Latest / Privycast / Ep. 197 Mist Madness 3: Candles and Poopourri

Transcript

Ep. 197 Mist Madness 3: Candles and Poopourri · Privycast

0:00
Hey, what are them boys doing down there?
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Oh, they're plucking their donkeys.
0:05
Man, he has been in the bathroom for a minute.
0:08
Yeah?
0:08
He's plucking his donkey again.
0:11
You know what saying?
0:17
Welcome back to Privy.
0:19
Privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from my home bathroom.
0:25
I'm your host, Hunter Hoover, and I love bathrooms.
0:29
Welcome back everyone.
0:30
Thank you for being here and thank you for joining us for this season of Mist Madness.
0:38
Many of you are at the point of this episode's release, either just building or
0:45
Maybe have finished building and have entered some of the earlier rounds of your various brackets that you build this time of year.
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We've discussed that it's bracket season.
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March has magically become bracket season, which is a fake and made up thing really.
1:03
But people like to make brackets, it turns out.
1:07
We're making brackets for all sorts of stuff.
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Best ice cream, best friend.
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best TV show and or book.
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And so, as was noted, on Privy here, we wanted to do a bracket competition of bathroom air fresheners to determine what is the best via use and trial and error and most popular via
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your engagement with this tournament of bathroom air fresheners.
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online.
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So if you have not had a chance as you listen to this episode and hopefully my thoughts and the history that we're going to jump into here in a moment don't sway you too much.
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But if you have not yet go rank your favorite bathroom air fresheners at the link in the description.
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And you can also check that out on our website privy-cast.com.
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We'd love for you to go there and fill out your ranking of bathroom air fresheners.
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And if you're really brave,
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Take a screenshot of the bracket, fill it in, maybe use the little notes thingy and write in there, and then email it to us, privycast at gmail.com.
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We would love to receive those and see what you think the bracket's gonna turn out to be.
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We've been in Mist Madness all so far this month of March, and at the point of this episode's release, we're half over.
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And so, as we have...
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The last half of the month for voting and ranking, we want to inform you of our number one and number two seeds for best air freshener.
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One of these air fresheners has been ubiquitous with the process of pooping and what you do as a result of what you leave there.
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And the other is honestly probably our newest and most recent contender entering the competition.
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While it does not look at the contenders in the order in which they are seated, we are going to observe them in this way as it will lay the groundwork
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for what is in many ways the oldest of our deodorizer technologies as it leads up to the newest of our deodorizing technologies.
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And so to begin, we are going to dive in to the history of the scented candle.
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Candles have been around a long time.
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In fact, in my opinion, it's one of those things that seems like it would have been more intuitive than it really was.
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Because people have been making and as a result, burning candles for a long time.
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The earliest candles that we have consistent record of are made out of animal fat or tallow.
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The people shouting about their fried food is better.
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for you because it's made with tallow or beef fat.
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That tallow or beef fat used to be used to make a variety of candles.
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And if it's anywhere in the ballpark of these things, you should know.
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Once upon a time in a land far, far away called Montana, I worked at a McDonald's.
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And it's one of those things you always hear people say, it's like, I used to work at so-and-so and now I can't stand the food.
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McDonald's had the opposite effect on me.
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I used to work at McDonald's and now I still love to eat it.
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At the point of this episode's record, it's Friday night, which means Friday night, McDonald's night.
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But there are smells which are often associated with McDonald's and that are coming from the fryers and more importantly from behind the fryers at fast food places that are truly
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heinous.
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They don't have to clean behind the fryers as frequently as you might hope.
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And all I'm going to say is one time we moved the fryer and well, the
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material that came off the fryer actually stretched like a piece of gack from between the back of the fryer and the wall on the other side.
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was truly a baffling sight.
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It's not something that I necessarily think of as a good smell.
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The smell of like burning oil or fried grease.
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It's different than barbecue.
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Barbecue, like the fat smells different when it's burned over
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just being heated.
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while at this point in history, candles are primarily used for lighting various spaces, they had to make those candles out of something.
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And so like they were not as concerned with the smell of like the burning animal fat.
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They just needed something to like keep their flame lit.
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They scrape up some old animal fat, mix it together in like a real pottery wax conglomerate.
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and call it an afternoon in the home fragrance aisle at Hobby Lobby.
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It's time to start burning.
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And it's weird because as we discussed in our essential oils episode just a couple episodes back, people have been burning oils for the smells that those oils produce for
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centuries, if not millennia at this point.
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And if they knew those oils smelled so good, it seems like they would have added the oils to the stanky fat a lot sooner.
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Stanky fat is a good code nickname for like a lot of what I got going on.
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You know what I'm saying.
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There's old stanky fat again.
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It should be noted that these candles were not candles, but they were more like wax torches.
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They would have a rag or some other sort of wood sticking out of the animal fat, much like we would see that wick coming out.
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We got to get him up here.
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There he is.
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There's my, there's the candle that I've been burning for our tests.
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It does smell good.
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I'm going to leave that open just for ambiance.
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uh
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But the oil acts as fuel to keep the candle lit while it burns the source of the wick of the candle.
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Like that's what it's got going on.
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But again, these were not traditional candles in the sense that we're thinking.
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While the ancient Egyptians and other ancient cultures did eventually begin adding smells to the candles and torches they made, they weren't candles.
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Could you imagine like Indiana Jones or like National Treasures, they're like walking around in the dark with a torch lit and they've got like their little torch and they're
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walking around and as a result, like the crypt that they're creeping around in just smells like baked apple pie or like sea breeze or like fresh laundry or some silliness like that.
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It's like, you know, the vibe down in this dank cave is something.
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but at least it smells like strawberry crumb cake.
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Really changes the vibe on a lot of those scenes.
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And it could be a great opportunity for some of these movie companies to introduce smell-o-vision.
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The Disney parks and the Universal Studios and the such have smell-o-vision in some of their like 4D rides.
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And maybe it's time for like the IMAX 4D whatever to start adding smell-o-vision to things.
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It could be the market.
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The Wicked candles origin though.
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Cause that's really the jump that we're talking about.
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We're talking about jumping from something that is essentially a torch with a stick sticking out of it to a wicked candle.
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But the candles origin is really an around the world grab bag of who made it here first.
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It's kind of like when you walk into a group of like any kids under the grade, like four or five, and you, and you say, I lost.
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somebody dropped this piece of candy.
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Whose is it?
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It's truly everybody's candy.
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It's the socialist little mini candy.
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Somehow all kids own that piece of candy.
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That's like what it is trying to track down where the wicked candle originally came from.
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Some records say the Egyptians had wicked candles.
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Some say that it was a Babylonian technology.
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Others say it was late Greek or early Roman advancements in the medium.
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Other accounts tie the wicked candle to China.
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China.
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Some of these reports state that the candles were made out of whale fat in China and may have even been using beeswax.
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I had a kid at the high school today, I work at the high school in special education.
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And I had a kid today tell me that they originally made candles out of earwax.
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Let's get it going, let's get it going.
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We're returning to the polar seltzer here.
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And first of all, I don't think so.
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I don't think they made candles out of earwax.
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Second of all, that's incredibly gross.
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Makes you wonder.
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I wonder if you could make a candle out of used gum.
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Makes a guy wonder, you know what saying?
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Other people made candles from the Stalingia tallow, which comes from what is called the tallow tree or is sometimes known as the Florida Aspen or the popcorn tree.
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And what had really undergone much development is the candle wick.
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Like a lot of the oil and like fat burning technologies remain similar.
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It's really like, how do we wick this G?
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You know what I'm saying?
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And while there were early plants and pieces of organic material used, the organic material, it should be noted, in some cases refers to bugs and other animal parts.
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And they would, in the early days of wicked candles, braid animal hair.
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Which, if you've never burned hair, or burned your hair, the short version is, it smells really bad.
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Like, really bad.
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And so,
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And bugs don't smell good either.
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Burning bugs doesn't smell good either.
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And so you have these two options, like little bug parts sticking up out of the candle as the wick, or like braided donkey hair or whatever the heck they were plucking.
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You can go pluck your donkey.
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That's what they're calling it.
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They're plucking their donkeys.
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You know what saying?
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Hey, what are them boys doing down there?
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Oh, they're plucking their donkeys.
12:25
Man, he has been in the bathroom for a minute, yeah?
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He's plucking his donkey again.
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You know what saying?
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If you pluck your donkey too often or for too long, it actually can do damage.
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That's what I'll tell you about that.
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You do not want to pluck your donkey as often as you might think or want.
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But if you've ever smelled like burning hair or burning bugs, it does very little to accomplish an increase in desirous smells coming off of the candle.
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Like, I guess when I was growing up, the way that I like would smell this was like I would sit there and like fry ants or box elder bugs and people are like, that's what sociopaths
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do.
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Boys get into some nonsense.
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But it makes you wonder, you know, it's not the best smelling things.
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It's, man, I have got charcoal on my fingies.
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I play them with the wick.
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It's not the best smelling stuff, burning hair and burning insect parts.
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In fact, the idea of putting candles on birthday cake might even come to us before there were even wicks.
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It's stated that ancient Greeks offered moon shaped honey cakes.
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lit with small torches or small pieces of candles.
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These moved out of the space of worship into the realm of day-to-day life.
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This putting the candle on my cake may be where birthday candles derive from.
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Putting the wick, as best I can tell, likely developed out of Italy in the Etruscan period in the seventh century BC.
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Candles at the time were essentially these long, thin candles called tapers with wicks that ran down the center.
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made of plant fibers that would be soaked in fat or pitch and allowed to cool in long sticks.
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I mean, these candles would be like multiple feet long at times.
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But it should also be noted that these candles, primarily used for lighting again, were second to the use of oil lamps.
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Like burning an oil lamp was actually preferred.
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And
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the burning oil lamps was preferred and was the primary source of lighting until that source was greatly diminished.
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When the Roman Empire collapsed, disruptions in trade interrupted the access to olive oil from the region.
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This made the use of fuel lamps more costly and more difficult to get the needed oil to supply those lamps.
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They, in turn,
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moved to another source of lighting.
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They turned back to the good old fashioned candle.
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in the absence of readily available oil.
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And it kind of, you know, it kind of makes sense.
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what was once what we, like this is what we do.
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We're going to go back to just the old way of doing things.
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Let's get them candles in here.
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This use of candles really took off in the middle ages where they were even more in need.
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And whenever you have a high need on an item,
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supply generally rises to meet the demand.
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Candlemakers known as chandlers or in other places smirmandry.
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That can't be right.
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Smiramonger.
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Smirmonger?
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I'm gonna go with smirmonger.
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Smirle smirmonger.
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Next time somebody really chaps your donkey, call him a smirmonger.
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Like you son of a smirmonger.
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These Chandlers or Schmiermongers or candle makers, the baker, the taker and the candlestick maker originally made candles much like the ancients before them from leftover
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fats saved from their kitchen.
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I think a new line of candles that smells like breakfast food that are made out of leftover bacon grease is in order.
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Like I think that would be well received.
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It's like fat candles.
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TM, TM, TM, TM, TM, TM, TM.
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Fat candles actually could be pretty dope.
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Like, you get like smells that typically fat people like.
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Like, I like the smell of bacon.
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I like the smell of Pam cakes.
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I like the smell of McDonald's.
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And you just make candles smell like stuff that is like that.
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Like, they already do it for like ice cream treats and little Debbie snacks and the cereal.
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I know there's a Lucky Charms or some sort of a Trix or something.
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And so you just take that like food idea and you pour it into the candle world.
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That makes me want to eat the candle.
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Looking at you, Native deodorant with all of your food smelling, food related names.
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But in the cases where these are coming from the kitchen, the Schmirmonger actually oversaw the sauces, the making of vinegar, soaps, and cheese.
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All of these things were connected via the animal fats and byproducts of cooking.
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for some time, sheep's fat was actually the preferred.
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How many times do you think people have to run at the process of like making a candle before it's like, yeah, the sheep, the sheep fat is the best fat.
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They preferred sheep fat, but manufacturing these sheep fat candles smelled so bad that
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There was actually multiple ordinances throughout various cities in Europe at the time that actually took sanctions against it.
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Like your stinky sheep candles are so stinky and very sheepish that you've got to go somewhere else to make these things.
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They actually made sanctions against it.
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They began turning to a different substance and landed on beeswax as a good alternative.
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But the material
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was much more costly.
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Beeswax costs more money than sheep's fat.
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And as such, these beeswax candles were reserved for the rich and royal of society.
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In time, Schmirmongers began to make candle molds where the wax, tallow, or other melted fats would be poured to shape the candle accordingly.
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The wick, which at the time was made from various materials,
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but the favorite being a piece of fabric was placed at the center and the mold was allowed to harden around it.
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They began to make candle molds where the wax was like, they would pour it in the thing and then you would like suspend a deal that like held the wick.
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So the wick actually came up past the candle, much like our candle wicks do, they stick out.
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Yeah.
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And then the, the, the fats and the oils were allowed to harden around the wick.
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Coming out of the 1700s, whaling industry, that is where you go hunt for whales, not like whaling like whale.
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It was on the rise.
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As such, whale's fat or whale oil grew as a viable option for candle making.
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This was the first candle made in mass quantities.
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This oil from the whale was known as spermaceti.
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That's like Italian, anyway.
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But this spermaceti didn't stink when it was burned.
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It made brighter lights and hardened to be firmer and more sturdy than tallow or beeswax.
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The technology for candles shifted again in the 1800s when Colza oil and the oils from various plants that were similar to canola were discovered.
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Canola oil.
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And that's what we're cooking in.
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This canola oil had similar properties to tallow, but produced a clear and smokeless flame.
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In the 1830s, candles began to be industrialized and produced.
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Joseph Morga.
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A pewterer from North Manchester patented a machine that allowed for the continuous production of molded candles.
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Machine, Morga's Candlemaker, is what I call the machine, could produce about 1500 candles an
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It's a lot of candles.
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I do wonder how many candles I've burned over the course of my life.
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It does make me wonder.
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In the industrial age, the wick developed to be braided rather than just single strands of cotton.
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These braided wicks burn up and bend the wick as it burns and it comes to be called self-trimming or self-consuming wicks.
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In 1848, James Young made the world's first oil refinery.
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One of the by-products, a thing called paraffin wax, was a naturally occurring presence in the oils.
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He took this wax, distilled it, and proved that it was actually pretty useful in making what is an inexpensive candle.
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Instead of tossing the paraffin wax out, let's make candles out of it.
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However, there was a new invention, a new discovery on the horizon, which would decrease
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the need for candles once more.
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Candles were no longer needed for lighting because electricity had arrived.
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And so candle production shrunk drastically.
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But as time went on and moving into the 20th, a new resurgence began within the candle world.
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No longer were they turning to candles for light, but now for decoration and
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As we well know, and as we are primarily concerned with for odor control.
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While many ancient oils were scented in the beeswax of the medieval period was noted for its sweet smell.
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It was actually the 16 that first put smell into candles.
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They would essence the animal fats to create quote perfumed lights.
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When the production of candles increased with paraffin wax.
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They also began to add scents to this new industrialized candle process.
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When candles were no longer necessary for light, they began to be used primarily for smell and mood.
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Vibe, if you will.
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Nothing is a vibe check like a candle.
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You get a good huff.
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Clementine mango, I might add.
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Not a bad poll.
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Not a bad poll.
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We've come a long way with candles to making my room smell like a big jug of fruit punch, which is consequently what this candle smells like.
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And so as we move from what is probably one of our oldest contenders, we need to turn briefly at the, as we round off the second half of this episode to discuss, Poopery.
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For those of you that do not know what Poo-Pourri is, it looks like this.
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It comes in a little thing, and you do the thing.
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I'll explain it in just a moment.
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And it should be noted, all the contenders in Mist Madness, Privy Casts, March Madness, Bracket Competition of Bathroom Air Fresheners, TMTM, seek to deal with the smell once the
25:04
crap smell that you produced is in the air.
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They don't do much to like keep that bad reeking butt stank from getting in the air in the first place.
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As the story goes, that's like actually exactly what happened.
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Entrepreneur
25:20
Susie Batees after two failed businesses, both of which were, well, you can go look her up and her failed businesses on your own time, but we'll just say they were interesting in
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nature.
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Susie Batees was inspired at a dinner party.
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As the story goes, one of the other guests had to use the restroom and they left to do so and they hit it hard.
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They blew that stank up.
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They blew it up.
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And the stink that they produced from their foul butthole actually disrupted everybody.
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Like that's how bad their terrible butt odor and stinky turd smell was.
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It like disrupted everybody that's trying to eat dinner and sniffing fart smell.
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Well, because Tony Bologna, who only eats bologna, like went and did a big Tony in the toilet and made everything smell really bad.
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Like really bad.
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Stink, quote, disrupted everyone.
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In Suzy Batiste came up with the idea.
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The essential oils that she is a white mom often turned to as, yeah, comfort, could maybe help neutralize the stink that was being made in the bowl.
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What followed was a system of trial and error, mixing concoctions of oils and passing them to her husband to go and drop a big stack.
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It's like, wait, wait, wait, babe.
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Are you on your way to the bathroom?
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Yeah?
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well, wait, wait.
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Take my strange witch's brew of essential oils with you and see if it helps things smell not bad.
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Some of these oils were helpful.
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Some of them were not.
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And the record goes one day, Susie passed her husband a potion of oils and he came out proclaiming that they were gonna be millionaires.
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How these oils allegedly work are when they are sprayed into the bowl, they create a layer of oils on the top of the water.
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Then when you poop, the poop goes through that layer of oils and the stink odors are trapped.
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They can't penetrate the oil barrier you have created.
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It's science.
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Think of the Poo-Pourri oil spray as like a liquid wall, keeping intruders and other stank aliens out.
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I'm sure there's someone who's going to be pissed about that analogy.
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Batees.
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Suzy Batees started to distribute these bottles to friends for testing and word spread where she was living in Dallas of a miracle spray, which actually somehow keeps your foul
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butt stink from stinking.
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Because it turns out it's rarely your butt stink that is stinking.
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It's actually the presence of that poop in the bowl.
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The rest of the story is really just marketing.
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Cause while things were like good, they didn't like pop off for some time.
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But business boomed for Poo-Pourri in 2013 when she, Susie Bautiz,
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filmed her Girls Don't Poop advertisement.
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And as frustrating as it is that an essential oil mom who conceived of this because she smelled someone's bad stink to hide that women make foul, I have to admit.
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These things work, dude.
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They're so cool.
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It actually does what it says it's gonna do.
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I've also found this, if you're going to spend a long time on your job, that oil really loses its effectiveness at some point.
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it's not a forever oil.
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If you spray it into the toilet bowl thinking I'm going to be good for an extended period of time, that's not technically true.
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Like you are going to want to do your business and get on with your life because if you sit there, eventually the oil will rinse off and not
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be effective.
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It has a shelf life.
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I want them to make a coffee scent and essentially like Poo-Pourri.
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I think that would be good.
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Maybe Poo-Pourri could like do a robust blend for people that take like an extra long time taking a dump.
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It's like, this is Poo-Pourri XL or Poo-Pourri Deluxe.
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It's for like thick children and people that like to play on their phone.
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With that, we have covered all our contestants in the Mist Madness.
30:15
bracket competition of bathroom air fresheners.
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I hope you go and rank your favorite air freshener as well as fill out the tournament bracket.
30:23
We would love for you to join us for Miss Madness in that.
30:34
This brings us to the end of another episode of Privy.
30:37
Please leave the show a rating or review.
30:38
The five star options are preferred.
30:40
And every rating and review you leave, we donate some money to Wounded Warriors International and Living Water as a reminder to keep pooping in the free world.
30:47
That free world was not always free and in pursuit of cleaner water for all.
30:50
Not everybody has it, but everybody should.
30:53
We'd also welcome you to go check out the Privycast merch store, privy-cast.com slash store.
31:00
We've got some Privy Cast logo merch out there and we are working on some of our other designs that we've had over the years in stickers.
31:08
Go check it out.
31:09
There's also a link to the Sticker Mule sticker store.
31:12
If you want to pick yourself up some Privy Cast stickers to rep in various ways.
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We've also got magnets.
31:18
See?
31:20
They're magnetic.
31:21
Pick those up.
31:22
That sticker store is available on the same spot, privy-cast.com slash store.
31:30
Follow us on social media.
31:31
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31:32
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31:33
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31:34
Go check it out.
31:35
My son and I are doing some Pokemon card stuff.
31:37
You can check it out at Rowletrips.tcg.
31:40
Looking for some Pokemon cards out here.
31:42
It is tough.
31:43
It is a tough landscape for Pokemon cards.
31:46
If anybody's got a hot lead on some at or sh slightly above MSRP ascended heroes, hit me up.
31:53
I would love to hear about that and purchase it.
31:56
And if you're a scalper, if you're a Pokemon card scalper and you're listening to this,
32:00
Your behavior is unacceptable.
32:02
Um, you should feel bad for your behavior because you're doing a bad thing.
32:07
Check out the website privy-cast.com while you're over at the store.
32:10
Click around, go explore that.
32:13
This brings us to the end of another episode of privy.
32:15
Thanks Kevin and Pottington and everybody else whose music contributed to this episode.
32:20
Keep pooping in the free world, own your stank.
32:24
And now as always, don't forget to flush.