by it. They didn’t understand the technical side of the tapes and were already a superstitious people.
  • There were other tapes
    • One tape started with women and children crying. Then an announcer pleading to the Viet Cong to throw down their arms so that no more children would die for communism. Then the cries turned to laughter and the announcer urged the Viet Cong to return to their families and to not ignore the laughter of their children.
    • Another tape titled “No Dose,” implying that no solider could sleep while it played, featured a child saying to his mother “you miss daddy. I miss daddy too. Why doesn’t he come back? He must not miss you. He has left us mother.”
    • These tapes werent just played in the jungles. The US also strapped speakers to helicopters and played it from the air.
      • These speakers were in the way and made it so the helicopter couldn’t return fire to the enemy. And EVERY time these tapes were played the Vietcong fired at the source. So the US would send a gunship with the helicopter carrying the speaker and open fire at the first sign of a enemy fire.
      • Sometimes the tapes were played with another piece of audio equipment known as the laugh box. This played a shrill laughing sound over the tapes and even creeped out the pilots setting it off.
  • Was the operation affective?
    • The extent of the operation’s success is unknown. The Viet Cong usually returned fire upon encountering the recordings, exposing their general positions to U.S. patrol groups within audible range to hear the gunfire over the loudspeakers. While occasionally helpful to U.S. scouts in a reconnaissance manner (i.e. during low visibility), the Viet Cong’s aforementioned responses thus nullified the intended outcome of the operation.
    • So no, it wasn’t that affective.
      • Some think Operation Wandering Souls even motivated the enemy to keep on fighting. They became even more determined to destroy their enemy who would play such psychological tricks.
      • Plus, as soon as the tapes were played they were fired upon and some US soldiers were in the line of fire from that.
    • Local farmers and merchants who worked near where the tapes had been played refused to return to work. They perceived the recordings as black magic.
    • The US military outside of the 6th Psychological Batallion was opposed to the operation.
      • Their opinions were reinforced when many a US soldier was kept awake at night by the sounds of their own country’s psychological weapon.
    • Another psychological tactic was used by the US when they dropped leaflets of a US General describing how he had won a battle against the North Vietnamese enemy, but allowed the enemy to retrieve their dead and carry their wounded to safety.
      • In contrast this operation used the carrot and not the stick. The result was that the North Vietnamese were more likely to surrender peacefully. This operation was regarded as the more affective psychological operation in Vietnam by some psychological operations members.
  • What do I think?
    • My initial reaction to hearing about Operation Wandering Souls was that of shame. I thought “how dare the US resort to such low tactics!”
      • But I quickly realized that opinion was based in a thick layer of hubris. I have no idea what war is like. I have no idea what all was done by each side apart from what the reports say.
      • Compared to the middle ages, Operation Wandering Souls is damn near harmless
        • During the Middle Ages, victims of the bubonic plague were used for biological attacks, often by flinging fomites such as infected corpses and excrement over castle walls using catapults. Bodies would be tied along with cannonballs and shot towards the city area.
    • So although Operation Wandering Souls may seem terrible to us, it was a essentially a bloodless tactic. Terrifying, creepy, and all together messed up… but bloodless.

CREDIT

Time mark – 2:40
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The Beautiful Ones

The content below is from Episode 81 of the Who’d A Thunk It? Podcast.

ANNOUNCEMENT

  • Welcome Who’d a Thunkers to the 2nd FrightFest episode of 2021.
    • Every Episode this month will be within the realm of terrifying!
    • But First lets do this week’s recommendation segment.

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

Amazon.com: PANDORUM - Movie Poster - Double-Sided - 27x40 - Original - VERSION A - DENNIS QUAID - BEN FOSTER - NORMAN REEDUS: Posters & Prints
  • There is a little known movie that came out in 2009 called Pandorum.
    • It is a British-German science fiction horror film, with elements of Lovecraftian horror and survival adventure.
    • Starring Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid with supporting actors like Norman Reedus this movie blew my mind when I first saw it.
Pandorum (2009) - IMDb
  • There is space, mental instability, and like Cube (the movie I recommended last week) it has some very claustrophobic feels to it.
Pandorum' has a few sci-fi chills and thrills, but not enough originality - New York Daily News
  • And I know I can say this without spoiling anything because you’ll never guess what it is, but there is a major twist at the end that will make you think about this movie long after it is over.
    • Why have you never heard of it? Well because it lost money. It had a $33 million dollar budget and didn’t even make $21 million in box office sales.
      • But like I always say: just because the masses didn’t pay for it doesn’t mean it was a bad movie.
      • Movies like:
        • Children of Men,
        • Bladerunner 2049,
        • The BFG,
        • Citizen Kane,
        • Event Horizon,
        • Fight Club,
        • The Iron Giant,
        • ShawShank Redemption,
        • and Willy Wonka
        • All did poorly in Box office sales and I can honestly say I love every single one of those movies.
    • Remember that next time you judge a movie or any form of story based on how much commercial success it has achieved.
Pandorum - Wikipedia

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • Alright Who’d a Thunkers, you survived last week’s Fright Fest topic of killer lakes and their limnic eruptions… but can you survive this week’s episode on rodents?
    • I know there are people like my mother who hate rodents so I hope this horrifies you!
  • THIS is about Mouse Utopia. THIS is a possible bleak look in to our own future. THIS… is Universe 25.
    • In the Mid 20th century a science experiment was conducted on mice and rats to try and gain a deeper understanding of the possible consequences of humanity’s then (and still) rapidly growing population across the globe.
    • The experiments were conducted and then the results were published in the Scientific America Journal
      • These reports terrified the masses into thinking the world would become over populated and we humans would turn out just like the rodents. But of course that didn’t happen…. or did it?
    • Strap in Who’d a Thunkers! this is gonna be a wild one!
      • oh and if you are a member of PETA or if experimenting on animals bothers you… maybe sit this one out. … SPOILER ALERT – things don’t go so well for the rodents.
  • What motivated such experiments? Well that can be answered by some quick history and like most history this is about some old dead white dudes.
  • Starting with Thomas Robert Malthus
    • Malthus was an English cleric, scholar and influential economist in the fields of political economy and demography during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
    • Malthus said the human population might increase exponentially, but our food will only increase linearly… aka, we gonna run out of food! Which would lead to a massive food shortage. This crisis was called a Malthusian catastrophe.
    • This specific fear surrounding humanity’s overpopulation permeated the mainstream media over the decades. There have been popular stories of overcrowding degrading our society through the centuries.
    • So by the 1950’s and 60’s research was done to determine what problems might arise from overpopulation.
    • Introducing John B Calhoun.
Thomas Malthus | Biography, Theory, Overpopulation, Poverty, & Facts | Britannica
Malthus
Darwin reads Malthus 1838
Malthus’s theory can be summarized with just 2 lines.
  • John Bumpass Calhoun
    • I heard he went by John B Calhoun and well, with a middle name like Bumpass could you blame him?
    • Calhoun was an American ethologist and behavioral researcher noted for his studies of population density and its effects on behavior. He claimed that the bleak effects of overpopulation on rodents were a grim model for the future of the human race.
John B. Calhoun - Wikipedia
Calhoun
  • His experiments
    • started as rats being contained in an outdoor pen. Then in the 1960’s his research graduated mice being kept in a large pen at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIH).
      • The public kind of freaked out over Scientific America’s reports on the experiments. A lot of people interpreted them as evidence of what we humans would become in the future if our population continued to grow at an exponential rate.
      • During his experiments, Calhoun coined a few of his own terms. One such term “behavioral sinks” is what he used to name the catastrophic behaviors of the mice that lead to their own doom.
  • One of these experiments was dubbed Universe 25… because it was Calhoun’s 25th attempt
    • Side note: one of the reasons why Calhoun did so many experiments is because he tried making minor adjustments such as using powdered food vs pellet food AND in one enclosure he made the mean with which the rodents got around longer to get around… stuff like that
    • He built what he thought was a mouse paradise with beautiful buildings and limitless food. He introduced eight mice to the population. Two years later, the mice had created their own apocalypse and were all dead.
    • Universe 25, the actual physical experiment was made up of a big ol’ box designed to be a rodent utopia. It was divided into main squares, subdivided in to levels, and used ramps that went to different rodent apartments. The rodents always had plenty of food.
      • The pen was2.7-square-meter enclosure consisting of four pens, 256 living compartments and 16 burrows that led to food and water supplies.
      • There was tons of food, no predators, no chance of a plague or anything so the mice were given all the luxuries of our human life.
John B Calhoun – Medicine on Screen
Young Calhoun
  • For the first 104 days 
    • Calhoun labeled different phases of his experiment and the first 104 days he called the “Strive Period“
    • This is when the mice stretched their legs, explored, marked their territory, and nestled in.
    • Next was the “EXPLOIT PERIOD” where the mice population doubled over 55 days. By day 315, Universe 25 had a population of 620.
    • This is when Calhoun noticed something peculiar.
      • The enclosure could hold up to 3,000 mice and each compartment or “apartment” as Calhoun called them, could hold 15 mice. However, It seemed that eating was a communal event. It looked as if the mice preferred to crowd in to certain areas and eat from the same feeding sources instead of nesting in their own apartments.
    • For whatever reason, the same time the crowding together started to happen so did a drop in mating. The birthrate in Universe 25 fell to a third of where it was at the beginning of the experiment and there was some weird social stuff going on…
      • One-third emerged as socially dominant.
      • The other two-thirds turned out less socially adept than their forbearers.
      • As bonding skills diminished among the mice, Universe 25 went into a slow but irreversible decline.
  • By Day 315,
    • There was a bigger gap between the high and low-status male mice. The lowest status males known as “Omega males” were rejected from females and stopped mating completely. These outcast males left the larger groups to be by themselves. They ate and slept alone and occasionally fought each other.
    • The high-status males got meaner and fought a lot more often… usually with no apparent reason. These high-status or “alpha males” would even go around the pen indiscriminately raping other mice regardless of their gender.
      • I’ll be honest, at this point in researching this I was thinking “just how observant was Calhoun and his staff? LOL these guys know about mice motivations and statuses. I believe it because similar kinds of observations are done on all kinds of animal species, but I can’t imagine the toil of just watching hundreds or thousands of mice trying to remember their social statuses or the last time they ate, mated, or even took a crap. I mean, how does one know if a mouse is being raped? I don’t actually want to know the logistics of that, I’m just saying it is wild that those logistics exist at all. You know that if they were making notes of these mice rapes that there exists somewhere a scientific definition on how to spot a mice rape apart from a regular rape. It is mind-boggling to me.
    • Then the class of males between the alphas and omegas known as Beta Males was just picked on all the time. They weren’t shunned from the larger groups like the omegas, but they weren’t at the top of the pecking order so they just took a lot of mouse aggression.
      • Here is a quote from one of the articles I read “In several instances, bloodbaths ended with a cannibalistic feast for the victors.“
      • And if all that mouse raping and cannibalizing wasn’t bad enough, At this point the infant mortality rate hit 90%
    • With the males morphing in to a hellscape of social hierarchy they stopped playing out their usual roles and the females had to protect their nests alone. These females became more aggressive and horrifyingly enough this aggression spilled over to their own young.
      • Other females just didn’t care for their offspring at all. They abandoned their young and banished them. There were entire litters left to fend for themselves. These derelict babies, as you can imagine, didn’t do so well. And for whatever reason, their mothers rarely ever mated again.
    • Calhoun named this pleasant little part of the experiment the “stagnation phase,” alternately known as the “equilibrium period” referencing the equilibrium of over-aggressive mice to the super passive mice.
      • He attributed the overly aggressive and passive behavioral patterns to the breakdown of social roles and rampant over-clustering.
  • By the 560th day,
    • the population increase stopped altogether and the mortality rate was at about 100%.
    • This marked the start of the “death phase” or just as cheerful of a name the “die period.“
      • This is when the rodent utopia slid toward extinction. And from what I just read about the last phase, maybe extinction was a good thing. holy hell.
      • You see, with all the violent raping and cannibalistic murdering going on the latest generation of youngster mice were raised without being taught how to act like normal mice. They didn’t know how to act like healthy mice with healthy mice relations. They didn’t know how to properly mate, parent, or mark territory. All they did was eat, drink, sleep, and groom themselves.
    • These mice were known by Calhoun as the “beautiful ones,” because they didn’t have scars on their coats from battling it out with other mice.
      • I must say, “Beautiful Ones” just sounds like some horror movie shit to me. It is just so creepy!
    • Although the Beautiful Ones were spared the violence of the larger crowds, they didn’t contribute anything… at all. They were like little hedonistic mice that just lived in seclusion from the other mice away from the violent crowded areas.
    • According to Calhoun, the death phase consisted of two stages: the “first death” and “second death.” The former was characterized by the loss of purpose in life beyond mere existence.
    • But the reports said they noted the mice had no desire to mate, raise young or establish a role within society. This first death was represented by the lackadaisical lives of the beautiful ones, whereas the second death was marked by the literal end of life and the extinction of Universe 25.
  • Notes towards the end
    • Using the Beautiful Ones as a reference, Calhoun surmised that mice, as humans, thrive on a sense of identity and purpose within the world at large. He argued experiences such as tension, stress, anxiety and the need to survive make it necessary to engage in society.
      • Basically: we need struggle to survive just like mice.
    • When all needs are accounted for, and no conflict exists, the act of living is stripped to its barest physiological essentials of food and sleep. In Calhoun’s view:
      • Herein is the paradox of a life without work or conflict.
      • When all sense of necessity is stripped from the life of an individual, life ceases to have purpose.
      • The individual dies in spirit
    • Gradually, the mice that refused to mate or engage in society came to outnumber those that formed gangs, raped and plundered, and fed off their own.
  • The last known conception in Universe 25 occurred on Day 920, at which point the population was capped at 2,200, well short of the enclosure’s 3,000 capacity.
    • An endless supply of food, water and other resources were still there for the mice, but it didn’t matter. The behavior sink had set in, and there was no stopping Universe 25 from careening to its self-made demise. Soon enough, there was not a single living mouse left in the enclosure..
  • Attempt at redemption
    • Before the rodent utopia imploded entirely, Calhoun removed some of the beautiful ones to see whether they would live more productive lives if released into a new society, free of social strife and carnage. Placing these mice in a fresh setting with few pre-existing residents — a scenario similar to that which greeted the initial pairs placed in Universe 25 — he expected the beautiful ones to awake from their asocial haze and answer nature’s call to populate the barren environment.
    • However, the relocated mice showed no signs of change from their earlier behavioral patterns. Refusing to mate or even interact among their new peers, the reclusive mice eventually died of natural causes, and the fledgling society folded without a single new birth.

In Calhoun’s view, the rise and fall of Universe 25 proved five basic points about mice, as well as humans:

  1. The mouse is a simple creature, but it must develop the skills for courtship, child-rearing, territorial defense and personal role fulfillment on the domestic and communal front. If such skills fail to develop, the individual will neither reproduce nor find a productive role within society.
  2. As with mice, all species will grow older and gradually die out. There is nothing to suggest human society isn’t prone to the same developments that led to the demise of Universe 25.
  3. If the number of qualified individuals exceeds the number of openings in society, chaos and alienation will be the inevitable outcomes.
  4. Individuals raised under the latter conditions will lack any relation to the real world. Physiological fulfillment will be their only drive in life.
  5. Just as mice thrive on a set of complex behaviors, the concern for others developed in post-industrial human skills and understandings is vital to man’s continuance as a species. The loss of these attributes within a civilization could lead to its collapse.
  • Criticisms:
    • Nowadays the scientific community seems to be less fearful of Calhoun’s experiments and their implications.
    • John B Calhoun isn’t a rodent himself so some people think he got it wrong. He also had designed quite a few mouse environments before he got to the 25th one, and didn’t expect to be watching a happy story.
    • The general consensus now is that The habitats that Calhoun created were not actually overcrowded. It is the isolation factor that fostered the hyper aggression among the rodents. They were forced to fight over territory and this lead to the isolation of the beautiful ones. Behavioral scientists today don’t think it was an overcrowded problem, but a fairness distribution problem.
    • And then National Institute of Mental Health’s Edmund Ramsden said:
      • “Ultimately, “[r]ats may suffer from crowding; human beings can cope. Calhoun’s research was seen not only as questionable, but also as dangerous.”
    • Another researcher, Jonathan Freedman,
      • turned to studying actual people — they were just high school and university students, but definitely human. His work suggested a different interpretation. Moral decay could arise “not from density, but from excessive social interaction. Not all of Calhoun’s rats had gone berserk. Those who managed to control space led relatively normal lives.”
  • My skepticism comes from how farfetched Calhoun’s conclusions were.
    • The man’s research claimed to know when a mouse had a lack of purpose…. I don’t care how many behaviors you cite to back up your hypothesis, I’m always going to have trouble believing a person who thinks they cracked the code to mouse psychology.
    • And I agree with Edmund Ramsden when he said Calhoun’s research was dangerous
      • Don’t get me wrong, I think the experiment did give a lot of interesting insight into social interactions, but it is not a 1:1 ratio from rodent to humans. We are very different creatures.
      • And I think this research’s conclusions WERE dangerous. Calhoun’s predictions of the human race based on his rodent experiments were almost fear-mongering to a population of baby boomers just starting to grow up and see all the riots and “sinful” way of life in the cities.
    • And my chief criticism was how Calhoun basically played god over this small community of rodents and watched as they violently raped and ate each other.
      • I mean, I know they are rodents and people hate rodents, but I’d like to think I would have a hard time just sitting back and watching these living creatures do this to each other all while knowing it was by my literal grand design that they do so.
    • yuck… gives me the heebee jeebees.
  • Thanks for listening Who’d a Thunkers! To the 2nd Fright Fest Episode of the year.
    • hope you enjoyed the episode. A few episodes back I said I would be making the material a bit more mature since 0 of my listeners are minors and I finally kept my word seeing as this episode had the most mature talking point so far… that being “rat rape.”
      • sorry, not sorry if I offended anyone. I did warn you and sometimes learning more about the world does include some vile-ass shit you know.
  • Special shout out to my mother who absolutely HATES rodents and does NOT enjoy horror movies or stories at all… but undoubtedly still tuned in anyway because she’s my mom and my biggest fan.
    • Love you mom!
    • catchya next week Who’d a thunkers!

CREDIT

Mouse Utopia Experiment | Mr. Pest Guy
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The Dead of Lake Nyos

The content below is from Episode 80 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast.

ANNOUNCEMENT

  • This is the first episode in October and you know what that means!? It’s the first episode of the Who’d a Thunk It? FRIGHTFEST!
    • All episodes this month will be spooky, creepy, or downright terrifying!
    • Last year I did Pennsylvania Folk Lore 1, 2, and 3. I also did an episode called FrightFest 2020, and my last episode of October 2020 I did an episode on the 2 man eating lions called The Ghost and the Darkness.
      • I had a blast doing FrightFest as an homage to the the cable network AMC’s Fear Fest that they have done every year for the last 24 years.
      • I have fond memories of my dad and I sitting down and enjoying movies like Friday the 13th, Halloween, Critters, Cujo, and more.
      • This marks the 25th anniversary of AMC’s Fear Fest where they play classic horror movies every night through the month of October.
    • So strap in Who’d a Thunkers because this is the first episode of 2021 FRIGHTFEST!!!

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • Want to watch a claustrophobic 90’s horror movie that turned a small budget in to a fascinatingly terrifying story? Watch Cube.
    • Here is a brief synopsis of the plot… don’t worry I won’t spoil anything for you:
      • Without remembering how they got there, several strangers awaken in a prison of cubic cells, some of them booby-trapped.
    • It is an hour and 30 minutes long and when I first watched it I immediately knew I had stumbled on to a little-known gem of a movie.
    • You can watch it for free on Pluto TV.
      • If you aren’t familiar with Pluto TV you should definitely get it. It is free *with ads* (less ads than cable TV though… because Cable sucks).
    • If you don’t have Pluto TV on your smart TV then download it and if you like a good thriller movie watch Cube on said Pluto TV app… you won’t regret it.
Cube alternative movie poster on Behance

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • You’ve heard of natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, forest fires, volcanoes, hurricanes, and landslides and how lethal each of them can be. But what if I told you Lakes could kill?
    • and No I’m not talking about Jason Voorhees popping out of a lake and grabbing your from your canoe.
Friday the 13th: There's a life-sized Jason Voorhees statue at the bottom of a lake in Minnesota
  • No, I’m talking about a very real horror.
  • The power of mother nature far exceeds that of the killer from the famous Friday the 13th movie franchise.
    • I’m talking about a rare natural disaster that has claimed the lives of 1,800 people since the phenomena was first discovered in 1986.
      • 1,800 may not sound like a big number, but there’s No telling how many lives were lost before 1986 and history failed to take note.
    • That first recording of this lake-related horror in 1986 occurred in Africa at Lake Nyos.
  • The Lake itself
    • is a crater lake in the Northwest Region of Cameroon, located about 315 km northwest of Yaoundé, the capital. Nyos is a deep lake high on the flank of an inactive volcano in the Oku volcanic plain along the Cameroon line of volcanic activity. A volcanic dam impounds the lake waters.
Nyos 2010 red
  • What happened at this lake that some have deemed cursed?
    • Well Lake Nyos is no normal lake. It is what’s known as a crater lake. It was formed over millions of years by a subterranean volcano.
      • Now it IS common for a crater lake to have a lot of carbon dioxide in them. And usually those high levels of carbon dioxide gases leave the lake slowly and harmlessly. They dissipate over time as the lake water churns. But as I said, Lake Nyos is no normal lake.
      • Hundreds of years of carbon dioxide built up in the deep lake and never dissipated. Scientists discovered Lake Nyos had a 5 to 1 ratio. That means over 5 gallons of carbon dioxide had dissolved in to every 1 gallon of water. That is a massive chemical reaction waiting to happen, and if you listened to Episode #76 “Explosives” you’d know that is what makes something explode… a chemical reaction.
    • The night of August 21st 1986 something set off the lake’s catastrophic potential. Something metaphorically ignited this powder keg of a lake and scientist aren’t sure what it was.
      • It could have been a landslide, small volcanic eruption, or even just a cold downpour of rain on a corner of the lake.
      • Regardless of what caused it, what came next was horrifying. Around 9:30PM at night on that August 21st in 1986 Lake Nyos exploded.
      • That is when 100,000–300,000 tons (some sources say 1.6 million tons) of carbon dioxide (CO2) flew up in to the air in the form of a gas cloud at about 100 kilometers per hour (62 mph) to an altitude of about 90 meters (300 feet). This explosion caused a small lake tsunami.
      • Because the gas cloud of CO2 was heavier than the surrounding atmosphere it quickly fell back down to ground level. As it did the immense volume of CO2 blanketed an area so large it affected people up to 15 miles away from the lake.
      • There were 800 residents of the nearby village of Nyos and only 6 survived. In total, the limnic eruption at Lake Nyos claimed the lives of 1,746 people and 3,500 livestock also were suffocated by the fumes in just a few short minutes.
      • Before Lake Nyos this phenomena was undocumented. It was a new scientific discovery… and a lethal one.
  • To define this uncommon natural disaster:
    • A Limnic Eruptions is also known as a lake overturn, is a rare type of natural disaster in which dissolved carbon dioxide suddenly erupts from deep lake waters, forming a gas cloud capable of suffocating wildlife, livestock, and humans. A limnic eruption may also cause tsunamis as the rising CO 2 displaces water.
Cattle suffocated by carbon dioxide from Lake Nyos
  • As you can imagine this devastated the community surrounding Lake Nyos. Without any survivors telling their story the cause of all that death may still be a mystery. But there were a few survivors and Here are some of their stories.
  • Reverent Father Anthony Bangsi was a missionary living in the marketplace known as Subum near the lake at the time.
    • He says that night is still very clear in his mind. It haunts him that whatever was causing all that death was invisible. The only way he knew there was danger was from the birds dropping from the sky dead and all the other animals dying around him at his feet.
    • He said he and his fellow missionary Father Lawrence were sleeping inside when Father Anthony Bangsi felt as if he was suffocating. He went outside to see if he could breath more freely out there, but shortly after leaving the house he went unconscious.
    • When he awoke the next day he found it hard to speak and even stand up. That night father Lawrence dies, his body was lying right next to Father Anthony Bangsi. Father Anthony Bangsi is 1 of very few to survive. Lake Nyos’s limnic eruptions claimed the lives of 500 at Subum.
Dead cattle surround compounds in Nyos village Sept. 3, 1986, almost two weeks after the lake's explosion.
  • Another survivor from Subum, Joseph Nkwain recounted the scene:
    • “I could not speak. I became unconscious. I could not open my mouth because then I smelled something terrible … I heard my daughter snoring in a terrible way, very abnormal…. When crossing to my daughter’s bed … I collapsed and fell … I wanted to speak, my breath would not come out…. My daughter was already dead.”
  • The scale of the disaster led to much study on how a recurrence could be prevented.
    •  Several researchers proposed the installation of degassing columns from rafts in the middle of the lake. The principle is to slowly vent the CO2 by lifting heavily saturated water from the bottom of the lake through a pipe, initially by using a pump, but only until the release of gas inside the pipe naturally lifts the column of effervescing water, making the process self-sustaining
    • Starting from 1995, feasibility studies were successfully conducted, and the first permanent degassing tube was installed at Lake Nyos in 2001. Two additional pipes were installed in 2011.
    • Following the Lake Nyos disaster, scientists investigated other African lakes to see if a similar phenomenon could happen elsewhere. Lake Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2,000 times larger than Lake Nyos, was also found to be supersaturated, and geologists found evidence that outgassing events around the lake happened about every One thousand years.
      • My mind immediately connected old taboo curse lore to disasters like this. 1,000 years ago we as humans didn’t even know things like molecules existed let alone have the ability to determine the cause of a rare geological disaster.
      • So I’m guessing there is some African curse tied to these CO2 burping volcano lakes.
  • While science did eventually find out why the Lake Nyos happened (minus what exactly triggered it) it wasn’t an immediate discovery.
    • I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be in the shoes of Father Anthony Bangsi or Joseph Nkwain to see the people around you die slowly without the ability to speak or already be dead when you discover them. For quite sometime the survivors had no explanation as to why so much death had happened all around them. It was truly and invisible killer.
  • There you have it Who’d a Thunkers. If you are like me and you live in an area that is relatively safe from natural disasters and you think:
    • “No fault lines anywhere so no earthquakes to worry about”
    • “No volcanoes to I don’t have to sweat over lava”
    • “Not real close to the coast so hurricanes don’t bother be”
    • and “we’ve got lots of hills so fat chance of a tornado destroying my house.”
    • WELL THINK AGAIN!
    • Killer Lakes! Lakes can kill…
      • of course these are special lakes with volcanoes underneath and this disaster has to build up over time so it only happens once every like… thousands years or so..
      • BUT YOU NEVER KNOW!
      • Next time you are at your buddies lake house (if you have a buddy wealthy enough to own a lake house and nice enough to let you visit) take a look at the water… maybe try and see if you can spot any invisible CO2 gas lurking in the depths.

CREDIT:

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Hydrogen Cars

The content below is from Episode 79 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast.

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • I’d like to recommend the band ABBA.
    • Yeah that ABBA, the one that plays Dancing Queen!
    • But I’ll tell ya, they have a lot of other bangers like Fernando and Chiquitita!
    • ABBA knows how to hit a good rhythm that always seems to get my butt moving! I’ve recently been listening to Chiquitita at the gym and every time that beat drops I’m pushing the treadmill up to 7+ MPH for a good jolt of powerful positive energy. I highly recommend.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT!

  • DISCLAIMER: I used a bunch of sources for this episode and you can find those at the bottom of the blog post, but I used one source HEAVILY and that is a YouTube video titled “Why Hydrogen Cars Flopped” by Donut Media. There video is also on the blog post. Just wanted to give credit where credit is due.
  • I don’t remember where I was when this happened, but I know I was with my mom.
    • It was in the past year or so that we pulled in to a gas station and I saw a pump that had a blue handle and simply said “Hydrogen” above it.
    • Now I’ve heard of electric cars, and your typical gasoline fueled cars, but I had never heard of “Hydrogen” fueled cars.
    • After digging in to the topic for this week’s episode I felt a bit embarrassed by that fact, because this technology has been around since the 1800’s and has been getting billion dollar funding grants from the US government as recent as the Bush administration… the Little Bush that is.
  • So what is the tech behind hydrogen cars?
    • I found out that hydrogen cars are powered by what’s called Fuel Cell technology.
      • And a fuel cell is a device that generates electricity by a chemical reaction. … One great appeal of fuel cells is that they generate electricity with very little pollution–much of the hydrogen and oxygen used in generating electricity ultimately combine to form a harmless byproduct, namely water.
      • Similar to a battery, a fuel cell is a device that produces electricity through an electrochemical reaction — a chemical reaction that generates electricity without any combustion. Unlike batteries, fuel cells don’t run down or need recharging. As long as there is a constant source of fuel and oxygen, fuel cells will continue to generate power.
      • While hydrogen is a common fuel source for fuel cells, it isn’t the only one. Fuel cells can produce electricity using hydrogen-rich fuels, such as biogas, natural gas, propane, methanol and diesel.
  • As I mentioned, fuel cell technology goes all the way back to the 1800’s
    • It was first invented in 1839 by Welsh scientist William Robert Grove.
      • He was a Welsh judge, inventor, and physicist (back when there were renaissance guys who held all kinds of titles like this). He mixed hydrogen and oxygen in the presence of an electrolyte and produced electricity and water. However, the invention didn’t produce enough electricity to be useful at the time.
    • Since Grove, NASA has used fuel cells to power onboard systems in their Gemini spacecraft. Those hydrogen fuel cells produced water as a byproduct, which the astronauts were then able to drink.
  • Now let’s talk about the automotive industry.
    • The very first Hydrogen car was made in 1966 by GM.
    • It was the 1966 GM Electrovan.
      • The vehicle was a 1966 GMC Handivan on the outside. Its insides were converted into a science lab of new technology that appeared more like a whisky still of old.
      • The Union Carbide 5 kw fuel cell (rated at 1,000 hours of use) was able to propel the GM Electrovan for top speeds between 63 – 70 mph.
        • Those aren’t killer top speeds, but the fastest highway in my home state of PA only goes to 70mph so thats about all you would need.
      • The Electrovan also had a range of 120 miles, which was not too shabby for 1966. Because of safety concerns, the Electrovan was only used on company property, where it had several mishaps along the way.
        • That is why when you google search what the “First Hydrogen Car” is you get:
          • The first commercially produced hydrogen fuel cell automobile, the Hyundai ix35 FCEV, was introduced in 2013… because that was the first to be commercially available.
  • This is how the hydrogen fuel cell works:
    • Compressed hydrogen enters a pipe to a positive terminal in the fuel cell. Then oxygen from the atmosphere enters from a 2nd pipe to the negative terminal.
    • The positive terminal is made of Platinum that acts as a catalyst accelerating the chemical reaction. When the Hydrogen atoms hit the Platinum catalyst they split up into Hydrogen Ions (that is protons and electrons). Hydrogen Ions are just hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons. Hydrogen just has 1 proton and 1 electron (that’s why it is #1 on the periodic table). So a Hydrogen ion is just a proton.
    • The positive charged protons are attracted to the negative charged terminal and go through the electrolyte. Because the electrolyte is made of a special polymer, only the protons can pass through it. Now that the electrons are free of their protons they flow through the open circuit and head towards the motor. These electrons power the motor and makes the wheels spin.
    • Then the electrons travel back out of the motor and towards the negative terminal where they link back up with the Hydrogen protons and the oxygen from the atmosphere. This makes H2O… water. This high quality H2O comes out of the exhaust pipe and you can actually drink it…
      • Although I’d have a hard time trusting it and you would probably look like an insane person if you laid on your back underneath a car with your mouth open and tongue out hoping to catch a small stream of water out of a car’s exhaust pipe…. If I saw my neighbor doing that I’d immediately get my phone out and put that all over Instagram and reddit.
  • What killed the Hydrogen Car?
    • I told a few of my friends about this week’s topic and their response:
      • “Society banned those cars so they can get rich selling petroleum” – that was my buddy Cory.
      • and I found that is the general consensus of the conspiracy theory community. While I do think industries do sometimes kill superior technologies so they can keep making bank off their inferior product, I’m not so sure that is the case with Hydrogen cars.
      • I did some research and there is A LOT going against these cars. IF some industry or “Society” as a whole as Cory claims is actively trying to kill the Hydrogen car, they didn’t have to try very hard.
      • Here are factors that attributed to hydrogen car’s downfall::
    • Environmental Factors
      • Hydrogen Fuel Cell tech does run on hydrogen and gives off only heat and water as a byproduct. There is even a “air cleaning” feature on these cars that claims to leave the atmosphere less polluted when it is running.
      • Just looking at how these engines work: Hydrogen goes in and Water comes out… you’d think they are great for the environment… but like all things in life, It’s Complicated.
        • Hydrogen doesn’t doesn’t exist on it’s own in nature. We have to make H2 through a process called Electrolysis and that takes A LOT of power.
        • Water is taken to a special plant and separated to make H2. This is 75% energy efficient.
        • Then the H2 is compressed, chilled, and transported to the fueling station. There the H2 is put in to a car which turns the H2 BACK in to electricity to power the motor.
        • In the end, if you started with 100 watts of power at the plant, only 38 watts of that electric power is used to move your car. The Hydrogen Engine is only 38% efficient.
        • and where did that electricity come from??? natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy so the source of the power isn’t coming out of thin air.
        • So if we could find a more efficient way to produce the H2 and get it in to the Hydrogen car then we’d have the greatest environmental friendly mode of transportation possible other than walking, but as things are now it is not that great.
  • For comparison…
    • The traditional combustion engine is only 25 to 35% efficient so hydrogen has them beat by a small margin
    • But the electric cars like Tesla use the electricity directly… they don’t have to transform the electric power into anything so they are a staggering 80% efficient.
    • The hydrogen car CAN be the environmental car of the future, but it needs A LOT more research, resources and time before it gets there. Right now it only marginally beats out the gas car and is left in the dust by the electric car.
  • Convenience – or lack there of
    • According to Wikipedia: “As of 2021, there are two hydrogen cars publicly available in select markets: the Toyota Mirai and the Hyundai Nexo…” but what Wikipedia didn’t say that there is also a car called the Honda Clarity available lol. so you know… Wikipedia…. There are 3 Hydrogen cars right now… only 3 cars to choose from. not a convenient selection.
      • In mid-2021, there were 48 open retail hydrogen stations in the United States. Additionally, there were at least 60 stations in various stages of planning or construction. Most of the existing and planned stations were in California, with one in Hawaii and 14 planned for the Northeastern states.
        • So lets give it the benefit of the doubt here and say all 60 of those stations are finished constructions… that is only 108 places to fuel up your car across one of the geographically largest countries on the planet. …
        • that is compared to over 150,000 petroleum gas stations available.
      • It is disgustingly inconvenient to fuel up your hydrogen car. As things are now it is literally impossible to travel across the US with one of these cars. You can start in NY and make it all the way to about Ohio/Michigan until you would start running out of fueling spots. If you only drove on the highway you MIGHT be able to make it to Missouri.
        • Traveling the other way from California… you wouldn’t even make it past Arizona before you’d find yourself stranded in the desert with no Hydrogen fueling station in sight.
        • So that inconvenient fact alone kills the thought of wanting to buy one of these
This map was published on September 2020
  • Price
    • After looking in to hydrogen fuel cell technology there are lots of benefits to this form of transportation, but the initial cost to switch over to this form of fuel kind of explains why they aren’t all over the place already…
    • First there is the cost of the cars themselves:
      • Honda Clarity Fuel Cell: $58,490
      • Honda Nexo: $60,120
      • Toyota Mirai: $49,500
    • Hydrogen fuel is much more efficient than gasoline, but it’s also four times more expensive, roughly equivalent to about $16 a gallon… however most Hydrogen pumps don’t measure by volume like gallons because what you are putting in to your Fuel Cell car is pressurized Hydrogen.
      • So the price is more accurately listed as $16.50 per kg.
      • The Toyota Mirai has a 5kg tank so that is $82.50 to fill up your car… and that will last about 400 miles.
        • For comparison my granny car: 2014 Hyundai Elantra has a 13.2 gallon tank. So with gas costing about $3.19 it would cost me $42.19 to fill up. With an average 32 MPG rate that is about 422 miles out of 1 tank.
        • So half the price and roughly the same result.
    • The price to install a Hydrogen fuel station is also pricey.
      • Electric charging stations cost about $50K to install at a Gas Station
      • Traditional Gasoline/Petroleum costs about $300K to install.
      • and Hydrogen fueling stations cost a Whopping $2Million to install.
    • There is some financial help from the government (via us taxpayers) that incentivized companies to create more hydrogen cars and hydrogen fueling stations.
      • But for the most part people are just not interested.
From left to right: Electric, Hydrogen, and Gasoline/Petroleum station installation costs.
  • Performance
    • More reasonably priced hydrogen cars like the 2021 Toyota Mirai’s performance is sad.
      • 0-60 in 9.1 seconds
      • top speed of 106 mph
      • and has a maximum range of about 623 miles on 1 hydrogen fill up
      • For a comparison, That granny car of mine the 2014 Hyundai Elantra goes 0-60 in 9.6 seconds and has a top speed of 121 mph
    • Now there is a hydrogen sports car that is set to release in 2022: the Hyperion XP-1
      • 0-60 in 2.2 seconds
      • top speed of 220 mph
      • 1,000 mile range
      • 1,000 horse power
      • and I personally love how futuristic it looks
        • But that is not a car that I can afford… and statistically speaking it probably isn’t something you can afford either… no price listed yet, but you can bet the cost will be atrocious.
  • The Competition
    • Hydrogen fuel cell technology in a car was an exciting futuristic concept when it came out as a commercial possibility in 2013. It looked like Hydrogen was the future for a hot second … then Elon Musk with his giant South African brain and Tony Stark-like reputation came along and left Hydrogen in the dust.
    • Electric cars like the Tesla got all the funding and research while Hydrogen car tech was left in the closet like toys from toy story.
  • Hydrogen Cars are soon to be a thing of the past… not that they were ever really popular to begin with… But there is hope for this water producing power source!
    • City transit systems like buses are starting to use Hydrogen and there are plans in the works to make hydrogen powered Semi trucks
    • Amazon and other factories are starting to use Hydrogen to fuel their forklifts and other equipment
    • Entire cities are looking to switch to Hydrogen Fuel Cell tech
    • I mentioned earlier that NASA uses Hydrogen fuel cells to make power and water for the astronauts to drink.
    • And Tech companies are looking in to manufacturing heaters and generators for rural communities.
  • What do I think about Hydrogen cars?
    • I would LOVE to drive one of these puppies. Can you imagine driving a car that gives off drinkable water? that would cool as hell.
    • However, I would hate driving a car that I could only fuel up at a spot that is probably an hour away or farther.

THANKS FOR LISTENING WHO’D A THUNKERS!

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Bobby Pearce: A Different Kind of Hero

The content below is from Episode 78 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

  • Episode 76 “Explosives” I said that you shouldn’t throw bullets in to a fire because they will explode.
    • One of my listeners Ronnie reached out to me by driving 11 hours from Savannah Georgia just to tell me I was being a tad misleading.
      • LOL JK, Ronnie drove 11 hours and we met at a wedding of a mutual friend.
    • But he said that I should be more clear. Bullet casings do go off when thrown in fire, but it is very rare that the bullet itself is propelled out as if it were fired out of a gun barrel.
      • Of course, it is still dangerous and YOU SHOULD NOT TRHOW BULLETS IN TO A CAMPFIRE lol.
      • But I agree with him. He and I both have been sitting around a controlled couch fire that unknowingly had a few live rounds in between the cushions.
      • I remember pops of explosions, but no bullets wizzing out of the flames.
  • Another announcement: I’ve kept this show clean for all this time, but looking at my stats the other day I realized NONE of my listeners are under the age of 18 lol.
    • So while I still plan on keeping the cursing to a minimum, there are some instances that are just better with a mild swear.
    • And I don’t have any specific topic in mind just yet, but this means I will also be opening the podcast to more mature content.
      • Well I guess I already made that switch a few weeks back when I did an episode with the word Cocaine in the title LMAO

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • Sword Art Online
    • It is one of the most popular animes out there and for good reason.
    • I remember watching the entire series with my little brother Jake. He and I loved it for different reasons and it showed me the kind of variety this show has.
    • It is about a emmersive VR game that connects to the players nervous system to allew them to experience a game in all 5 senses as if they are really in the game.
      • but things go wrong when the game master makes the game TOO realistic. If you die in the game you die in real life… and you can’t just quit. You have to beat it!

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • Last week’s episode was about a hero Shavarsh Karapetyan.
    • If you haven’t already, give that one a listen. But Shavarsh’s acts of heroism were spectacular. The man literally risked life and limb to save dozens of people on multiple occasions. After I read Shavarsh’s story there was no doubt in my mind that he was a hero.
    • And while this episode’s story doesn’t have any of those dangerous or spectacular feats, I would argue this episode is about a hero too. A different kind of hero, but a hero none the less.
  • September 30th, 1905 Henry Robert Pearce was born in Sydney Australia.
    • And get a load of his family. Give you an idea as to what caliber of athletic genes Bobby was blessed with:
      • Bobby’s grandfather Henry John “Harry” Pearce, Sr. was an Australian champion in sculling. 
      • Bobby’s father, Henry J “Harry, Jr” Pearce Jr., was an Australian sculling champion and challenged for the world championship twice (in 1911 and 1913).
      • His uncle Sandy Pearce, was a national rugby league representative inducted into that sport’s Australian Hall of Fame.
      • Bobby’s cousins were Cecil a sculler, who represented for Australia at the 1936 Summer Olympics and Sid Pearce who also played rugby league for Australia.
      • Cecil’s son (Bobby’s first cousin once removed) Gary Pearce would row in three Olympic games from 1964 to 1972.
      • …. yeah, I’ll bet there was quite a lot of pressure on little bobby to become a world class athlete. He practically hit the genetic lottery.
  • Bobby started rowing early.
    • He entered a U-16 handicap race at the age of just six years old, managing to finish in second place.
    • Then he left school early to become a carpenter, and then worked in the fishing industry with his father.
    • When he turned 18 he joined the Australian Army in 1923, and attained the rank of master sergeant. In 1926, after winning the Army heavyweight boxing championship, he left the army to become a full-time rower. He was a competitor for the Sydney Rowing Club.
      • I love how “Australian Army Heavyweight Boxing Champion” is but a mere footnote in his life.
    • Bobby Pearce was a whopping 6 feet, 2 inches and weighed about 210 pounds (for you metric system users across the world, that’s 188 cm and 95 kg).
      • In 1927 at the age of 22 Bobby entered in the amateur national sculling championships. … he won that… and then proceeded to win the 1928 and 1929 championships.
      • His domination of the water got the attention of the right people. He was selected for the 1928 Olympics and even carried the Australian Flag at the opening ceremonies that year.
  • It was at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam where Bobby became a legend. This was where he became a hero in my opinion.
    • His first race was against a German named Walter Flinsch. Bobby beat his ass by 12 lengths.
    • Next race was against a Danish guy named Schwartz… Bobby smoked him by 8 lengths.
    • Then the quarter finals rolled around. Up against 8 competitors, Bobby was easily beating the French guy Saurin who was in 2nd.
  • Leading by a large margin in the quarter finals on the Stoten Canal, Bobby heard shouting from the Dutch spectators on the bank. He looked up and saw the spectators with worried looks on their face. When you row a boat you have your back to the front of the boat. So Bobby had to turn around to see what was ahead of him. He saw a duck about to cross his path and a string of fuzzy little ducklings trailing behind their mother.
    • There is no rule against rowing right over the ducks and most competitors in the Olympics would probably do just that without a moment’s hesitation. Olympic athletes train for years just to get a chance to compete. Most sacrifice so much to be there and aren’t willing to lose just because of some ducks.
      • If I were in the same situation as Bobby Pearce I would plow those little ducks right over and as I sped away I would stare back to see if they all made it back up safe.
    • But Bobby slowed down, leaned on his oars for a bit and let those adorable little ducklings pass.
      • As he did this, Victor Saurin, the French guy in 2nd place and a powerful 3 time European champion rower took advantage of the situation. Because of those ducks, Saurin was able to get a 5 length lead on Bobby.
    • Once the ducks passed, Bobby gritted his teeth and rowed like mad. He had 1,000 meters left in the race and Saurin far ahead… By the time the race ended Bobby Pearce had done the unthinkable. He beat Saurin by almost 30 seconds as he glided across the finish line. His finishing time of 7:11 was a record over the 2000m distance. This time stood for 45 years.
      • In the final, Bobby defeated Kenneth Myers of the United States by the unusually large margin of 9.8 seconds.
      • Pearce had hoped that his Olympic win would allow him to row in the Diamond Sculls at Henley, but he was refused admission because he was a carpenter. Back in Sydney he was unable to find work due to the Depression.
        • Back then the Olympics apparently would not let you compete depending on your profession.
      • When Lord Dewar, the Canadian whisky manufacturer, learned of Pearce’s plight, he offered him a job as a salesman. This new position made Pearce eligible for Henley, since he was no longer a laborer.
      • In 1931 he went to London and won the Diamond Sculls by six lengths. Although he moved to Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada, Pearce represented Australia again in 1932 at the Los Angeles Olympics… where he won again.
      • Bobby Pearce went on to dominate the rowing scene for 12 years from 1933 as world professional champion.

‘The most important thing in the Olympic games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.’ 

Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, founder of the Olympic committee
  • When Bobby stopped for those ducks he didn’t just make instant fans out of the spectators on the bank. He captivated the world with his compassion.
    • I’m convinced Bobby Pearce was a real man, and true hero.
    • I can’t think of a better example of true masculinity than a 6 foot 2, 210 pound natural athlete risking the most important competition of his career just to save a family of ducks, THEN go on to reclaim victory by the sweat of his brow.
    • And I’m hard-pressed to think of a better display of heroism than a man sticking to his moral code, his Maxim of “Life is Precious” when most minds at that time would only be thinking about winning.
      • IDK what Bobby was thinking at the time. Maybe he stopped because he was tired and needed a rest. Maybe one of those Dutch spectators on the bank was a pretty lady and he only stopped to impress her. … I very much doubt those were his motivations,
      • But it in the end it isn’t his motivations that are important. It is the message he sent to the world. Some things aren’t worth sacrificing. Even if it means attaining your dream, you shouldn’t go against who you are.
    • I think Henry Robert Pearce valued life. I think when he turned around and saw those ducks there was no question in his mind, no debate. He just simply was not the person to intentionally kill an innocent creature for no other reason than to win a race. Those ducklings lives meant more to him than that.
      • It was quite the display of ethics.
  • Damn I hope just about every woman living in the Netherlands in 1928 threw their panties at Bobby Pearce!
    • I mean can you imagine how much he pulled at the pub after that?! Chicks eat that shit up.
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CREDIT

The meme that inspired this episode.