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Rabies

Content below is from #178 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend… you go back and listen to my past episodes released during October!
  • That’s right, I’m shamelessly recommending you listen to my own content.
    • Every October I try to keep things creepy and do a Who’d a Thunk It? FrightFEST!
    • In honor of AMC’s FearFest where they show classic horror movies all throughout the month of October each year.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • Rabies is a viral encephalitis (a virus that causes inflammation of the brain)
    • Symptoms:
      • Fever
      • pain
      • hyperactivity
      • excitability
      • excessive salivation
      • confusion
      • hydrophobia (fear of water)
        • Rabies has sometimes been called hydrophobia due to this rare symptom
    • One of the most notable aspects of Rabies is that it can only be diagnosed by its symptoms… but by the time the symptoms appear… it is already too late.
      • If rabies is not treated before symptoms appear, it is 100% fatal*
        • * – Some VERY new treatments has lead to VERY few patients recovering from rabies after symptoms appeared, but very little is known about this treatment. I heard about it on NPR’s radio lab podcast. I’ll talk about this later on.
  • Rabies has the highest mortality rate than any other disease on earth. It is 99.999% fatal.
    • Rabies is most commonly spread via a bite from an infected mammal (dogs, raccoons, cats, foxes, etc.)
    • We don’t know when or where the disease originated
      • But There was a 2012 Phylogenic analysis published in the Journal of General Biology that suggests the current canine genotype of the illness may have been predated by another genotype.
      • But the human connection and by far the most common way the illness is spread is by being bitten by a dog… as dogs have been man’s best friend longer than any other domesticated animal.
    • Somewhere between 33 and 40 thousand years ago we humans started our relationship with dogs, but dogs came into contact with the rabies virus long before that.
  • Not only is rabies the most deadly and horrifying diseases, it is also one of the oldest.
    • Rabies is one of the oldest diseases ever recorded. a 2017 article in the Journal of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases cited 4,000 concepts related to rabies in animals and humans.
    • The oldest being a cuneiform clay tablet found within the archeological record titled the Laws of Ishununa. It was from Sumerian and later Acadian city-state in present-day Iraq. The tablet is over 4,000 years old and says
      • “If a dog becomes rabid it makes that authority known to its owner. But he does not watch over his dog so that it bites a man and causes his death, the owner of the dog shall pay 40 shekels of silver”
      • It should be known, 40 shekels of silver is A LOT of money. During that time, an entire boat costed just 2 shekels…
    • There are also Dog incantations from this same time period that suggest these ancient people figured out the disease was in the dog’s saliva and if bitten, the person was certain to die.
  • The word Rabies is from the latin word for Madness which found its origin in a sanskrit word for “to rage.”
  • Ancient Scholars from all over talk about this horrifying disease
    • Aristotle, Hippocrates, Pliny, Ovid, and Cicero, and Chinese texts dating back to the 3rd century AD reference rabies
      • The 2nd-century Greek philosopher Celsus suggested cauterizing the wound when bitten. It is unclear how effective burning the spot of a dog bite was against rabies… but this remained the go-to treatment for rabies bites up until the 19th century.
      • Odd because the other treatment Celsus suggested was holding the victim underwater… for those subjected to this treatment… those that didn’t drown stilled died of rabies…. ‘
      • The only other treatment people used was prayer
Pliny the Elder
  • In medieval Europe, a common treatment was to place the hair of the dog that delivered the bite (sometimes after being charred) into the wound. This was a medical suggestion from Roman Naturalist Pliny the Elder.
    • This treatment is the etymology of the term “the hair of the dog that bit you.”… you know, the term that refers to an alcoholic chaser that is supposed to cure your hangover… FYI… I never found the hair of the dog to cure my hangover, but I’m sure it is more effective than the original Hair of the Dog treatment… that did Diddly Squat to cure rabies.
  • While there are LOTS of historical records of rabies cases and unsuccessful treatments throughout history, not too many of them are all that interesting. The most interesting this is just how often this disease is mentioned by so many different cultures separated by both space and time.
    • Rabies is one of the scariest diseases out there and it has been scaring the crap out of us humans for as long as history has been recorded (and likely much longer than that).
  • A notable historical case is that In 1996, a group of doctors at a medical conference were presented a set of symptoms for a patient referred to as EP (a writer from Richmond VA) They were asked to diagnose the patient. They concluded the patient died of rabies… EP was Edgar Allen Poe.
    • Poe died in 1849 so the diagnosis obviously can’t be confirmed, but is now the widley accepted cause of the famous writer’s death.
  • Today, one of the greatest weapons we humans have against rabies is vaccines.
    • In 1881 Louis Pasteur developed a successful vaccination protecting cattle from anthrax.
      • He started to develop a vaccine for dogs to protect them against rabies.
      • He first greew the virus in rabbits then weakened it by drying the nerve tissue.
      • It took decades until comprehensive vaccination protocol programs were developed.
    • Those shots you are legally obligated to give your pets (the ones I always gripe about when we take our dog Rorschach or cat Beerus to the vet for) drastically lowered the number of rabies cases.
  • In 1885 Pasteur used the vaccine on 9-year-old Joseph Meister who was mauled by a rabid dog.
    • For doing this, Pasteur could have not only ruined his career as a vaccine scientist, but could have been sent to prison as he was not a licensed physician and therefore not legally permitted to deliver vaccination to a human.
    • But considering the alternative for little Joey Meister (horrificly painful suffering and death), Pasteur went ahead with treatment.
    • Pasteur and his colleagues gave 13 inoculations in 11 days. Little Joey Meister made a complete recovery. It was a breakthrough. Quickly word spread about Joseph Meister surviving rabies (pre-symptom rabies) and patients flocked to Pasteur for treatment.
    • By the time Louis Pasteur died 9 years later, over 20,000 people had received his vaccine (post-exposure prophylactic vaccine).
    • It is important to know that the vaccine for rabies is only effective if given BEFORE symptoms appear.
    • In Pasteur’s time, it required up to 20 shots (and it is a big painful needle), but today only takes about 4 shots.
      • Secondly, if administered within 10 days of exposure, it is nearly 100% effective.
  • Today the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates 59,000 people die of Rabies each year mostly in Asia and Africa.
    • While we humans can get it from many different kinds of mammals, dogs are responsible for 99% of transmission to humans due to our lives being so intertwined with dogs.
  • Before Pasteur’s vaccine treatments that came along as early as 1885, if someone was bitten by a rabid animal, they were as good as dead.
    • Their only hope was that the animal that bit them was just acting funny in general and wasn’t actually rabid…
    • Then when the vaccines came along, there was hope. Get the treatment before the symptoms and there was a decent chance of survival…
    • But even after Pasteur’s vaccines, if someone exibited symptoms (which was common as most people didn’t equate a bite with rabies…) they were doomed. Like 100% chance of one of the most horrific things to plague mankind for as long as writing has existed. The Babylonians and Acadians wrote about this stuff thousands of years ago and genetic testing suggests it existed before canines.
  • Well in 2004 that changed… just a little bit. And I first heard of this story on NPR’s Radio Lab podcast title Rodney Versus Death (link in CREDIT section)
    • In 2004 a girl from Milwaukee went to the hospital with flu like symptoms. Pretty quickly her symptoms were obviously not from the flu as she started to become really stiff and lots of pain.
    • When the mother of the girl told the Doc that she had been bitten by an odd-acting bat in church a few weeks back, the pediatrician went pale and said “I will be right back,” and left the room… He was confirming the information with colleagues before informing the family that their daughter was practically doomed with the most fatal disease known to man.
    • After the family was fully informed they were freaked out, but ultimately were like “Ok, so lets try any experimental treatment out there. If she is doomed to horrible pain and death… we will try anything because anything is better than that.”
    • The pediatrician found that the rabies virus works differently than most viruses. Where most viruses enter the body, multiply at the site of entry, enter the bloodstream, and spread all over the body until they find the tissue they are most suited to multiply in…
    • Rabies doesn’t do that. It enteres at the entry point (in Milwaukee girl’s case, the left index finger), then proceeds to latch onto the closest nerve. The rabies virus then slowly crawls along the nervous system at a rate of about 2 centimeters per hour.
      • So for the rabies virus to travel up the length of your finger might take a day. Up your entire arm, maybe a few weeks… it is slow… but once it reaches the brain you are screwed. it inflames the brain and starts wreaking havoc.
    • Well Milwaukee girl’s doctor started looking at the past 20 years of Rabies cases and also learned that once the victims are disected (autopsy) the victim’s brain is found intact. Not destroyed.
      • He thinks, huh, Rabies virus must not destroy the brain, it just hijacks it and kills the victim via the symptoms before the imune system can destroy the rabies virus. So he thinks: “what if I can buy the immune system enough time to get rid of the rabies virus before the patient dies?”
      • Sure enough, he enduces the Milwaukee girl into a monitored coma. For weeks she is like this, given IV and monitored closely.
    • When they wake her up, her pupils respond to light and eventually she wakes up… very slowly.
      • Milwaukee girl had lost months of memory and had to teach herself how to walk, and talk again, but she did it and is now considered 100% recoverd… the first case EVER recorded of a rabies victim who showed symptoms and survived!
https://www.ocala.com/story/lifestyle/health-fitness/2011/06/12/worlds-first-rabies-survivor-graduates-from-college/31442226007/
  • Now, that have been other studies, like this one Peruvian doctor who went deep into the heart of the Amazonian rainforest to test people who regulary come into contact with Vampire Bats. The hope to was gain insight into rabies victims that aren’t normally studied.
    • What he found was that about 7% of the population had Rabies antibodies in their system. The only way this could have happened is if some of these people had Rabies infection at some point…
    • This Peruvian doctor disputes the case of the Milawakee girl (now known as the Milawukee protocol). Peruvian doctor says the Milwaukee girl survived, not because of the Milwaukee protocol (induced coma), but because she had antibodies naturally… just how he suspects a small percentage of the population already has.
  • In the end, the Milwaukee protocol has been used on about 30 people (at the time the Radio Lab pod was released in 2013… so theres been a whole decade of research since then…).
    • Out of those 30, 5 people survived… and all 5 had the naturally occuring antibodies.
    • Whether it is the Milwaukee protocol or the antibodies saving these people… one thing is for sure, before 2004, there were ZERO cases of people surviving symptomatic rabies. and Now that number is NOT zero.
  • So why did I do an episode on this? Well… Rabies scares the shit out of me. It is October so Halloween is coming up and I usually do spooky themed episodes in October. I call it my Who’d a Thunk It? FRIGHT FEST!
    • And I think it would be beneficial for everyone to be afraid and aware of Rabies and the potential horrors it presents.
      • IF a person is aware of rabies and how important it is to seek medical help quickly, that means fewer people die in this horrible way that has plagued our species for as long as history was written.
    • And I am NOT the only person who is scared of rabies. Literary scholars have long suspected Rabies as the direct influence for some of the most horrifying monsters… think about it.
      • Vampires – get bit by a bat, turn into a violent monster obsessed with biting others… thats rabies
      • Werewolves – get bit by a dog (or wolf) and turn into a violent monster obsessed with feasting/biting others… thats rabies
      • Zombies – get bit by a violent monster of a human and turn into a violent monster human obsessed with biting others… Thats rabies.
  • And lastly… I DO NOT CONDONE THIS OR SUGGEST ANYONE LOOK THESE UP AS THEY ARE HORRIFYING AND REAL. DO NOT WATCH THESE
  • But there are tons of rabies victim videos available on YouTube. they are disturbing… even for me and I like watching messed up horror stuff.
    • The only benefit I got out of watching a few seconds of one of these hydrophobia rabies videos to research this episode… It instilled a very real and deep fear in me. Which may save me one day if I get bit by a raccoon that is rabid. Instead of brushing it off until symptoms arrive… I’ll certainly be gong to the hospital and asking for Rabies testing/treatment now.

CREDIT

13:19
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SkyWalkers

Content below is from #177 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend a YouTube channel called Code Blue Cam
    • The description from their own YouTube Channel reads:
      • Code Blue Cam delivers unbiased and genuine footage of incidents captured by body cameras. We are confident that this content can serve as an educational and informative tool for viewers to examine and assess different scenarios.The channel is not run by or affiliated with any law enforcement agency. We only provide unique and original content that hasn’t been covered before unless there is significant and meaningful information to include. Leave an anonymous tip or any general questions using the email below. 🛑 The featured content is NOT intended to be violent or glorify violence in any way. We are sharing the footage STRICTLY for the purposes of news reporting and educating. 🛑
  • It feels like a guilty pleasure. Sort of like Cops, but with a smaller budget.
    • They say it is unbiased, and for the most part, I would agree… but it seems they side with Law Enforcement rather than the suspects.
    • I do think the videos are educational and can benefit most people who watch them. Shannon and I frequently say how it teaches you a lot about one’s rights regarding interactions with Law Enforcement.
    • That being said, it is entertaining as hell!

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • No, this episode isn’t about Luke, Leia, or Anakin… these are a different kind of skywalkers… real ones.
  • Indians or Native Americans, aren’t typically associated with the concrete jungles of America, certainly not one of the largest: NYC.
    • But the Mohawk nation played a key role in the construction of the Big Apple, particularly its giant skyscrapers.

These “Skywalkers” have for generations traveled far and wide to work on the “high steel,” bringing back good wages to support their home communities such as Kahnawake, Six Nations Reserve and Akwesasne in northern New York State and southeastern Canada.” –History.com

  • This wasn’t just a small story from history… these guys constructed virtually every skyscraper in NYC!
    • They came to Pittsburgh too!
    • They worked on iconic infrastructure like the U.S. Steel Building, the Civic Arena, and the Fort Pitt Bridge, and more.

BORIS SPREMO/TORONTO STAR VIA GETTY IMAGES

UNDATED PHOTOGRAPH OF ROBERT MCCOMBER, FROM CAUGHNAWAGA INDIAN RESERVE, WORKING ON HIGH STEEL CONSTRUCTIONS SITE IN DOWNTOWN MONTREAL AS A WELDER.

“It became a rite of passage really,” said Lynn Beauvais, a Kahnawake resident and grandmother from a fourth-generation ironworker family, in an interview with HISTORY.com. “The men were thrilled to be working away from home and seeing new sights. They were a band of brothers. But our men had always traveled—for the hunt, the fur trade or as lumber men.”

CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES

MOHAWK MEN BUILDING A SKYSCRAPER.

  • It started in 1886 over the St. Lawrence River. Mohawk men from Kahnawake agreed to contruct the Victoria Bridge across the behemoth river bordering their reserve near Montreal.
    • This wasn’t a totally new revelation, the fearlessness these men displayed over deadly heights. Early settlers from Europe documented Mohawks running across logs laying over rivers and scaling large cliffs.
    • This rare skill was put to use connecting steel beams for America’s infrastructure.

“Having once hunted, trapped and farmed throughout the northeast woodlands, the Mohawks of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, eventually took to the high steel in burgeoning metropolitan areas. These indigenous riveting gangs spoke their native languages on the job while helping to build the Chrysler Building, Empire State Building, Rockefeller Plaza and many other structures that shaped the New York City skyline in the 1920s and 1930s.” – History.com

  • Aw inspiring construction wasn’t all there was to see during this SkyWalker era. Tragedy also befell these fearless steel men.
    • It was in 1907 that 33 Mohawk workers from Kahnawake died in the collapse of the Quebec Bridge.
      • The tragedy left widows and orphans… dozens of them. It gutted their community.
      • There was protest that they not continue this dangerous work. Even the decent Hazard pay these men received, wasn’t enough to compensate the loss of life.
      • But the Mohawk workers did return after their wives demanded they work in dispersed riveting gangs instead of in family groups.

Beauvais said it was typical for women to call the shots. “Women always chose the chiefs because they lived in matrilineal clans and saw the boys grow up,” she said. “They would choose leaders because they knew about their boys’ characteristics from infancy to manhood.” –History.com

  • When it first started in the 1880’s it was a good-paying job for a lot of Mohawk men, but as it continued, it became part of their culture.
    • Working on these towers became tradition, a rite of passage.
      • Fathers and grandfathers taught the next generations to face their fears and get the job done.
    • Some Iroquois compare working the iron to another chapter in their history.

“The Skywalker tradition was passed down for many generations as Mohawks worked the high steel from Ontario to Chicago and Philadelphia, and as far away as San Francisco. They even established a neighborhood of their own in Brooklyn, New York.” – History.com

Mohawk 'Skywalker' Joe JocksCOURTESY LYNN BEAUVAIS

MOHAWK IRONWORKER JOE JOCKS WAS ONE OF FOUR GENERATIONS OF ‘SKYWALKERS’ IN HIS FAMILY.

“Putting riveting tools in the Mohawks’ hands was like putting ham with eggs. They were natural-born bridgemen, said one construction company official.” – Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Riveting Gangs – History.com

Skyscrapers of the ’20s and ’30s were framed with steel columns, beams and girders fitted together by four-man riveting gangs. One man called a “heater” fired the rivets in a portable forge until they were red-hot, tossing them to the “sticker-in” who caught it in a metal can or glove. The “bucker-up” braced the rivet with a dolly bar while the “riveter” used a pneumatic hammer to mushroom out the rivet stem to secure the locking steel.

They took turns on each job while standing on narrow scaffolding hundreds of feet above the street. “It was always windy up there, and in winter the men cleaned off the steel beams of ice and snow before working on them,” Beauvais said. “In the old days there were no safety lines, and they didn’t wear helmets. It was hard work, but they never talked about the danger. Our men have always really enjoyed their work and were proud of it.”

Ironworkers, waaaay above street level, building the U.S Steel Bldg. No (visible) safety nets or harnesses in that pre-OSHA era. Source: Newsweek, Oct 6, 1969.
  • As time went on, technology advanced.
    • With hardened steel skeletons fastned by rivet gangs, the towers these men created grew higher than anyone could have imagined. And so did their legend.

During the 1920s, this led to a “race to the sky” as some of the most notable skyscrapers in Gotham began to take shape. Mohawks worked on the 1,046-foot Chrysler Building, a stainless-steel-sided Art Deco masterpiece that was completed in 1930. It was the tallest building in the world until, less than a year later, it was surpassed by the Empire State Building at 1,250 feet, also with the help of the Mohawks. Skywalkers then helped out on Rockefeller Plaza, which was finished in 1933. –History.com

  • This was the golden age of the SkyWalkers

Lynn Beauvais’ grandfather Joseph Jocks worked on several of them. He told her that during the Great Depression men were desperate for jobs. “Men would wait in the street for someone to fall off so they could take their job. My grandmother would walk miles to find day-old bread to eat, but they survived.”

Beauvais was proud of her grandfather’s work on the Empire State Building, once the tallest building in the world. “But when I got older, he told me there were going to be other buildings even taller—the World Trade Center towers. I was sad that my Empire State Building was going to be outdone, but Joe Jocks also went to work on the Trade Towers.” –History.com

  • After World War II, as the rest of America was transforming into the world Super Power we know today, the American Indians started to move away from the reservations and into the urban areas of the country.
  • Now it is over 60% of American Indians live in US Cities.
  • The US government encouraged this urbanization in the 50’s with federal relocation programs…
    • (sounds eerily similar to the “relocation” programs the US government imposed on the Native populations in the 17 and 1800’s)… bu i digress
  • The federal US government said there would be cheap beautiful homes, well-paying jobs, and a happy life. But when thousands flocked to America’s cities, they found crap-paying jobs and expensive crappy apartment
    • Many went back to their reservations.
    • Unfamiliar challenges confront Native people who move to urban areas. Life in the city often means living next door to non-Indian strangers. It means trying to balance one’s traditional cultural values with the often-conflicting requirements for success in mainstream society.
    • Despite all that, some did manage to call NYC their home.

Before researching this episode I had no idea NYC had a little Caughnawaga neighborhood.

  • In the 1960s the SkyWalkers were well well-known and well-established class of respected and high-paid workers.
  • and About 800 of these Mohawk Ironworkers called Brooklyn home.
  • They went to the Wigwam Bar for drinks and attended church held by Reverand David Munroe Cory… Munroe Cory even learned the Mohawk language to address his flock with sermons given in their native language.
  • Stores stayed stocked with Mohawk ingredients.
    • Corn bread and beans were a hit.

” This enclave of indigenous tradesmen centered around the Brooklyn Local 361 Ironworkers’ Union, made up largely of Kahnawake Mohawks. Old-timers in the Brooklyn neighborhood, known as Little Caughnawaga (an early spelling of Kahnawake), would recall the booming 1920s and 1930s when the Mohawk Skywalkers became legend while building the nation’s most bustling metropolis. Above the entrance to the Wigwam was a sign that read, ‘THE GREATEST IRONWORKERS IN THE WORLD PASS THROUGH THESE DOORS.’ ” –History.com

Skywalkers at the World Trade Center

Hundreds of Mohawk ironworkers went to work on the World Trade Center towers in the late 1960s. Beauvais watched the towers rise from her mother’s kitchen window in Brooklyn. Her grandmother said not to visit the job site to see what the men do. “‘It’ll make you nervous,’ she said—and it does. I went to lower Manhattan later to see my brother Kyle Beauvais. He was working five stories up, and I saw him walking outside of the building to come see me. I couldn’t stand to watch him.”

  • Then 9/11 happened and infamously destroyed the Twin Towers.
    • The Mohawks familiar with steelwork and crane operating showed up to Ground Zero to help with rescue.

including members of the Beauvais family. “My brother Kyle went in eight hours after the towers came down. My grandfather had worked on the construction of the towers and retired from that job. My brothers worked on their final demolition and sent them to the scrapyard.”

  • We non-indigenous people like to add mysticism to American Indians. There is lore surrounding the Mohawks and how their skill as SkyWalkers comes from other worldly powers… but that is malarky.
    • It comes from generational training to controls ones fear, trust their team, and innate balance.
    • Today the riveting gangs have been replaced by technology, but work on these skyscrapers is still perilous.
    • There are still 35 to 50 fatalities each year, the majority from falls.
    •  Many Mohawk ironworkers have fallen to their deaths while on the job. Steel girder crosses mark the graves of fallen Skywalkers in the Kahnawake cemetery.

Now, Native people from all over the country are being trained as ironworkers in the National Ironworkers Training Program for American Indians. Walking the high steel earns a good wage, but it also is a source of pride.

Ironwork provides the Indians with an honorable way to make a living. Young ironworkers carry the reputation of their fathers, or uncles, to each job, but you earn your own name among the men, and a new reputation is born for your sons to live up to.

Joel Budd from the Guardian wrote in 2002:

Last autumn a new 10-storey building went up on West 4th Street in Manhattan. The road is a busy one, and recent events have made New Yorkers more curious about how large buildings are put together, so many people stopped to watch.

Those who happened to look up at the building before its steel skeleton was covered with fire retardant might have noticed an unusual detail. On a girder halfway up the building, a word was written in orange letters a foot high: ‘Mohawks.’ The man who put his nation’s name on the steel was following in a proud tradition.

The spectacle of native Americans working on the world’s most ambitious skyscrapers has long entranced photographers, who have aimed their cameras at Mohawk ironworkers almost as long as they have been around.”

  • One recurring theme I noticed while looking into the SkyWalkers was photography.
    • While my podcast is mainly meant for audio, and I do believe this story can be carried mainly through audible means, the photos of these men on top of the world is truly spectacular.
    • Without the photos, their legend wouldn’t be as profound. So check out my blog or simply google the Mohawk IronWorkers or the Iroquois Skywalkers

CREDIT:

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The Real Rain Man

Content below is from #176 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend you check out the YouTube Channel Real Stories
    • Their description: Welcome to Real Stories, the home of award-winning and compelling documentaries you need to see. We will be uploading at least three full-length documentaries a week from the best documentary producers on the planet. Subscribe so you don’t miss out.
  • Shannon and I often sit down and watch these documentaries for free on YouTube. I’d say the average length is about 1 hour and they are a delight to watch.
    • Plus they are documentaries so you are learning about the real world when you watch them.
    • A video with the YouTube title ” The Genius Within: Extraordinary Gifted People | Real Stories Full-Length Documentary ” was the inspiration for this episode.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • The movie Rain Man starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise released on December 12th, 1988.
    • Here’s the plot:
      • When car dealer Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) learns that his estranged father has died, he returns home to Cincinnati, where he discovers that he has an autistic older brother named Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) and that his father’s $3 million fortune is being left to the mental institution in which Raymond lives. Motivated by his father’s money, Charlie checks Raymond out of the facility in order to return with him to Los Angeles. The brothers’ cross-country trip ends up changing both their lives.
  • Dustin Hoffman took home an Oscar award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his portrayal of the autistic savant Raymond in the film Rain Man.
    • Dustin Hoffman’s character is based on a real person named Laurence Kim Peek.
      • Although Peek was previously diagnosed with autism, he is now thought to have had FG syndrome
      • The National Organization of Rare Disorders explains:
        • FG syndrome type 1 (FGS1) is an X-linked genetic disorder that is characterized by poor muscle tone (hypotonia), intellectual disability, constipation and or anal anomalies and complete or partial absence of the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres of the brain (corpus callosum).
    • In his Oscar acceptance speech, Hoffman thanked Kim Peek and cited him as the inspiration for the character.
    • While being mentioned during a big Oscar acceptance speech is pretty darn cool, it is far from the coolest thing about Kim Peek.
  • Born in Salt Lake City Utah on November 11th, 1951 with an abnormally enlarged head, Kim’s doctors accurately predicted developmental issues in his future.
    • He was born with with macrocephaly, damage to the cerebellum, and agenesis of the corpus callosum,a condition in which the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain is missing; in Peek’s case, secondary connectors
    • Unable to walk until the age of 4, unable to walk with a normal gait, unable to button his shirts, and kicked out of school after just one day… his community was ready to give up on Kim. The medical world said he would never walk, talk or be able to learn.
      • Although Peek was previously diagnosed with autism, he is now thought to have had FG syndrome
      • The National Organization of Rare Disorders explains:
        • FG syndrome type 1 (FGS1) is an X-linked genetic disorder that is characterized by poor muscle tone (hypotonia), intellectual disability, constipation and or anal anomalies and complete or partial absence of the part of the brain that connects the two hemispheres of the brain (corpus callosum).
    • Not long after being expelled from school, his family and community started to notice his abilities. Even as a small child, Kim was able to memorize virtually everything. As a toddler, he was reciting books word for word.
      • In addition to being diagnosed with developmental disabilities, Kim was diagnosed with Savant Syndrome.
      • Dr. Darold Treffert (Psychiatrist from the University of Wisconsin) explains:
        • “Savant Syndrome is a rare but spectacular condition in which somebody with a developmental disability such as autism has some spectacular island of genius that stands in stark contrast to overall handicap.”
      • Proving his doctors wrong, he is now believed to have had the greatest factual memory in the world. He memorized 98% of everything he read.
  •  According to Peek’s father, Fran (Francis) Peek, Kim was able to memorize things from the age of 16–20 months. Peek read books, memorized them, and then placed them upside down on the shelf to show that he had finished reading them, a practice he maintained all his life. He could speed through a book in about an hour and remember almost everything he had read, memorizing vast amounts of information in subjects ranging from history and literature, geography and numbers to sports, music and dates. Peek read by scanning the left page with his left eye, while reading the right page with his right eye. According to an article in The Times newspaper, he could accurately recall the contents of at least 12,000 books. Peek lived in Murray, Utah, and spent a considerable amount of his time reading at the Salt Lake City Library and demonstrating his capabilities at schools, with great help from his father
    • Peek did not walk until he was four years old, and even then in a sidelong manner. He could not button up his shirt and had difficulty with other ordinary motor skills, presumably due to his damaged cerebellum, which normally coordinates motor activities. In psychological testing, Peek yielded superior ability in the performance sub-tests and limited ability in the verbal sub-tests, leading his overall IQ of 87 not to be considered a valid measure of his cognitive ability.
    • In his adult life, Peek attended the Columbus Center and earned $40 a week doing payrolls for 86 employees at the Salt Lake City School District.His father didn’t fully appreciate Peek’s talents until 1979 when he correctly predicted that the plummeting Skylab would land near Perth, Australia

Rain Man

In 1984, screenwriter Barry Morrow met Peek in Arlington, Texas; the result of the meeting was the 1988 Academy Award-winning film Rain Man. The character of Raymond Babbitt, although inspired by Peek, was depicted as being an individual with autism. Dustin Hoffman, who portrayed Babbitt in the film, met Peek and other individuals who displayed savant mannerisms, studying their characteristics and nature in order to play the role as accurately as possible. The movie led to a number of requests for appearances, which increased Peek’s self-confidence. Barry Morrow gave Peek his Oscar statuette to carry with him and show at these appearances; it has since been referred to as the “Most Loved Oscar Statue” because it has been held by more people than any other. Peek also enjoyed approaching strangers and showing them his talent for calendar calculations by telling them on which day of the week they were born and what news items were on the front page of major newspapers that day. Peek also appeared on television. He traveled with his father, who took care of him and performed many motor tasks that Peek found difficult.

Scientific investigation

In 2004, scientists at the Center for Bioinformatics Space Life Sciences at the NASA Ames Research Center examined Peek with a series of tests including computed tomography (CT scan) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The intent was to create a three-dimensional view of his brain structure and to compare the images to MRI scans performed in 1988. These were the first tentative approaches in using non-invasive technology to further investigate Kim’s savant abilities.

By the time he was 18, despite his lack of schooling, Peek had a job doing payroll for a company with 160 employees. It took him only a few hours a week, and he performed all the necessary calculations in his head.

Despite his prodigious feats, Peek’s IQ was only 87, and he lived a quiet life in the care of his family… until Rain Man. Afterward, he often toured the country with his father, advocating tolerance for disabled individuals and demonstrating some of the amazing things that he could do… things that the rest of us couldn’t even imagine being able to do.

  1. Reading Both Pages of an Open Book at Once One reason Kim was able to provide so much detail and depth from his voluminous memory was that he could speed-read anything put in front of him. Peek could open a book and read each of the two facing pages at the same time – the left eye reading the left page, the right eye reading the right one, effectively absorbing both pages at once. Even thick books were filtered into his brain in under an hour using this technique. He became known for going through the better part of the entire catalog of books in the Salt Lake City Library reading everything he could get his hands on.
  2. Providing Instant Driving Directions Between Any Two Cities In The World Before Google Maps could do it, Kim could. Among his other reading materials at the library, he absorbed maps, atlases, and travel guides. Using a combination of his near-perfect recall and his prodigious mathematical calculating abilities, Kim could calculate the best routes in his head in an instant, years before anybody thought to put a computer on the job.
  1. Figuring Out What Day Anyone’s Birthday Was Not just the date… the day. And not just for modern people… Kim could tell you in a second that Isaac Newton was born on a Sunday—but also, interestingly, that his birthday was both Christmas Day 1642, and January 4, 1643, since two competing calendars were in use at the time. Even better, Peek could instantly provide any other notable events that might have happened on the same day from his recall of newspaper headlines and other historical readings.
  2. Reciting Any Shakespeare Play VerbatimKim loved Shakespeare and with his high-speed reading skills didn’t have any trouble absorbing the entirety of the Bard’s body of work. He also enjoyed going to performances of Shakespeare’s plays, but there was a problem… not all of the actors could remember their lines as perfectly as Kim did. When a thespian deviated, even slightly, from the original work, Kim would stand up mid-performance to correct them. An impressive feat of memory, but not something that went over well with the Shakespeare in the Park crowd.
  3. Counting CardsThe scene from Rain Man where Raymond hits it big at the Vegas blackjack tables never happened in real life, but Kim did read a book on card counting and had all the mental faculties to perform that feat… but even savants know right from wrong.When the screenwriter for the movie tried to get Peek to enter a casino to try the experiment in real life, Kim refused, feeling that it would be unethical.Kim Peek passed away in 2009 of a heart attack, but his feats will not soon be forgotten, thanks to Rain Man. Nor did Peek ever forget his own role as inspiration for the movie—to his dying day, one of his most prized possessions, that he carried with him everywhere he traveled, was the golden Oscar statute given to him by the screenwriter who won it for penning the movie.
  • Peek died of a heart attack at his home on December 19, 2009, aged 58.
    • Barry Morrow put his own Oscar statuette on permanent loan to Salt Lake City in memory of Kim Peek and put forward the money for the Peek Award, which “pays tribute to artists, media makers, and film subjects who are positively impacting our society’s perception of people with disabilities” and is given out by the Utah Film Center
  • Most people who met Kim when he was alive thought his memory would have reached capacity at some point, but up until the day he died, he was still absorbing, retaining, and recalling information at lightning speed.
  • His brain was wired completely differently from the rest of humanity.
    • That Corpus callosum I mentioned earlier, the thing Kim was born without, is white matter that carries vital connections between the left and right sides of the brain.
    • No one really knows how, but Kim’s brain was able to rewire itself in an entirely unique way.
    • The human body is amazing… especially the brain.
    • And whenever someone asked him how he did it, whenever most savants are asked how they do it… they have no answer. They can’t explain their methods. Kim would say something like “I look into my own mind,” when offering an explanation for his otherworldly gift.

CREDIT:

Kim Peek’s story starts at 8 minutes nad 22 seconds (8:22) into the video.
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Stomp the Invader

Content below is from #175 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMent

The recommendation segment was lost to WordPress’s inability to save my work LOL. But it is on the recording at the link above.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • I live in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (technically not a state) commonly referred to as PA because Pennsylvania is a mouthful. In the past couple years, PA has been invaded by a destructive insect species commonly referred to as the Spotted Lantern Fly (SLF).
    • I first encountered them in the Lancaster area in the southeastern part of the state a few years ago. They were relatively rare, but my mom (daughter to dedicated PA Forrester) was quick to inform me that they were invasive and should be destroyed.
      • My grandfather Patrick (lovingly referred to as Papa) dedicated his entire life (professional and otherwise) to advocating the importance of our forests and even though he passed away years ago, his ideals permeate virtually every member of his extended family.
      • So when mom told me it was a big deal to try and stop the spread of the SLF due to agricultural and forestry reasons, I shrugged it off as something my mom was perhaps overly-concerned about…
        • I was wrong.

The spotted lanternfly is an invasive insect. It’s native to China, India, and Vietnam but was first found here (PA) in 2014. It feeds on many trees, including fruit, ornamental, and woody ones. They move around easily, through the movement of materials or as egg masses. As it feeds, it sucks sap and excretes honeydew which can build up and become a become a growth area for sooty mold. SLF damages trees and rarely kills them.

In addition to the impact on our tree canopy, it also has the potential to devastate our economy if not contained. It’s estimated the state could lose $324 million annually from the forestry industry.

Scientific Name: (Lycorma delicatula)
Pest Category: Invasive • Agricultural Pest

Spotted lanternflies do not bite or sting. They feed exclusively on plants outdoors and can only survive for about 48 hours without feeding on a plant. They can be a nuisance because of their sheer numbers. 

  • I remember last year seeing a few on my side of the state (Western side near Pittsburgh) and thinking, well it really is spreading, but the issue probably won’t get out of hand.
    • This summer I’ve seen thousands. And that is just me, a guy who walks around his neighborhood. The statistics aren’t finalized yet, but the predictive numbers are starting to show $324 million loss in agriculture.
    • Western PA is getting his the worst. These things are everywhere and they are a problem.

There are 4 stages of the spotted lanternfly.

Egg mass (October-June)
You can find egg masses on trees, stones, cars, patio furniture…really anywhere. The masses are 1 inch long and are covered in a white substance that dries over time, looking like mud (blending into things like trees).

Early stage nymph (May-June)
After they hatch, nymphs are very tiny and grow to about 1/4 inch. They have black bodies with white spots. They’re excellent jumpers.

Late stage nymph (July-September)
As late stage nymphs, SLFs get bright red spots in addition to the white. They grow to be 1/2 inch long.

Adult (July-December with egg laying beginning in September)
Adult SLFs are about 1 inch long. Their wings are red closest to their bodies, with tan wings and black spots outside. They like to jump and glide.

If you find spotted lanternfly, please visit this link or call1-888–422-3359.

If you find egg masses, this video shows you how to identify, remove, and destroy them. When you find other stages on your property, you should try and destroy it. You can find information on that from the PA Department of Agriculture here.

  • It has become so normalized here to see thousands of them crawling on infrastructure such as bridges, guard rails, etc.
    • When I go to the gym today I guarantee I will see hundreds and I will see about a dozen people stomping around the parking lot trying to kill them because the word is out: STOMP THE INVADER
    • There is now merchandise about it, I bought a shirt down at the strip district of Pittsburgh last weekend that says “10/10 would smash” and shows the open-winged adult SLF.
      • The coolest is the 11th Hour Brewing Company in Pittsburgh released a shandy beer called “Stomp the Invader.” And even though I missed it, they did an educational walk for the beer release.
  • I recently had a friend come up to visit from Washington DC (shoutout to Panda), and he said he knew nothing about these things.
    • So he was baffled when he saw the parking lot stompers, heard the Best Buy guy compliment us for doing our duty of killing a dozen outside the store, and saw SLF merch at the Strip District.
      • Side note, apparently PANDA should not have come to visit as his home in Fredricksburg VA is outside the SLF quarantine zone.

If you see a spotted lanternfly, it’s imperative to immediately report it online or via phone by calling 1-888-4BADFLY.  Especially if you are not inside the quarantine zone.

What else? Kill it! Squash it, smash it…just get rid of it. In the fall, these bugs will lay egg masses with 30-50 eggs each. These are called bad bugs for a reason, don’t let them take over your county next.

A Quarantine and Treatment Order is in place to help prevent the spread of spotted lanternfly in Pennsylvania.  Quarantine zones may be expanded to new areas if SLF detections are confirmed. The interactive SLF quarantine map provides information on whether your location is quarantined for SLF.Opens In A New Window

A county is placed under quarantine when evidence of a reproducing population of spotted lanternflies, such as an egg mass or a group of adults, is found by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

The spotted lanternfly causes serious damage including oozing sap, wilting, leaf curling and dieback in trees, vines, crops and many other types of plants. In addition to plant damage, when spotted lanternflies feed, they excrete a sugary substance, called honeydew, that encourages the growth of black sooty mold. This mold is harmless to people however it causes damage to plants. In counties infested and quarantined for spotted lanternfly, residents report hundreds of these bad bugs that affect their quality of life and ability to enjoy the outdoors during the spring and summer months. Spotted lanternflies will cover trees, swarm in the air, and their honeydew can coat decks and play equipment.

In addition to damaging trees and affecting quality of life, the spotted lanternfly is a huge threat to Pennsylvania agriculture industry. The economic impact could total in the hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs for those in the grapes, apple, hops, and hardwood industries. 

  • The SLFs love the Tree of Heaven
    • These invasive little buggers LOVE the Tree of Heaven for some reason.
    • Perhaps the reason is because the Tree of Heaven is also in invasive species to the United States.
      • Ailanthus altissima ay-LAN-thəss al-TIH-sim-ə, commonly known as tree of heaven, ailanthus, varnish tree, copal tree, stinking sumac, Chinese sumac, paradise tree, or in Chinese as chouchun, is a deciduous tree in the family Simaroubaceae. It is native to northeast and central China, and Taiwan.
      • So maybe the SLFs prefer the Tree of Heaven because it reminds them of home sweet home.
  • So my final note to you Who’d a Thunkers:
    • While I do try to not kill any insect for no good reason… These things need to die. Feel free to let our your inner hatred on these things and kill them with a quick and decisive stomp.
    • Be warned though, while they pose no direct threat to us, they do tend to jump away and glide on their wings when you go to stomp them. So stomp quickly. Also, I could totally see someone trying to get one of these agile little buggers and wander into oncoming traffic, so beware of your wurroundings while doing your duty as a citizen… by mercilessly stomping the life out of these things.
    • I tell my wife Shannon that I feel bad. It isn’t their fault, they aren’t malicious little devils. They were brought here because of us humans… but that doesn’t change the fact that they MUST DIE!
    • And apparently our human intervention has helped slow their spread and decimation of local plant life so keep it up!

CREDIT:

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The Caissons

The content below is from #174 of Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

SPECIAL THANKS TO ThePublicDomain.com for this weeks episode and providing an awesome source.

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend you take your time appreciating your infrastructure such as bridges.
    • That’s right, this week’s recommendation segment ties directly into the main event.
    • Pittsburgh, my home, has 446 bridges which is more than Venice Italy… the city known for being under water.
    • Today’s topic focuses on the Brooklyn Bridge, it is located in New York City and reportedly has 789 bridges in total.
    • Those bridges aren’t just some simple thing, they are marvels of engineering, hard work, and human accomplishment.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • Have you ever walked past a bridge or pier and thought: “how the hell did they make this?”
    • I do, frequently. Engineering is miraculous in its accomplishments. Today engineers use all sorts of designs to lay the underwater foundations for structures like bridges. These are called caissons.
  • Let’s talk about a bridge NOT made with modern engineering and technology, the Brooklyn Bridge.
    • The Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world upon its completion in 1883 and remained so for the next 20 years. It stretches just shy of 6,000 feet end to end and, at its base, 140 feet side to side. Designer John Roebling meant for the bridge’s towers to be its most conspicuous features. Soaring 278 feet above the East River and weighing 140 million pounds each, they surely are. But, in my opinion, the most interesting features are the caissons that sit below the towers and support much of the weight of the whole span. These caissons that sit as supports at the bottom of these behemoth towers are partially made of wood!
  • In the early 1870s, two massive wooden boxes called caissons were sunken to the bottom of the East River.
    • The French word “caisson” is derived from the Italian “cassone” and means a large box. The caissons were the first part of the bridge to be built. The idea was to flip the box over, pressurize it with air to force the water out, and sink it to the bottom of the river. The mammoth boxes were built on land and slid into the river like a ship being launched into the water. The one closest to Brooklyn was 168′ x 102′ and 14′ tall, and weighed six million pounds. Nothing heavier had ever been launched before.
    • They were built entirely of heavy oak and pine timbers, bolted together, sealed to be airtight, and sheathed in tin. The thickness measured 15 feet on the roof of one caisson and 22 on the other, the density required to hold the millions of pounds of limestone and granite of the towers. The wood is still there. Turns out, wood can last indefinitely when completely submerged. It becomes waterlogged, which pushes out the oxygen, in turn preventing the growth of microbes that cause decay.
This sketch, by Stanley Fox at Harper’s Weekly, shows one of two caissons during construction on land in 1870 (top) and how it was expected to look after being launched. Picture courtesy Brooklyn Museum.
  • Workers would enter inside these boxes beneath the river in order to build the Brooklyn Bridge towers.
    • With the caisson resting on the river bed, men entered the pressurized interior through an air lock and began digging. They shoveled clay, rock, and boulders into pools at the bottom of two square “muck tubes” (also called waste shafts), where it was clawed out by a top-mounted derrick dropping a clamshell bucket down the tube.
    • As men carved away the river bed from underneath and masons built the tower atop it, the caisson slowly sank.
  • The grueling work of excavating the mud and rock from inside the caissons was done by hundreds of low-paid laborers.
    • Water filled the muck tubes. You might wonder why the water doesn’t flow back into the caisson below. It stayed put because the pressure of the air in the caisson’s interior pushed back against it. At the same time, the weight of the water pushed downward, trapping the air in the caisson. It was a delicate balance that had to be maintained; if the volume of water suddenly decreased in the tubes, there would not be enough weight to restrain the air in the caisson. It would blow up and out, depressurizing the caisson and possibly causing it to implode under the crushing weight of the tower.
  • The more mud they shoveled out, the deeper the caisson would sink.
  • Life in the caissons was brutal and to most workers, it must have felt like Dante’s inferno. They endured arduous and hazardous labor in unbearable heat.
    • In an episode known as “The Great Blowout,” the delicate balance of air pressure was disrupted and catastrophe alsmost struck. Very early on a Sunday morning when no one was in the caissons, the water level in one of their muck tubes fell dangerously low. During working hours, with the clamshell buckets busily pulling soil up through the muck tubes, sediment floated in the water that substantially increased its weight. Men usually monitored the water levels and filled the muck tubes when necessary. On this calm morning, however, no one noticed that the level dropped. The clear water in the tube, its heavy silt settled to the pool below, lost its struggle to hold the air in the caisson and exploded out like a volcano. But the caisson did not crumple like its designer feared. Although it settled hard about 10 inches into the packed earth, Roebling’s wooden box held the falling weight of 35 million pounds.
“Inside views of the East River Bridge caisson, Brooklyn, N.Y. / from sketches by our special artist,” from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1870. The pool beneath the muck tube can be seen in the lower left photo. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.
The Brooklyn-side tower rising atop the sunken caisson. Photo courtesy New York Public Library.
  • Many workers experienced a mysterious illness which they called caisson disease subjected the workers to paralysis and death. The cause of caissons disease was unknown at the time, but we now know it was the now common illness known to divers all over the world as The Bends.
    • Decompression sickness, also called generalized barotrauma or the bends, refers to injuries caused by a rapid decrease in the pressure that surrounds you, of either air or water. It occurs most commonly in scuba or deep-sea divers, although it also can occur during high-altitude or unpressurized air travel.
    • Bubbles forming in or near joints are the presumed cause of joint pain (the bends). With high levels of bubbles, complex reactions can take place in the body. The spinal cord and brain are usually affected, causing numbness, paralysis, impaired coordination and disorders of higher cerebral function.
  • About 1/3 of caisson workers experienced the Bends, but they were quickly replaced with droves of migrant workers from Germany, Ireland, Italy willing to work for just $2 a day
    • Eventually, the caissons reached a depth where the soil was dense enough to support the weight of the bridge. They were filled with concrete, where they remain today inconspicuously carrying the tens of millions of pounds of masonry and steel that stretches across the East River, and the more than one-hundred thousand cars, four thousand cyclists, and ten thousand pedestrians that cross the bridge every day.

CREDIT:

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Piss In the Wind

The content below is #173 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend you watch Mushoku Tensei Jobless Reincarnation
    • It is an anime and I know that’s niche as hell because a lot of people despise anime, but I love it.
    • I don’t like all anime. When I was a kid there was little anime that made it over here to the states so I think the quality of anime series/movies that did find a market in the US was higher than today.
      • Today the streaming services (not to mention the not-so-legal pirate streaming services) are flush with all sorts of titles. Which is good and bad. It means there are so many different kinds of anime stories available, so there is something for everyone, but it also means there is a lot of crap content too.
    • Anyway, I digress. Mushoku Tensei Jobless Reincarnation
    • Here’s the official summary:
      • When a wayward man is reincarnated with the knowledge, experience, and regrets from his previous life, he resolves to become successful in his new body.
  • That summary doesn’t really do the story justice LOL
    • The main character is a severely depressed Japanese man who was ruthlessly bullied in school and so he never leaves his home…
    • Until one day he dies and opens his eyes in an entirely new world as a new born… except, he still has all his memories, knowledge, desires, and mental illness from his past life.
    • Because the story starts completely fresh (from birth) I think it uniquely allows the audience to relate to the main character.
    • Season 1 is on Hulu and season 2 is still coming out with episodes. You should check it out.
    • I’ve watched season 1 twice now.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • Our story this week follows an American hero John Glenn
    • He was an American Marine Corps aviator, engineer, astronaut, businessman, and politician. He was the third American in space, and the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times in 1962.
    • John Herschel Glenn Jr. was born July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio. He attended primary and secondary schools in New Concord, Ohio. He received a bachelor of science degree in engineering from Muskingum College in New Concord.
    • Glenn entered the Naval Aviation Cadet Program in March 1942. He graduated and was commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1943. After advanced training, he joined Marine Fighter Squadron 155 and spent a year flying F-4U fighters in the Marshall Islands. He flew 59 combat missions during World War II.
    • In Korea he flew 63 missions with Marine Fighter Squadron 311. As an exchange pilot with the Air Force Glenn flew 27 missions in the F-86 Sabre. In the last nine days of fighting in Korea, Glenn shot down three MiGs in combat along the Yalu River.
    • In July 1957, while he was project officer of the F-8U Crusader, he set a transcontinental speed record from Los Angeles to New York — 3 hours and 23 minutes. It was the first transcontinental flight to average supersonic speed.
      • Glenn accumulated nearly 9,000 hours of flying time, about 3,000 of it in jets.
    • When astronauts were assigned to provide pilot input for the design and development of spacecraft, Glenn specialized in cockpit layout and control functioning, including some of the early designs for the Apollo Project.
    • Glenn was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on six occasions, and holds the Air Medal with 18 Clusters for his service during World War II and Korea. Glenn also received the Navy Unit Commendation for service in Korea, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, the American Campaign Medal, the World War II Victory Medal, the China Service Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the Korean Service Medal, the United Nations Service Medal, the Korean Presidential Unit Citation, the Navy’s astronaut Wings, the Marine Corps’ Astronaut Medal, the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, and the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
  • He was the first American to orbit Earth. He also became a U.S. senator. Later, he became the oldest person to fly in space.
    • (Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space, had made a single orbit of Earth in 1961.)
    •  No, John Glenn never landed on the moon. BUT He completed the Earth orbit in a Mercury spacecraft he named Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962.
  • Glenn resigned as an astronaut on Jan. 16, 1964. He was promoted to colonel in October 1964 and retired from the Marine Corps on Jan. 1, 1965.
Glenn climbs into his Friendship 7 capsule for his historic flight on Feb. 20, 1962.
Credits: NASA
John Glenn Gallery
Glenn’s official portrait as one of NASA’s original seven Mercury astronauts.
Credits: NASA
John Glenn Gallery
  • In the wake of Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination, Glenn felt a call to public service. Consequently, he left NASA in 1964 to seek a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio. That time, when he ran for senate, he suffered a fall that made him dizzy and drop out… but he didn’t give up on politics and ran again.
    • He served four terms as a U.S. senator from Ohio from 1974 to 1999
    • He became an executive with Royal Crown International, but took an active part in Ohio politics and environmental protection efforts. He won his Senate seat in 1974, carrying all 88 counties of Ohio. He was re-elected in 1980 with the largest margin in Ohio history.
    • Ohio returned him to the Senate for a third term in 1986, again with a substantial majority. In 1992 he was elected again, becoming the first popularly elected senator from his state to win four consecutive terms.
    • During his last term he was the ranking member of both the Governmental Affairs Committee and the Subcommittee on Air/Land Forces in the Senate Armed Services Committee. He also served on the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Special Committee on Aging.
Then-Senator Glenn joined the STS-95 Discovery crew in 1998, becoming the oldest person to fly in space at 77.
Credits: NASA
John Glenn Gallery
  • Then, in 1998, he flew into space again at age 77. 
    • His mission of almost nine days on the space shuttle orbiter Discovery, launched Oct. 29, 1998, when he was 77, made him the oldest human to venture into space. On Discovery he participated in a series of tests on the aging process. The aging population was one focus of his work as a U.S. senator.
    • Glenn was described as “humble, funny, and generous” by Trevor Brown, dean of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at Ohio State University, in a statement joined by the Glenn family. “Even after leaving public life, he loved to meet with citizens, school children in particular.  He thrilled to music and had a weakness for chocolate.”  
  • Former astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn died Thursday, Dec. 8, 2016, at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus. 
    • Glenn will always be remembered as the first American to orbit the Earth during those tentative, challenging, daring days when humans were just beginning to venture beyond the atmosphere that had nurtured them since the species began.

That is the life story of John Glenn the man. and while he IS most known for his “first American to circle the Earch” title… There is a lesser-known story from his space missions that tends to raise a few more eyebrows and turn up a few more smiles.

John Glenn holds a special place in US history. He was part of the Mercury Seven (the first group of American astronauts), and he was the first American to orbit Earth. On February 20, 1962, he climbed aboard the Friendship Seven and blasted into the atmosphere.

  • While aboard he watched the Mercury spacecraft, monitoring for any kind of insight.
    • remember, he was one of the first people to ever go into space. This was mostly uncharted territory.
    • Glenn circled the globe about 3 times in just 5 hours while on his mission. Yeah, things go really fast in space without the drag of atmosphere.
    • While he was watching the craft, he also had ample time to observe our beautiful planet and the multiple sunrises and sunsets… I can only imagine how breathtaking of an experience that is.
  • While he was experiencing the surreal, being one of the first people in space to see our planet from afar and watching the sun come into view… something freaky showed up!
    • What appeared to be tiny lights started to swirl about his spacecraft. He watched out the viewport (window) as he circled the Earth on his second run and saw tiny glowing lights surrounding the Friendship Seven craft. He was Awestruck.
    • Glenn radioed to Mission Control in an excited panic saying he witnessed his craft was “in a big mass of thousands of very small particles that brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent.” – He said they wee yellowish-green and each looked like “a firefly on a real dark night.”
  • Both Mission Control and Glenn didn’t know what they wre looking at at first.
    • Some down on Earth started to speculate Aliens! Like something out of a Stanley Kubrick movie or something.
    • Glenn’s initial thought was that he was witnessing nothing short of a Miracle
  • Well it turns out it wasn’t Aliens… and while miracles are somewhat subjective, it wasn’t a miracle either.
    • The craft that Glenn was riding around the Earth, the Mercury Spacecraft had a ventilation system that took its human passenger’s bodily fluids and shot them into space. When the bodily liquids were jettisoned into the black void of space they froze immediately and if they were hit by the sun’s rays at the right angle… they would glow brightly.
  • So those “thousands of celestial fireflies” were just John Glenn’s piss shining back at him… LOL he had pissed in the cosmic wind so to speak.

CREDIT:

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Czechoslovak Legionnaires

Content below is episode #172 of Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend the book Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne
    • Joe Rogan talks about this book a lot so I thought I would give it a shot.
    • I was pleasantly surprised to find a historically accurate book that is told from a narrative perspective.
    • the American West has more to tell than you think. give this one a listen.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • World War 1 (The Great War) started in 1914.
    • Austro-Hungarian Empire at the start of the war was vast, ruling over many different lands.
      • The Czech and Slovak cultures were heavily repressed by the empire and the grumbles of independence had already started before WW1
    • When it did break out, there were ethnic Czechs and Slovaks living in Russia.
  • The Czechs and Slovaks requested of the Russian Tsar to have their own Czechoslovak unit within the Russian army.
    • The Russian Tsar understood the benefits of having a Czechoslovakian unit motivated against Russia’s Austro-Hungarian enemy. He dubbed his Czechoslovakian force “Druzhina” translating to Companions.
      • The unit was created by 720 soldiers and 21 officers in September of 1914. He sent them to the front lines to fight alongside the Imperial Russian Army.
These three bafoons were major players in the Great War
Russian Tsar Nicholas II
  • What Tsar Nicholas the II didn’t anticipate was the long-term intentions of his Druzhina Czechoslovakian unit.
    • Druzhina didn’t just want their own unit to fight their hated repressor the Austro-Hungarians… They predicted this Great War would be the downfall of the teetering Austro-Hungarian empire and wanted a backup plan when that happened.
    • When their Austro-Hungarian imperial overlords fell, there would be land for the taking.
  • With only those 720 soldiers and 21 officers making up the Druzhina unit, they were designated for recon duty on the Eastern front.
    • The Czech and Slovak volunteers (pictured on a patrol on the Eastern Front) saw themselves as freedom fighters against an oppressive regime. But the Austro-Hungarian authorities considered them traitors to the empire. Afterall, the Austro-Hungarian empire did rule over their homeland.
…and if caught, they faced execution. This Czech fighter was hanged after his capture by Austrians in 1918.
  • The 21 officers realized their numbers were so low that if they wanted to keep from being absorbed by Russian forces they would need to grow their ranks and fast.
  • They made many recruiting efforts in Russian areas with high Czech populations while also convincing a large number of enemy troops in the Austro-Hungarian army to defect.
    • This sounds astonishing, but consider the Czechoslovakian people were torn apart by two different empires that cared little for their cultures. It wasn’t hard to convince men to stop fighting a horrific war between empires they hated and secretly takes up arms with their own brethren.
    • Not to mention, the Czechs and Slovaks were treated well by the Russian empire.
  • This recruiting lead to an ethnically and culturally cohesive unit, that also benefited from being well-versed in the language and tactics of both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian sides.
  • Recruitement efforts were successful. Where they only numbered 741 in September of 1914, by April of 1916 they were 2,436 strong. They were no longer reconnaissance, but the Czechoslovak Rifle Brigade

When I started this episode I could not point out Czechoslovakia on a map…
When I started this episode I could not point out Czechoslovakia on a map…
  • The Czechoslovak unit was part of the famous Brusilov Offensive, the greatest battle for Russia up until this time. They lost 500K men.
    • They attacked weak points in the Austro-Hungarian line and caused it to break in 1916.
    • This Russian offensive saw 1.7 million men smash through the broken Axis lines.
    • The Czechoslovak unit displayed great bravery and discipline during this offensive. Both the Russian and Axis sides saw how cohesive a unit they were.
  • In 1917 another Czech regiment was added to the Czechoslovakian brigade swelling the units numbers even more.
    • By this time the rest of the Russian forces were beaten, tired, and not too happy with their Tsar… but the Czechoslovakian morale was higher than ever.
    • By March 15th of 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne. The Bolsheviks were starting to gain traction with the Russian people
      • Crack a history book if you want to know how this one played out LOL. The Russian Revolution is fascinating. The very first episode of this podcast was about one of the minor players in the Russian Revolution.
after Russia’s 1917 revolution ended with Bolsheviks seizing power, the Czechoslovakian situation inside what had been the Russian Empire became increasingly precarious.
  • The Bolsheviks wanted to get out of wars and they were getting more of Russia’s troops to see their side. The result, Russian troops were becoming unreliable.
    • In July of 1917, the Kerensky Offensive was launched. It would be the last Russian offensive of the war as it destroyed Russian morale.
      • But the Czechoslovakian unit gained a key opportunity here. They were incharge of a particular offensive task during the Kerensky Offensive. They failed, but their bravery spurred propaganda that made the units already badass reputation soar even higher.
  • The Provincial Government of Russia had enough on their hands and decided to unshackle the Czechoslovakian unit that had been placed on it by the Tsar.
    • With their new popularity and now unrestricted from the government, the unit grew faster than it had ever grown before.
    • They added artillery batteries and gained thousands of volunteers eager to join the unit they heard fostered a tight-knit brotherhood of badassery.
    • By 1918 they were known as the Czechoslovak Legion with 40,000 strong.
  • It was around this time that a guy named Tomas Masaryk founded the Czechoslovak National Council based out of Paris.
    • Masaryk wanted to build a homeland for his people the Czechoslovakians
    • With a Czech mother, Slovak father, and American wife, Masaryk was well-placed to rally for an independent Czechoslovakia.
      • After World War I broke out in 1914, thousands of Czechs and Slovaks living inside Russia heeded Masaryk’s call to fight alongside Russians against the Central Powers, which included Austria-Hungary.
    • By October 1917, the Imperial Russian Government had lost command of the country to the Bolsheviks… a party that most did not see rising to power.
    • With Russia falling apart and the Austro-Hungarian empire seeing the Czechoslovakians as traitors, the Legion was trapped and being hunted
  • Masaryk was the Czechoslovakian leader. He knew he had to get his ultra-badass fighting force (the only fighting force the currently nationless Czechoslovakian people had) out of tumultuous Russia
  • Where else to send his men other than France, the country that supported an independent Czechoslovakian nation and allowed Masaryk to start his Czechoslovak National Council
    • The French provided financial support to the Czechoslovakians, but only if they would help them fight the Germans.
      • I know, lots of different countries in this story here. Its Europe, what can I say LOL
    • Russia had pulled out of the war due to the whole Russian Revolution thingy, and they were France’s ally helping to keep Germany occupied on 2 fronts. So yeah, France needed any backup they could get.
When the Bolsheviks withdrew Russia from the war in the spring of 1918, some 40,000 well-armed Czechs and Slovaks found themselves trapped.
  • So now France was like “you want a country of your own? We’ll help make that happen, but you’ve got to get your asses to France to help us fight these Axis guys
    • Now, the Czechoslovak Legionnaires were badasses, and they were 40,000 strong with artillery and all, but they didn’t think they could fight all the way across the Austro-Hungarian territory to make it to France (about 2,400 kilometers of enemy territory). So what did they do?
      • Well they decided they would try to travel to the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok… about 9,700 kilometers from their base in Kiev, then get a ship and sail it from the Pacific coast of Russia, all the way over to France…
    • In order to travel across all of Russia, they made an agreement with the Soviet Government called the Penza Agreement. Basically it said the Czechoslovakian Legion would have safe passage through The Russian motherland, as long as they gave up their weapons.
      • Seeing Russia devolve into a bloody backstabbing nation, the Czechoslovakian Legion didn’t trust the agreement. They expected the Soviets to not keep their word… plus they were still fighting the Germans
      • And the Soviets thought the Czechoslovaks would join the White Russian Rebels in Siberia (these White Russians were loyal to the now-dead Tsar)
        • Again, go back to episode #1 to hear about the craziest SOB from the Russian Revolution fighting for the white Russians.
      • So the Legion didn’t want to give up their weapons, but did anyway… or at least they gave up SOME of their weapons to appease the Soviets into letting them travel to the Pacific port of Vladivostok
    • The majority of their weapons they hid on the trains they used to travel to Siberia
The legion cut a deal with Josef Stalin, then a Bolshevik leader, who promised safe passage if the Czechs and Slovaks surrendered most of their weapons.
  • Along the way they encountered way too many Soviet officials demanding bribes and a railway that was in horrible disrepair (sounds about right for Soviet Russia LOL)
    • by May of 1918 the Legion was scattered across thousands of miles of the TransSiberian Railway
    • While the legion travelled East to the Pacific, Hungarian POWs were travelling West from Russian siberian prison camps (not nice places). On May 14th, the Legion met the POWs of their former imperial overlords.
    • The Legionnairs recognized some of the POWs as men who were directly responsible for massacres of Czech wounded during the war… the Legion took revenge.
    • The bloodbath was gruesome and the news of it reach Leon Trotsky, the Soviet Commissar of War.
      • Trotsky immediately revoked the Penza Agreement and ordered the Czechoslovakian Legion be arrested.
    • The Legion said F**K THAT!
      • They invaded the town of Chelyabinsk where they had encountered the Hungarian POWs. they took control. The Legion was in full-on revolt.
      • Leggionaires strung out along the Transsiberian Railway heard about their fellow Legionnaires take-over of Chelyabinsk and immediately started seizing towns and cities along the railway. One of the towns was the port of Vladivostok.
    • A lot had happened since the Legion left their base of Kiev, but the mission remained the same: get the hell out of Russia and join their Czechoslovakian people.
Other sources told the “Incident” at Chelyabinsk went down a bit differently. tensions were high in Russia. As Russia collapsed into chaos, the eastbound Czechoslovaks brushed past freed Austrian and Hungarian prisoners of war headed west.
In May, a freed POW flung an object at a Czech legionnaire, sparking a bloody brawl. Local Bolsheviks arrested the Czechs involved, but the legion wasn’t having it and stormed in to free its comrades. Bolshevik leadership reacted furiously, demanding the Czechoslovaks be disarmed or “shot on the spot.”
  • This nationless legion, deep in enemy territory and needing to navigate around the world to reach their few allies had managed to seize majority control of the longest single rail system in the world, stretching 5,771 miles (9,288 km) across Russia between Moscow and Vladivostok
    • needless to say, it had a major impact on the Russian Civil War.
    • The Legion was just trying to get the hell out of the blood bath that was Russia during its civil war, but in doing so, had run the Reds (the soviet Bolsheviks) out of Siberia… which made Siberia a safe haven for the Tsarist Loyal White Russians.
    • Oh and after Trotsky ordered the Legion be “shot on the spot” they decided to arm themselves as much as possible… they stole an armered train from the Bolsheviks LOL
The “Orlik” (Little Eagle) was wrapped in steel armor, bristled with machine guns, and bookended with two cannons.
Legionnaires inside the Orlik. Their journey east continued, but while the Czechoslovak rebels were now virtually unstoppable, the going was slow.
  • With their newly acquired war Train and now numbering 61,000 strong, they were on the road to Vladivostok port.
The legion, by now some 61,000 strong, needed to clear the tracks…
…repair sabotaged bridges…
…and fight off attacks from Bolsheviks (and swarms of mosquitoes).
But morale was high, and the trainloads of Czechoslovak fighters soon made a home on the rails.
Bakeries were created inside some wagons.
Others were decorated with images of home. This door depicts the Prague Castle above the message, “You, glory of the Czechs, as you used to live, you live and will live on in our hearts.”
“Death is better than the life of a slave,” proclaims another of the legionnaire’s wagons.
Legionnaires guarding a railway tunnel in Siberia. At the behest of the Western Allies, the Czechoslovaks were asked to protect the Trans-Siberian Railway and assist the White Army in its fight against the Bolsheviks.
  • Thats when the Romanovs story comes into play.
    • A small, but historically impactful detour from the Legion’s story.
Tsar Nicholas II and his family the Romanovs
  • The Tsar Nicholas II and his family the royal Romanovs had been kicked out of Moscow to make room for the Soviets. They had been moved to a town called Yekaterinburg, just 230 kilometers from the Czechoslovak held town of Chelyabinsk.
    • The Romanovs and their allies (including England and France) hoped the Czechoslovaks would be able to launch a rescue mission to save the Royal family… The Czechoslovaks were allies with France and England and the Romanovs had family in England that would have welcomed them. The Czechoslovaks were already heading to France… there was lots of hope they would make it out…
    • but the Soviets knew this was the plan and took action.
    • Under Vladimir Lenin’s personal command the last Tsar of Russia and his entire bloodline was executed by firing squad in a dark and dank basement in July 17th of 1918. Their remains were buried in the Siberian wilderness with no gravestones… the Soviets convinced them they were being rescued… and just shot them instead
the aftermath of the firing squad that killed the entire Romanov family
  • The Czechoslovak Legion arrived just 5 days later to find the room where they had been killed and no remains… just a torn up wall where they had been shot.
    • It wasn’t until in 1991, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, that the Romanov bodies were recovered. The state’s investigative team found thousands of bones and other relics from the imperial family, and DNA analysis soon confirmed they were in fact the Romanovs.
    • This scene was recounted on Netflix’s hit show The Crown where Queen Elisabeth learns about the fate of her distant family.
  • With the Romanovs dead and the Soviets gaining more power by the day, the Red Army fought back.
    • They defeated the Legion at Samara and forced them eastward. The Legion held on as long as they could, fighting bravely, but their morale was badly bruised.
    • Then on October 28th 1918, Czechoslovakia was granted statehood. The Great War was coming to an end.
    • The Legion was now deep in Russian territory, far away from the Homeland they had wanted for so long.
    • While the Legion had been allies to the white Russians during their time in Siberia, they were tired of fighting Russians with Russians and being caught up in politics that had nothing to do with their own people.
But the Russian Civil War was not their fight, and by the beginning of 1920, the legionnaires just wanted to go home.
  • The Mission remained the same: GET THE HELL OUT OF RUSSIA AND JOIN THEIR PEOPLE.
    • So when Admiral Kolchak, who had overthrown the White Russian Government in Siberia, established a bloody dictatorship in its place, and was losing the Russian Civil War against the Soviet Red Army asked if he could get on the Czechoslovakian controlled TransSiberian Railway… they said sure, why not old Kolchak, our power hungry ally who doesn’t seem to know how to run a government and hasn’t done much of anything to help us get to our newly created and undefended homeland… Come aboard!
    • The Legion called a truce with the Red army and handed Kolchak over at the first opportunity. Kolchak was promptly executed.
    • in Return, the Red army gave the Legion safe passage to the Pacific port of Vladivostok, the same port they had set out for years ago… but kept getting caught up in the Russian Civil War… again, a conflict that had nothign to do with them.
    • Wisely the Soviets didn’t try to take the Czechoslovak’s gun. They let the Legion go armed to the teeth this time.

  • The Legion had about 50,000 soldiers at this point and they weren’t all together. They were spread out defending their one bargaining chip they had in hostile Russia, the TransSiberian Railway.
    • So it took over a year until the las to the Legionnaires made it to Vladivostok.
    • Along the way, the Allies kept pestering the Red Army which slowed the LEgions evacuation. The Allies tried to get the Legion to fight the Red Army, but the Legion was done fighting other people’s wars. They didn’t take the bait. THE MISSION STAYED THE SAME: GET THE HELL OUT OF RUSSIA AND GET TO THEIR PEOPLE
    • By March 1920, the last Czechoslovak train made it to Vladivostok.
Legionnaires boarding at Vladivostok. The Czechoslovaks left behind some 4,000 dead but took with them more than 1,000 local women whom they had married.
  • The Czechoslovakian Legion was formed in September of 1914 under Imperial Russia because it had no country of its own.
    • The next 3 years it spent fighting in some of the most bloody battles of the Great War.
    • In 1917 the Imperial Russian Army was no more, overthrown by the Soviet Red Army. So the Legion set their sights on France to link up with Marasyk and Czechoslovak National Council… their people.
    • Literally caught in the middle of the Russian Civil War the Legion seized control of the Great TransSiberian Railway so to not get swallowed up by the Russian White and Russian Red war.
    • They spent 3 years deep behind enemy lines until they were able to get their last man out of Russia.
    • In the end 60,000 Legionnaires made it out of Vladivostok with another 10,000 refugees.
    • they made it to Europe and received a hero’s wwelcome as they strode into their new Homeland.
    • These 60,000 Legionnaires, these battle-hardened veterans, these badasses, formed the new Czechoslovak Army.
    • Their Journey from the Eastern front of the Great War across Siberia and finally to a new nation in Europe is astonishing.
      • Churchill wrote about these ultra-tough men: “The pages of history recall scarcely any parallel episode at once so romantic in character and so extensive in scale.”
      • Roosevelt wrote: “The extraordinary nature of whose great and heroic feat is literally unparalleled, so far as I know, in ancietn or modern warfare.”
Legionnaires guarding a train in Siberia on a -40C day. By the autumn of 1918, World War I was over and the legionnaires’ distant, beloved Czechoslovakia had been declared an independent nation.
After weeks at sea, the legionnaires of Russia finally returned to their independent homeland under its new president, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk (visible inside car during his 1918 inauguration in Prague).
A century later, the Czechoslovak Legion’s travails in Russia are remembered with a traveling museum and immortalized in monuments and in reliefs on a Prague building (pictured).
Czech and Slovak fighters on the Eastern Front in 1916.
  • From the safety of Czechoslovakia, and after the Communists had seized full control of Russia, one legionnaire recalled, “The brotherhood of the Czechoslovak Legion was a thing at which to marvel. Nothing could shake the confidence of the legionnaire in himself and in his brothers. And so we were able to stand firm in the heart of the Bolshevik ruin, and for all practical purposes, remain untouched by its doctrines.”

CREDIT:

2:36

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Cards

The content below is from episode #171 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend PRINCESS MONONOKE
    • But I can’t help but think I just recently recommended this Studio Ghibli classic… so I will recommend a few more.
    • It’s just that I finally saw Prince3ss Mononoke in theaters and it was by far, the best viewing I have experienced of my favorite anime movie.
    • Princess Mononoke is one of the most awe inspiring things I have ever watched. I get emotional sometimes when I think about it. I whistle the theme song frequently and it will forever hold a special place in my heart.
      • But I recommend this too often LOL
  • So I would also like to recommend Knock at the Cabin Door by M. Night Shyamalan
    • Was this Night’s best movie? No… it wasn’t. Was it a perfect movie? No, it had some flaws for sure, but it DID get me to think about it days after watching it and that is, in my opinion, one of the best qualities a movie can have. And that is also, something M. Night Shyamalan always delivers.
    • Here’s the plot:
      • While vacationing at a remote cabin in the woods, a young girl and her parents are taken hostage by four armed strangers who demand they make an unthinkable choice to avert the apocalypse. Confused, scared and with limited access to the outside world, the family must decide what they believe before all is lost.
    • I think Dave Batista did a wonderful job of acting. Some critics that tear this movie to pieces, saying it was boring and shotty writing… praise Batista for his work in the movie.
    • My biggest critique: it could have been about half the runtime. This movie drags on for no reason.
  • And finally, I want to recommend, not just two titles this week, but a third, the short film from 2020: Opal
    • Like Knock at the Cabin Door, this is a scary one… but unlike Knock at the Cabin Door, it does NOT waste anytime… its a short film
  • Where my other 2 recommendations were relatively well-known with big marketing budgets and/or cult followings like Studio Ghibli, Opal is a pretty unknown gem.
  • You can watch it now on HBO Max, but I will warn you… it is F**king terrifying. At least, I think so.
  • The basic description is:
    • A curious girl investigates the cries she hears coming from a forbidden house across the street.
  • Jack Stauber directed and did the voices and sang every song in the 13 minute short movie
  • The claymation (a style of animation I typically shy away from) is what makes this truly horrifying. Shannon told me to stop watching it LOL.
  • I loved it.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • I’ve been going to and hosting poker games since I was just a kid.
    • I can vividly remember the first time my buddy’s stepdad Mark brought us to a living room poker night.
      • Some may say that was bad parenting skills, to take some pre-teens to a poker game consisting of smokers and beer guzzlers, but my buddy’s stepdad was a solid guy. He had his faults, but taking care of us kids was not one of them. I think because he carefully treated us like adults on occasion seriously helped us grow into men.
      • There was one of those old TVs with a wooden frame and they were watching the Baltimore Orioles game through the broadcasting fuzz and airborne Marlboro smoke.
      • That day I was taught how to play Texas Holdem. and I never forgot how cool it felt playing.
    • So that’s why this past weekend while I contemplated a good topic to cover for this week’s episode, I thought about the standard 52 deck of cards we used that day playing poker with my buddy’s stepdad Mark.
      • The very same deck of cards my friends and father inlaw play on about once a month in my own living room… and the same deck used by thousands of casinos all over the world.
      • The same deck is used by cheap and pro magicians. The same deck that is shuffled by old ladies day-in and day-out so they can beat their fellow old lady friends in their retirement homes.
    • Why is this particular deck of cards so popular?
      • Where did it come from?
      • Why are there kings, queens, jacks, and jokers?
  • PlayingCardDecks.com writes:

“…Playing cards have undergone a radical transformation since their first beginnings several centuries ago. Our modern playing cards evolved into a deck of 52 cards with four suits in red and black and with two Jokers by making a journey that took hundreds of years and involved travelling through many countries. In fact, the most significant elements that shaped today’s deck were produced by the different cultures and countries that playing cards travelled through in order to get to the present day.”

  • Cards are typically made from paper… a pretty flimsy material that doesn’t last long and so there isn’t much in the archeological record about playing cards.
    • most historians believe cards originated from the East, likely Asia as far back as 1,000AD coming from the same time as tile games like dominoes and mahjong.
  • We do have hard historical evidence of playing cards in Europe dating back to the 1300s and 1400s so they are at least that old…
    • A Swiss monk dude named Johannes wrote a manuscript in 1377 that briefly mentions some playing cards and lists a few different games he knew could be played with them.
    • Ironically, some of the best evidence of playing cards from this era come from religious sermons that denounce gambling as sin.
      • They point to card games and dice as some of the worst offenders. These religious sermons are the reason we know the 52 deck card was used at least as early as the 1400s.

ITALY AND SPAIN

  • The suit signs in the first European decks of the 14th century were swords, clubs, cups, and coins, and very likely had their origin in Italy. They are referred to as the Latin Suits
  • The court cards from the late 14th century decks in Italy typically included a mounted king, a seated and crowned queen, plus a knave. The knave is a royal servant, although the character could also represent a “prince”, and would later be called a Jack to avoid confusion with the King.
  • At first cards were expensive to make and therefore reserved for Europe’s upperclass. They were handpainted and looked really cool!
    • But soon the plebs began to make their own versions in a much more efficient way. This lead to the popularity of cards spreading across all social classes in Italian and Spanish societies… and eventually card games popularity began to spread across borders.
    • The soldier class is typically seen as the class responsible for spreading cards all across Europe.

GERMANY

  • When cards made it to Germany, that notorious german engineering made the fad spread like wildfire.
    • The Germans got to work printing cards like mad, but not just on that flimsy paper.
    • They printed cards on wood and even copper.
    • But the Germans didn’t just print cards as the Italians and Spaniards, they put their own articistic flair on them.
      • Their own suits were acorns, leaves, hearts, and bells. They reflected the German rural way of life.
      • A throw back to a recent episode of Who’d a Thunk It?, one German suit was of hawk-bells to show the german people’s interest in Falconry.

FRENCH

  • That’s when the French came into the picture.
    • The French contribution to playing cards is most notably the current suits we use today: Hearts, Spades, Diamonds, and Clubs.
      • Translated to French: coeurs, piques, carreaux, and trefles
    • The second most notable contribution of the French was to break up the suits into two different colors: Black and Red.
      • The French also made their suit symbols more simplisitic and therefore easier to stencil onto cards. Where the Italian, Spanish, and even German suits had beautifully intricate suit symbols that required delicate artwork, the French created the simple symbols we use on cards today. The result:

“[Production was] a hundred times more quickly than using the traditional techniques of wood-cutting and engraving. With improved processes in manufacturing paper, and the development of better printing processes, including Gutenberg’s printing press (1440), the slower and more costly traditional woodcut techniques previously done by hand were replaced with a much more efficient production. For sheer practical reasons, the Germans lost their earlier dominance in the playing card market, as the French decks and their suits spread all over Europe, giving us the designs as we know them today.”

  • A historically intriguing aspect the French added to playing cards was that they attributed face cards (King, Queen, Jack, Joker) of each suit to actual historical figures.
    • King David (Spades), Alexander the Great (Clubs), Charlemagne (Hearts), and Julius Caesar (Diamonds),
      • They each represented  the four empires of Jews, Greeks, Franks, and Romans
    • For Queens they had the Greek goddess Pallas Athena (Spades), Judith (Hearts), Jacob’s wife Rachel (Diamonds), and Argine (Clubs). 
    • and for Jacks (then called Knaves) they had La Hire (Hearts), Charlemagne’s knight Ogier (Spades), Hector the hero of Troy (Diamonds), and King Arthur’s knight Lancelot (Clubs)

ENGLAND

  • Taxes started to soar in France so card printers moved to Belgium where decks of cards found another rennaisance.
    • The Belgian printers spread cards all over Europe and most notably to England.
    • England was the first to call the French coeurs, piques, carreaux, and trefles the English version: hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs
      • If you know a little French you will notice piques (pikes) and trefles (clovers) don’t translate to spades and clubs. For some unknown reason, the English took spades and clubs from the Italians.
    • Once again, I will quote PlayingCardDecks.com as they explain England’s unique contribution:

​”It is also to the English that we owe the place of honour given to the Ace of Spades, which has its roots in taxation laws. The English government passed an Act that cards could not leave the factory until they had proof that the required tax on playing cards had been paid. This initially involved hand stamping the Ace of Spades – probably because it was the top card. But to prevent tax evasion, in 1828 it was decided that from now on the Ace of Spades had to be purchased from the Commissioners for Stamp Duties, and that it had to be specially printed along with the manufacturer’s name and the amount of duty paid. As a result, the Ace of Spades tended to have elaborate designs along with the manufacturer’s name. Only in 1862 were approved manufacturers finally allowed to print their own Ace of Spades, but the fate of the signature Ace of Spades had been decided, and the practice of an ornate Ace with the manufacturer’s name was often continued. As a result, to this day it is the one card in a deck that typically gets special treatment and elaborate designs.”

AMERICA

  • Since the very first colonizers of the Americas there have been cards on the new world.
    • There is even evidence that Native Americans made their own decks with original suite symbols and designs once the introduction of playing cards became popular amongst the Native populations.

“One final innovation that we owe to the United States is the addition of the Jokers. The Joker was initially referred to as “the best bower”, which is terminology that originates in the popular trick-taking game of euchre, which was popular in the mid-19th century, and refers to the highest trump card. It is an innovation from around 1860 that designated a trump card that beat both the otherwise highest ranking right bower and left bower. The word euchre may even be an early ancestor of the word “Joker”. A variation of poker around 1875 is the first recorded instance of the Joker being used as a wild card. “

  • in short, Americans added the Joker card and also made cards at an even faster pace than Europe eventually

FUN FACTS

  • Now some fun facts about the playing cards
    • The first cards were made with ivory tiles.
      • Ivory tiles, wood, marbles, and other surfaces were used to make cards back in the day before paper became the standard medium for cards globally. 
    • Ace of Spades was painted on soldiers’ helmets to bring them good luck in WW2.
      • You would most probably have seen the Ace of Spades over the helmets of soldiers in movies. In the second World War. This was done because the Ace of Spades was known to bring good luck among the soldiers. It is believed that the mere presence of the painted helmet would help them fight fiercely. 
    • Cards were used as a means of important information in the 18th century.
      • The most heart-wrenching example can be given of the deadly hunger period during the 18th century; women who could not take care of their little ones would leave them out in the streets with notes written over cards, hoping people would take pity on them.
    • At casinos, cards are changed every now and then to make sure nobody cheats.
      • Casinos have to take precautionary measures to ensure that cards don’t become marked during play. They also need to ensure that cheaters don’t pull an extra card out of their sleeves and corrupt the game. Almost once every hour, used cards are changed with a new deck.
    • Playing some card games can increase problem-solving skills and immunity.
      • Playing card games could potentially enhance cognitive functions. It could improve one’s ability to think critically; more so, playing card games (like Bridge) can help increase immunity.
      • From WelshBridgeUnion.org: This was show in a study undertaken by Professor Marian Diamond from Berkeley University in 2000. Playing a game of bridge requires you to concentrate. This helps keeps your brain active and, apparently, helps boost your immune system. For the study, Professor Diamond used a group of 12 women in their 70s and 80s.
    • 52 cards in a deck symbolize the 52 weeks in a year
    • And my favorite fun fact about cards, the thing that makes them so cool and timeless:
      • There are roughly eight-hundred-quadrillion times more ways to shuffle a deck of cards than atoms on Earth.
      • No one has or likely ever will hold the exact same arrangement of 52 cards as you did during that game. It seems unbelievable, but there are somewhere in the range of 8×1067 ways to sort a deck of cards. That’s an 8 followed by 67 zeros.

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Soviet Strong Man

The content below is from Episode 170 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend an author: Yuval Noah Harari
    • Yuval’s most popular book is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
    • But I have listened to 3 of his books now via the Libby App, which is 100% free as it allows you to borrow books or audiobooks through your library card.
    • Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli public intellectual, historian and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of the popular science bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. 

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • This week’s episode is about Valentin Dikul, born April 3rd 1948 in Soviet Lithuania.
    • His occupations are listed as “Circus artist and rehabilitation specialist.”
    • In 1999 he was awarded the People’s Artist of Russia
      • People’s Artist of the Russian Federation (Russian: Народный артист Российской Федерации, Narodnyy artist Rossiyskoy Federatsii), also sometimes translated as National Artist of the Russian Federation, is an honorary and the highest title awarded to citizens of the Russian Federation, all outstanding in the performing arts, whose merits are exceptional in the sphere of the development of the performing arts (theatre, musi], dance, circus, cinema, etc.).

Dikul was born prematurely, weighing just over one kilogram (about 2.5 pounds). His father Ivan Grigoryevich (1920–1950) was Ukrainian by nationality and worked as a serviceman in , the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but was killed in the line of duty. His mother Anna Korneyevna (1925–1952) was Russian by nationality, and died when Valentin was still in kindergarten.

Dikul was raised by his grandparents until he was seven years old, when he began living in orphanages, first in Vilnius and then in Kaunas.

Aged nine, he became interested in the circus and helped to put up the circus tent, cleaning the arena, looking after the animals, sweeping, and washing the floors. At fourteen he began working as a motorcycle repairman. In his free time he trained in gymnastics, wrestling, weightlifting, balancing acts, acrobatics, juggling, and stunts, and eventually became involved with the circus in Kaunas

In 1962, he starred in his first act of air gymnastics at the Sports Palace. It was in 1962, At age 14, Dikul was seriously injured during a gymnastic performance when a steel support cross beam broke, causing him to fall 43 ft (13 meters) and fracture his spine and suffer a traumatic brain injury.

 He spent a week in intensive care at the City Hospital and was then transferred to the neurosurgery department of the hospital. His final diagnosis was a compression fracture of the lumbar spine and traumatic brain injury, with many local fractures.

As part of his recovery process, Dikul began to train 5 to 6 hours a day stretching rubber bands, lifting heavy objects and doing push-ups.

Suffering from pain in the spine and fatigue, he performed strength exercises and studied the medical literature on the spine, gathering the necessary information. 

However, he was unable to even move his legs. Doctors told him that there was no hope that he would be able to walk again, but Dikul persisted by continuing to workout everyday until he would pass out from exhaustion.

As he began to develop more muscles on his chest, body and arms, Dikul would incrementally increase the weights.

Once he regained his upper body strength, he had the idea that you need to move the inactive parts of the body as if they were healthy a full cycle. He began to tie ropes to his feet and move them using a pulley system.

The system he used to rehabilitate was unorthodox to say the least. He Tied a rope to his feet, passing it under the headboard, which played the role of the pulley and then pulling it and moving the feet. Then he began using counterweight loads. Friends helped him build a system of weights and pulleys around his bed designed by Dikul. Eight months later he was discharged from the hospital with the first group of disability

Once fully recovered, a feat he did mostly by himself, he put to use his immense strength, in which he displayed mostly in the form of juggling, flipping, and snatching massive kettlebells. He is known to have used kettlebells weighing up to 80–90 kg.

There are videos of Valentin Dikul tossing around big golden bowling balls like they were nothing. Then he goes to the audience and asks a full-grown man to hold one of the balls… it dramatically falls to the ground. So heavy, the audience member can’t even hold it.

A series of publications in the press provoked an avalanche of letters to Dikul with requests for help. In response, he would send them a package of instructions designed for medical rehabilitation. In processing a large amount of correspondence he was helped by his wife Lyudmila.

Many people using a wheelchair saw it as their hope. Valentin spent three to four hours a day on advising people with disabilities.

In 1988, Dikul opened up a rehabilitation center to help people with spinal injuries and with consequences of infantile cerebral paralysis. He is still heading it to this day and is alive and well.

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The Bush Dog

The content below is from episode 169 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend the show Silo on Apple TV
    • I am impressed with the Sci-Fi chops of Apple TV
    • They have Severence, Silo, Foundation, For All Mankind, Invasion, See, and a bunch of other SciFi titles I haven’t even started watching yet.
    • I love SciFi so I’m like a kid in a candy shop when I open Apple TV
    • But for this recommendation segment I thought I would highlight one in particular, a show that Shannon and I binged in a week: Silo
      • Seasons: 1 | Episode Count: 7 (ongoing) | Average Run Time: 55 minutes
      • Creators: Graham Yost, Morten Tyldum, Hugh Howey, and Rebecca Ferguson
      • Cast: Rebecca Ferguson, Common, Rashida Jones, Avi Nash, Tim Robbins
      • In a ruined and toxic future, thousands live in a giant silo deep underground. After its sheriff breaks a cardinal rule and residents die mysteriously, engineer Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) starts to uncover shocking secrets and the truth about the silo. The series feels unique because while it has the dystopian setting we expected, it tells its story in a very noir, almost Hitchcockian way. As we follow Juliette, we uncover the truth about the silo, which will have you hooked by the end of Episode 1.
    • It can be a bit slow at times, but that is all to build up the suspense of wanting to know what the heck is going on in this dystopian future of the Silo!
      • It jumps from the past to the present a few times in the beginning, but that is to get the audience hooked (which is SUPER important for storytelling).
      • Rebecca Ferguson is the main character and I love her acting.
      • Oh, and don’t get too attached to any character LOL. People drop like flies in this one.
      • Oh, and I almost forgot, Common, the 3-time Grammy award, Academy Award, Primetime Emmy award, and Golden Globe Award winner plays a vital role in the series.
        • Shannon said his acting sucks… I disagree. Perhaps I’m biased because I’m such a fan. But I totally thought he brought what was needed to his character.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • This week I wanted to talk about a species of canine that I had never heard of before.
    • I can’t remember why I typed it in… I think I saw a YouTube short about Hyenas and wanted to know if they were canines or not (Hyenas aren’t by the way… they are part of their own Hyenas are not members of the dog or cat families. Instead, they are so unique that they have a family all their own, Hyaenidae).
    • but the other day I searched “all members of canine family” and looked for the weirdest one… I found the Bush Dog, the Speothos venaticus.
    • This thing doesn’t even look like a canine.

Wikipedia :

The bush dog is a canine found in Central and South America. In spite of its extensive range, it is very rare in most areas except in Suriname, Guyana and Peru; it was first identified by Peter Wilhelm Lund from fossils in Brazilian caves and was believed to be extinct.

  • This bizarre canine lurks within the wetlands of dense forests.
    • with its territory spanning 2 continents, you’d think its population would be higher or that scientists would have ample documentation of the Bush Dog, but it remains rather elusive. And it has a healthy aversion to human presence.
    • Why I chose to make this gnarly looking canine species into an episode is how different it looks.
Image taken from cited Smithsonian YouTube video
Image taken from cited Smithsonian YouTube video
Image taken from cited Smithsonian YouTube video
Image taken from cited Smithsonian YouTube video
  • The Bush Dog doesn’t look like a dog.
    • It has a nose or muzzle that resembles the muzzle of a bear more than any dog.
    • If you saw just its feet, you’d think they belonged to an otter… because they are webbed!
    • And they have this short and very bushy tail.
  • To me, they look more like a Tasmanian Devil
    • The endangered  Sarcophilus harrisii,  a carnivorous marsupial of the family Dasyuridae.
      • They weigh about 20 to 30 pounds
    • But not quite like a Tasmanian Devil…
Tasmanian Devil
  • Maybe more like the ferocious wolverine… no, not Hugh Jackman, the animal…
    • found primarily in remote reaches of the Northern boreal forests and subarctic and alpine tundra of the Northern Hemisphere, the wolverine (Gulo gulo, meaning “glutton”) weighs about 20 to 55 pounds.
    • But the Bush dog doesn’t quite look like a Wolverine either…
Wolverine
Bush Dog – Image taken from cited Smithsonian YouTube video
  • No, the Bush dog belongs to its own thing…
    • So weird it looks like two animals from completely different families in the animal kingdom.
      • The Wolverine is a big-ass weasel, whereas the Tasmanian Devil is a marsupial
    • The Bush Dog belongs to the Canidae family
    • There are less than 10,000 Bush Dogs left in the world
    • They live in Neotropical habitats
      • ; Northern and central South America into Panama, south to southern Brazil, Paraguay and north-eastern Argentina, and west to Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. Found in forests and wet savannahs, always close to water. Bush dogs den in underground burrows or hollow tree trunks.
    • Encyclopedia Britannica: Unlike most other members of the dog family, which reproduce once per year, bush dogs can breed year-round. Up to six young are born after a gestation of 65–70 days, and females have been shown to produce litters at 238-day intervals in captivity. Whereas male bush dogs become sexually mature after one year, females can become sexually mature as soon as 10 months after birth.
      • Ecologists note that, despite its extensive geographic range, the bush dog population is in decline because of an increasing rate of habitat loss and fragmentation—namely, from the conversion of natural areas to urban and agricultural land uses; declines in the bush dog’s prey populations, due to illegal poaching and to predation by domestic dogs; and increased exposure to diseases transmitted by such dogs.
      • The bush dog has short legs and long hair and grows to a shoulder height of about 30 cm (12 inches). It is 58–75 cm long (22.8–29.5 inches), exclusive of its 13–15-cm (5.1–5.9-inch) tail. It weighs about 5–7 kg (11–15 pounds) and is brown with reddish or whitish forequarters and dark hindquarters and tail. Bush dogs hunt in packs and feed largely on rodents, though they appear to seek out agouti and armadillos in some parts of their range.
  • The Bush Dog looks like no other dog, but what REALLY sets it apart is its hunting ability. These things are amazing.
    • I said earlier that they have webbed feet. makes them strong swimmers and means they are well adapted to a semi-aquatic lifestyle. Bush dogs are carnivorous and will hunt together as a pack to bring down large rodents such as agouti, capybara and even rhea!
    • They live and hunt in family groups of up to 12 animals.
    • They communicate via squeaks and yelps.
    • The Bush Dog hunts in the water! A very rare trait amongst land predators
      • They chase their prey into deep pools of water and are able to dive underwater, staying submerged for up to 30 seconds.
      • They confuse their prey and use their webbed feet to outswim them.
      • they are water specialists.
      • Typically one Bush Dog makes the kill and shares it with the rest of the pack
      • This style of hunting is VERY unique
Rheas are a bit smaller than an Ostrich, but are still big birds that come up to a person’s midsection
Capybaras are bigger than you think. The largest rodent is like the size of a pig. I’ve seen them at local county fairs.

LOOK AT THOSE THINGS! They look both cuddly and ferocious at the same time.
  • Some other cool facts I learned from the Woburn Safari Park Website (located in the UK):
    • Only the Alpha pair (alpha male and alpha female) will mate.
      • The alpha female uses hormones to prevent the other females from becoming pregnant.
    • They smell like vinegar!
      • Local people call them Cachorro-Vinagre which means “vinegar dog”

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