Latest / Ridiculous History / That Time Victorians Treated Seaweed like Pokemon

Transcript

That Time Victorians Treated Seaweed like Pokemon · Ridiculous History

0:00
Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
0:27
Speaker 1: back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
0:30
Speaker 1: so much for tuning in. That's the one and only
0:33
Speaker 1: super producer, Mr Max Williams. Give him, Give him some hands. Uh,
0:39
Speaker 1: they don't have to pet, but don't don't throw hands.
0:41
Speaker 1: Don't hands put them together for him, or put your
0:44
Speaker 1: hands up. If you're not reserve your fisticuffs. Keep your
0:49
Speaker 1: hands in your pockets if you're gonna be throwing those
0:50
Speaker 1: things around. Yes, that is hand advice from your fellow
0:55
Speaker 1: Ridiculous Historians, Ben Noel, You and I were both very
0:59
Speaker 1: taken by the whimsy of a quote that are old
1:05
Speaker 1: pal Gabe dug up for today's episodes. I say we
1:09
Speaker 1: split it just because it's so much fun to read.
1:11
Speaker 1: Is that cool with you? Totally? Okay? All right, Uh,
1:15
Speaker 1: here we go. Call us not weeds. We have flowers
1:21
Speaker 1: of the sea for lovely and bright and gay, tinted,
1:26
Speaker 1: all wet and quite independent of sunshine and showers. Oh,
1:35
Speaker 1: call us not weeds, oceans gay flowers. Now, Bass, I
1:44
Speaker 1: knew you were going to do the weedy old man
1:46
Speaker 1: voice on that, and then I knew you were going
1:48
Speaker 1: to do. It demands it. It demands it really does.
1:51
Speaker 1: And I love how we were leaning into the invisible
1:54
Speaker 1: h is after those ws, not weeds. So so based
2:00
Speaker 1: on that description, it may be a little bit tough
2:03
Speaker 1: to guess what the subject of that rhyme is. However,
2:07
Speaker 1: if you play it back, and if you listen to
2:09
Speaker 1: it and treat it like you know, unpacking riddle, a
2:12
Speaker 1: lot of us would probably guessed correctly that is a
2:15
Speaker 1: little poem about seaweed. No, Max, you guys, you guys
2:21
Speaker 1: are eating Japanese cuisine, right, You've had like seweed salad
2:24
Speaker 1: and so on. Yeah, I like seweeds salad. Uh. It's
2:28
Speaker 1: one of those things that I discovered when I worked
2:30
Speaker 1: at this restaurant back in Augustus also the place where
2:33
Speaker 1: I learned to cook and really enjoy cooking. But it
2:35
Speaker 1: was the kind of thing I probably never would have
2:37
Speaker 1: thought out of my own, but it was on the
2:38
Speaker 1: menu and I tried it, and I love it. I mean,
2:40
Speaker 1: it's obviously love. It has to do with the sesame
2:43
Speaker 1: flavoring and the seasoning and all that. It is a
2:45
Speaker 1: little on the slimy side, but once you get past
2:48
Speaker 1: the texture or maybe even lean into the texture. It
2:50
Speaker 1: is delicious, but then there's a crispy versions of it.
2:53
Speaker 1: You can get little seaweeds snacks or the kind of
2:56
Speaker 1: wraps that you use for hand rolls for example, or
2:59
Speaker 1: even like you know, the kind of what do you
3:01
Speaker 1: call the sushi that's with the rice and the and
3:03
Speaker 1: the seaweed wrap. What was that called? That's wrap sor
3:07
Speaker 1: that's nori. But there's a name for the kind that's rappling.
3:09
Speaker 1: There's shemi is just the fish, and then there's nagiri
3:13
Speaker 1: that's just on rice. And then there's another name for
3:16
Speaker 1: the one with the seaweed around it. That's like yelling
3:19
Speaker 1: at their phones. You the hand roll, I'm talking about
3:21
Speaker 1: the little sliced ones, you know, the little pieces rice
3:23
Speaker 1: on the It's like the layer of seaweed, layer of rice,
3:27
Speaker 1: and then the good stuff on me and saide. There's
3:28
Speaker 1: another name for that, but we'll just leave that to
3:30
Speaker 1: people to yell at their podcast apps. I know what
3:34
Speaker 1: that one is. Yeah, I don't want to get to
3:36
Speaker 1: Coughton the weeds, but I and the weeds. He's saying, Oh,
3:39
Speaker 1: and the seaweeds there we are, yeah, but but we're
3:42
Speaker 1: we're saying yeah, I'm gonna jump in. Uh is it
3:44
Speaker 1: nori maki? Oh it's mocki Yeah, yeah, yeah exactly rolls
3:50
Speaker 1: so good to um really makes me miss just being
3:54
Speaker 1: able to stroll into a convenience store in Japan and
3:58
Speaker 1: eat like a king so expensively. But well, there's always
4:01
Speaker 1: grocery store sushi ben, there's always grocery store sushire is
4:05
Speaker 1: there is um and we are lucky enough to have
4:07
Speaker 1: some really good sushi spots here in Atlanta, but being
4:11
Speaker 1: so far inland and not being in Japan, we do
4:16
Speaker 1: pay a premium for that, so really good sushi is
4:19
Speaker 1: kind of a special occasion thing for us here. But see,
4:23
Speaker 1: weed go so far beyond sushi. We're just talking about
4:26
Speaker 1: sushi because we like food, and that's uh, that's gonna
4:29
Speaker 1: be the main touch point for us in the world
4:32
Speaker 1: of seaweed. But seaweed has been around forever. Everybody knows
4:37
Speaker 1: what it is. You don't have to live by the
4:38
Speaker 1: ocean to know about seaweed. And today's episode, which was
4:43
Speaker 1: arguably cursed for a while, is about a very weird
4:47
Speaker 1: Victorian hobby. People started getting into really into seaweed, like
4:53
Speaker 1: treating it as though it were almost like Pokemon today,
4:58
Speaker 1: as though it were as a a torso chest. Just
5:02
Speaker 1: so I love it. We teased it a little bit
5:04
Speaker 1: in the episode that we did with the Ridiculous Romance
5:07
Speaker 1: Crew that we had an episode coming up that involves
5:10
Speaker 1: scrap booking to some degree, because uh, we were talking
5:14
Speaker 1: about Valentine's and like, you know, making lace kind of
5:18
Speaker 1: you know, little ephemera, and today really does kind of
5:23
Speaker 1: discuss the the art of scrap booking, specifically seaweed scrap
5:27
Speaker 1: booking as kind of a weird form of women's empowerment
5:31
Speaker 1: in the Victorian Age, because as as many folks know,
5:35
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, um was not the most liberating of
5:40
Speaker 1: times for women, especially in Victorian England, where they were
5:45
Speaker 1: you know, kept in many respects. In most respects, in fact,
5:49
Speaker 1: outside of the ones that we're going to talk about today,
5:51
Speaker 1: they were required chaperone's in order to venture outside of
5:55
Speaker 1: the home. They were you know, largely almost exclusively treated
5:59
Speaker 1: as kind of domestic uh servants, essentially in service to
6:03
Speaker 1: to their their their male counterparts, um. But it wasn't
6:07
Speaker 1: really counterpart because there was no equality there whatsoever, more
6:10
Speaker 1: like their male masters. Honestly, that's kind of how it
6:14
Speaker 1: was three of those sort of the attitude of the time.
6:16
Speaker 1: But there was a new thing happening, a very widespread
6:21
Speaker 1: interest in the natural sciences. Uh, and that was because
6:25
Speaker 1: of discoveries from people like Darwin. Who else Ben was
6:30
Speaker 1: contributing to this um interest and nature Oh so much.
6:34
Speaker 1: There's so much stuff here. We're talking about a time
6:37
Speaker 1: of great scientific discovery and breakthroughs, and we're talking about
6:43
Speaker 1: some deep and profound paradigm shifts in society at this time.
6:48
Speaker 1: Because you you pointed out the dichotomy in which this
6:51
Speaker 1: story takes place. Everybody is fascinated by scientific investigation, right,
7:00
Speaker 1: People want to as hobbies learn more about the natural world.
7:05
Speaker 1: But at the same time, society only wants certain members
7:10
Speaker 1: of the population to learn. Like if you're if you're
7:13
Speaker 1: a little dude, then go get your chemistry set. But
7:17
Speaker 1: if you're a woman, whether child or adult, then civilization
7:21
Speaker 1: is telling you, whoa, that's that's men's stuff. Stay home
7:26
Speaker 1: and you can like music and you can like to
7:28
Speaker 1: decorate things, but that's that's where we draw the line.
7:31
Speaker 1: And don't talk to me about voting. That's what society
7:34
Speaker 1: was saying. If you're a dude, go watch that bird. Hell,
7:38
Speaker 1: kill that bird. Stuff that bird, mount that bird, you know,
7:42
Speaker 1: like mount like taxidermy, you know, because at the again,
7:45
Speaker 1: another big figure at this time was John James Autobon,
7:50
Speaker 1: you know, who established the Audubon Society. You mentioned the
7:53
Speaker 1: idea of membership. Um. The things like the Audubon Society
7:58
Speaker 1: inspired countless smaller kind of offshoots and and clubs, organizations
8:04
Speaker 1: where members would participate in in different outdoorsy type activities,
8:08
Speaker 1: whether it be bird watching or rock collecting or you know,
8:12
Speaker 1: mineral hunting or whatever. But women were almost exclusively not
8:18
Speaker 1: permitted to join these clubs, except when it came to
8:23
Speaker 1: the idea of taking in the country air, you know,
8:27
Speaker 1: going for a dip in the ocean, you know, but
8:29
Speaker 1: not too far, just just a dip of the toe
8:32
Speaker 1: and uh, and make sure to keep on those petticoats, ladies, um,
8:36
Speaker 1: because otherwise it would be unto old. But it's true.
8:40
Speaker 1: There became a sort of offshoot of all this naturalism
8:43
Speaker 1: that was considered like for for the girls, and it
8:47
Speaker 1: was the collecting of seaweed. The collecting, drying, and preserving
8:53
Speaker 1: in albums or scrap books of seaweed was huge, particularly
8:59
Speaker 1: in the middle class. Uh, not only in England but
9:02
Speaker 1: also in New England in America. Yeah, this is a
9:06
Speaker 1: transatlantic phenomenon. And I love the idea of people taking
9:10
Speaker 1: a constitutional I just enjoy Victorian phrases so very much.
9:16
Speaker 1: People are into fur and feathers, there into taxes, dermy.
9:19
Speaker 1: We're seeing the age of the self described gentleman scientists,
9:25
Speaker 1: which I love. I love the idea of a gentleman scientists.
9:29
Speaker 1: They travel across the planet just collecting plants and animals,
9:35
Speaker 1: describing them, classifying them. It's cool to be a nerd
9:39
Speaker 1: at this time. A lot of people want to be nerds,
9:42
Speaker 1: but there's still a lot of misogyny. This misogyny is
9:46
Speaker 1: not going to hold. It's it's not a sustainable type
9:51
Speaker 1: of discrimination in this part of history. Because we're seeing
9:57
Speaker 1: the democratization of technology and of learning. There are more
10:01
Speaker 1: rail networks expanding, you know, definitely in the UK, and
10:05
Speaker 1: more people are having more free time. So you don't
10:09
Speaker 1: necessarily have to be a viscount or an archduke to
10:13
Speaker 1: care about studying you know, birds or bats or what
10:17
Speaker 1: have you. You now just are a person who has
10:20
Speaker 1: a hobby. Microscopes are no longer, insanely expensive bird collecting clubs, well,
10:27
Speaker 1: collecting clubs of any kind start spring up like wildfire
10:31
Speaker 1: across Britain. And this is where I think we should
10:33
Speaker 1: introduce a guy named Dr Stephen Hunt, a researcher environmental
10:38
Speaker 1: humanities work in the University of the West of England,
10:43
Speaker 1: and he notes all these factors and says that because
10:46
Speaker 1: of this, in the nineteenth century, Britain became a hotbed
10:51
Speaker 1: of biological enthusiasm and natural history encountered this sort of
10:56
Speaker 1: you could call it a renaissance, but not the thoughts
11:00
Speaker 1: time period renaissance in interest. It's an amazing time for scientists,
11:04
Speaker 1: it really is. And um Cara Giamo over at Atlas
11:09
Speaker 1: Obscura wrote a really fantastic article called the Forgotten Victorian
11:12
Speaker 1: Craze for Collecting seaweed um that we refer to for
11:16
Speaker 1: this episode quite a few times. And these quotes from
11:20
Speaker 1: Dr Stephen Hunt um were originally seen in that article.
11:24
Speaker 1: And Hunt really describes it beautifully when he describes this
11:27
Speaker 1: as a democratization of natural history, you know, in the
11:30
Speaker 1: same way that I like to refer to I mean,
11:31
Speaker 1: not just me, but like the democratization of technology is
11:34
Speaker 1: what is allowed in in the era that we currently
11:36
Speaker 1: live in. A lot of art to flourish, a lot
11:38
Speaker 1: of music to flourish. People now have garage band on
11:40
Speaker 1: their computers that comes like preinstalled. Um, it's a lot
11:43
Speaker 1: more affordable to get a decent DSLR camera out there
11:46
Speaker 1: on your phone, you know. So that is a similar
11:49
Speaker 1: situation where because of the things that you're saying, ben
11:52
Speaker 1: like the prices of microscopes becoming much more affordable to
11:55
Speaker 1: you know, maybe not the average person, but at the
11:57
Speaker 1: very least middle class. I guess that is kind of average,
12:00
Speaker 1: is nous um, So let's just go back the average person.
12:02
Speaker 1: It was a big deal. People were able to kind
12:04
Speaker 1: of become these fair weather kind of natural history enthusiasts,
12:09
Speaker 1: but again not women. And a lot of this too
12:12
Speaker 1: had to do with the shift to um wage earning
12:17
Speaker 1: wage labor, creating this very novel concept of free time.
12:21
Speaker 1: You know, people weren't just like spinning yard and the
12:24
Speaker 1: factory anymore like you know, shoveling coal. Uh, there was
12:28
Speaker 1: a lot more time to do things for leisure. By
12:31
Speaker 1: the way, I learned in this other article that we
12:34
Speaker 1: looked at Collector's Weekly dot com who published an article
12:37
Speaker 1: UH called When Housewives Were Seduced by Seaweed scandalous that
12:41
Speaker 1: refers to the idea of a withdrawing room. I didn't
12:45
Speaker 1: know that drawing room was short for withdrawing room. And
12:49
Speaker 1: I want to say, isn't a really kind of superfluous shortening,
12:53
Speaker 1: Like is withdrawing that much longer than just drawing? I
12:58
Speaker 1: don't know that that was necessary, but it's the withdrawing
13:00
Speaker 1: rooms of course, like you know, the parlor right where
13:03
Speaker 1: people would hang out and maybe do their do their
13:05
Speaker 1: little little crafts. Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is also the
13:09
Speaker 1: age where the well to do people have very specific
13:12
Speaker 1: rooms or areas of their estates. The orangery right where
13:17
Speaker 1: you just grow oranges to flex on people. So it's
13:20
Speaker 1: not it's not too unusual, but it stinks to be
13:24
Speaker 1: a woman or someone identifying as female and have this
13:28
Speaker 1: same interest in the natural world and continually get stone
13:32
Speaker 1: walled by people. It may strike many of us as
13:35
Speaker 1: odd or paradoxical or hypocritical today to realize that the
13:40
Speaker 1: folks who were really into learning and and thought of
13:45
Speaker 1: themselves was very intelligent. We're also very into gate keeping.
13:49
Speaker 1: The royal Society, the Linnaean Society. All those groups refused
13:55
Speaker 1: female members, and some wouldn't even let them show up
13:58
Speaker 1: to the public speeches where we're like, hey, let's explain
14:01
Speaker 1: what a badger is. And women weren't allowed to hunt animals.
14:06
Speaker 1: It was seen as too dangerous and digging up plants
14:09
Speaker 1: was get this seen as like too erotically charged. Oh
14:13
Speaker 1: my goodness, that's because well why because plants like reproduce,
14:18
Speaker 1: you know, like, uh, isn't it a sexually though I
14:22
Speaker 1: don't fully understand. Maybe some plants are vaguely vaginal, but honestly,
14:28
Speaker 1: what's more vaginal and kind of erotic than seaweed? Just
14:34
Speaker 1: wait when these guys here about Georgia O'Keefe anyhow, Like
14:39
Speaker 1: the Linnean bought me like this thought was based on
14:44
Speaker 1: the sexual parts of the of the plant, according to
14:47
Speaker 1: Dr Hunt. So it was seen as controversial and, as
14:50
Speaker 1: we said earlier, untoward to be digging plants out of
14:54
Speaker 1: the ground because it was too sexually charged. And that's
14:57
Speaker 1: where seaweed comes in. This story is strange, but seaweed
15:07
Speaker 1: is seen as very wholesome. It's very like innocuous. It
15:12
Speaker 1: doesn't have a bunch of sex organs that worry the
15:15
Speaker 1: more prudish people in society. And it's kind of close
15:19
Speaker 1: to home because a lot of people live on the coastline,
15:22
Speaker 1: so it's considered healthy and wholesome. Are allowable for women
15:26
Speaker 1: to go take in the shore and and stroll along
15:30
Speaker 1: the beach. They might just go on a family vacation.
15:33
Speaker 1: They might be trying to get to a place with
15:36
Speaker 1: better weather because of a medical condition, and a lot
15:39
Speaker 1: of them are already really into scrap booking. So they
15:44
Speaker 1: noticed that seaweed has such a vast variety of sizes
15:49
Speaker 1: and shapes, and they started saying, hey, this is decoration.
15:55
Speaker 1: Society will allow us to decoration that allow us to
15:58
Speaker 1: do scrap booking. But at the same time, and we're
16:00
Speaker 1: going to be able to satisfy some part of our
16:03
Speaker 1: scientific curiosity without the boys clubs of the world shutting
16:09
Speaker 1: us down yet again. Yeah, it's um, it's interesting. I mean,
16:13
Speaker 1: things like pressing flowers are trying, and pressing flowers was
16:18
Speaker 1: already pretty popular, despite the hilarious idea of plants being
16:23
Speaker 1: controversial because of their sexuality. That just really cracks me up.
16:28
Speaker 1: But this is just kind of an extension of that.
16:30
Speaker 1: See weed and is perfectly fit for this because it
16:33
Speaker 1: can flatten out beautifully and you can kind of paste
16:36
Speaker 1: it to a page. You can even use photographic technology
16:41
Speaker 1: or photographic techniques to create what are called cyanotype prints.
16:47
Speaker 1: There was a very well known book at the time
16:50
Speaker 1: by Anna Atkins called Photographs of British Algae. This is
16:55
Speaker 1: in the eighteen forties, by the way, and um she
16:58
Speaker 1: used sense really just photographic light sensitive, you know, photographic
17:04
Speaker 1: paper to create these cyanotype prints to document these various
17:08
Speaker 1: types of seaweed. And when you look at some of
17:11
Speaker 1: these books, I would really recommend checking out that acts
17:14
Speaker 1: Obscure article. Ben. I know you're a big fan of
17:16
Speaker 1: the Voyantage Manuscript. I think you own a copy of it.
17:20
Speaker 1: We've talked about it many times on our other podcast,
17:22
Speaker 1: Stuff that Don't want you to know for anyone that's
17:24
Speaker 1: not familiar. It is a mysterious book that kind of
17:28
Speaker 1: chronicles a lot of like alien flora and fauna, more
17:32
Speaker 1: and more flora really right than fauna. Um. I guess
17:35
Speaker 1: it has some kind of like creatures depicted in it,
17:38
Speaker 1: but a lot of the very seaweed like, wouldn't you say?
17:40
Speaker 1: And and and also very similar layout to what you see
17:42
Speaker 1: in in some of these British um you know, uh,
17:46
Speaker 1: seaweed scrap books. Yeah, yeah, and I love whenever somebody
17:51
Speaker 1: mentioned that manuscript. I'd also like to shout out a
17:57
Speaker 1: thematic successor to that, the Codex Seraphinus shows shout out
18:02
Speaker 1: to Luigi Serafini for making a on purpose, incomprehensible book.
18:09
Speaker 1: It's such a great read. Uh, maybe we should start
18:11
Speaker 1: a book club. But how do you start a book
18:13
Speaker 1: club with books that are designed not to be legible? Anyway?
18:18
Speaker 1: Story for another day, But you you are right. People
18:21
Speaker 1: are all of a sudden in the world of publishing
18:24
Speaker 1: discovering that books on identifying and preserving seaweed are a
18:29
Speaker 1: surefire bet people are gonna buy them. So now there's
18:31
Speaker 1: a there's a market motivation to popularize this idea. More
18:36
Speaker 1: and more people get involved. We mentioned New England, UM
18:40
Speaker 1: mentioned the UK, also Canada. A lot of Canadian people
18:43
Speaker 1: start going into tide pools to collect and press seaweed
18:47
Speaker 1: of their own. Now, it didn't get as popular as
18:51
Speaker 1: some other hobbies at the time because you needed a
18:55
Speaker 1: little more technical aptitude. Depressed seaweed and seaweed does doesn't
19:00
Speaker 1: grow everywhere. It's in the name, you know what I mean.
19:03
Speaker 1: So if you are inland, you're gonna have to take
19:06
Speaker 1: a trip, You're gonna have to physically go somewhere to
19:10
Speaker 1: engage in this hobby. And there there were, to be clear,
19:13
Speaker 1: there were some male seaweed collectors, but they lived a
19:18
Speaker 1: very different life. They were starting on third base in
19:21
Speaker 1: this endeavor. They were able to be by choice. They
19:25
Speaker 1: could they could have done whatever else they wanted, but
19:27
Speaker 1: they chose the seaweed life. The seaweed life didn't choose them. Yeah, yeah,
19:32
Speaker 1: well put so, women were you know, again, not seen
19:36
Speaker 1: as scientists by the powers that be at this point.
19:39
Speaker 1: So if a guy is collecting seaweed, like if Max
19:43
Speaker 1: is out collecting seaweed and makes a book about it,
19:47
Speaker 1: then Max is going to be treated like the pre
19:50
Speaker 1: eminent scientists of seaweed. And then if we had you know, um,
19:55
Speaker 1: like Eve's Jeffcoat doing the same work at the same time,
19:59
Speaker 1: since iety would have instead treated her as like a
20:03
Speaker 1: person with a quirky, cute hobby even though they were
20:07
Speaker 1: both like conducting real science. Absolutely, and and let's let's
20:12
Speaker 1: not forget um, this is something that really takes uh
20:17
Speaker 1: some talent um at the very least stick toutiveness and
20:21
Speaker 1: and and the ability to really like learn how to
20:23
Speaker 1: do this correctly, because like you said, Ben, it wasn't
20:26
Speaker 1: nearly as easy as maybe dried flowers. Uh not anyone
20:29
Speaker 1: could do this. The article that I mentioned earlier in
20:32
Speaker 1: uh Collectors Weekly, when Housewives are Seduced by Seaweed by
20:36
Speaker 1: Hunter Oatman Stanford has a really great quote that I
20:39
Speaker 1: think sums this up nicely. He says, part of the
20:42
Speaker 1: appeal was what a seaweed collection said about the collector.
20:47
Speaker 1: Anyone could appreciate and collect flowers, but painstakingly obtaining, preserving,
20:52
Speaker 1: and mounting seaweed specimens demonstrated patients artistic talent and the
20:56
Speaker 1: refined sensibilities necessary to appreciate the more subtle beauties of nature.
21:02
Speaker 1: And in fact, Queen Victoria was known, you know, of
21:06
Speaker 1: the Victorian age queen, that Queen Victoria was known to
21:09
Speaker 1: have made a seaweed album when she was a young lady.
21:13
Speaker 1: Even even the Queen approves off Mike max yettam, I
21:17
Speaker 1: was just gonna stay at the moment of that. I
21:18
Speaker 1: resent you for make putting me in that comparison, making
21:21
Speaker 1: me the bad guy. Oh, we'll keep it up up. Sorry, Max.
21:25
Speaker 1: I have a I have a little list to the
21:28
Speaker 1: to the right of my monitor of who has to
21:31
Speaker 1: who has to be the bad cops. So I I
21:33
Speaker 1: rotated out but prioritize the three of us over guests,
21:37
Speaker 1: just because we could take it. You know, usually you'll
21:40
Speaker 1: you'll be the good guy in a later example. Sure, okay,
21:45
Speaker 1: all right, And it holds me to that. So you
21:47
Speaker 1: make a great point, Noll to that the the idea
21:51
Speaker 1: that the most powerful political figure and social figure in
21:55
Speaker 1: the country also approves, people are going to be incredibly
22:00
Speaker 1: hesitant to criticize seaweed collecting when the monarchy itself is
22:05
Speaker 1: engaged in it. And there's a religious aspect here that
22:11
Speaker 1: we also have to acknowledge. It's discussed by Peter Harrington
22:15
Speaker 1: over at Peter Harrington dot co dot uk where he
22:20
Speaker 1: explores this idea of the inter relationship of seaweed collecting
22:25
Speaker 1: in society, and he said, if you go to his website,
22:29
Speaker 1: actually you'll see a real a real live seaweed scrap
22:34
Speaker 1: book and it looks really cool, it looks professional, there's
22:37
Speaker 1: a great artistry to it. But for the Victorians, the
22:42
Speaker 1: natural world was still very much tied to religious and
22:46
Speaker 1: moral ideas. So if you're going to defend yourself, if
22:51
Speaker 1: you're identifying as female at this time and somebody's giving
22:54
Speaker 1: you a hard time about seaweed collecting, what you could
22:58
Speaker 1: do is say, well this, I'm, you know, very pious,
23:03
Speaker 1: and this gives me a new appreciation of the world
23:07
Speaker 1: God created. And then people would say, all right, as
23:12
Speaker 1: long as you're not doing science, right, okay, and well
23:17
Speaker 1: back to back to whatever game we're playing in the
23:20
Speaker 1: withdrawing room. Whist is with the card game? What is
23:24
Speaker 1: whist Uh? Well, I mean you can be one can
23:28
Speaker 1: be whistful, so it should logic follows that whists is
23:34
Speaker 1: a thing that one can be full of. I don't
23:36
Speaker 1: know what it is. It is a game, and it's
23:38
Speaker 1: a game that would right you know, of course, you know, Max.
23:41
Speaker 1: What is whist with is a classic English trick taking
23:45
Speaker 1: card game. I am totally not reading this off Wikipedia,
23:48
Speaker 1: which was played widely in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
23:52
Speaker 1: Although the rules are simple, there is a scope for
23:54
Speaker 1: a strategic play. So yeah, there's no answer, and wanted
23:57
Speaker 1: to said out there interesting and also not reading off
24:01
Speaker 1: of Wikipedia. I'm reading on etymology online. Actually dam edam online.
24:07
Speaker 1: That's a portmanteaus far to say, um, wistful is actually
24:11
Speaker 1: described as being closely attentive. I always thought wistful of
24:14
Speaker 1: men you were kind of like melancholy. Or I've I've
24:18
Speaker 1: been yeah, I've been misusing that. I guess it says here,
24:22
Speaker 1: um wistful. Well, never mind. Other the atomology is a
24:27
Speaker 1: little different than maybe the way it's used in you know,
24:30
Speaker 1: the parlance of our times. But it does refer to
24:33
Speaker 1: in early seventeenth century. Um kind of I guess obsolete
24:39
Speaker 1: kind of translation of the word uh whistley, which could
24:45
Speaker 1: have been influenced by the word wishful. So unrelated to
24:47
Speaker 1: the game whist I was hoping there was a connection,
24:49
Speaker 1: but as it's a case with etymology, sometimes the obvious
24:52
Speaker 1: seeming thing has nothing to do with anything. Yeah, like
24:55
Speaker 1: the word lepidopters. They study butterflies and moths. Well, but
25:00
Speaker 1: Lepidoptera is the genus I believe of butterflies, right, yes, yeah,
25:06
Speaker 1: And we know this because I introduced us. Uh. I
25:10
Speaker 1: was waiting for a chance to use that word for
25:12
Speaker 1: years and years, and it came up in strange news
25:16
Speaker 1: which is a weekly segment we do on stuff they
25:18
Speaker 1: don't want you to know. Uh, we're we're always learning
25:22
Speaker 1: weird and strange things. So shout out to any lepidopterist
25:25
Speaker 1: in the crowd, amateur or professional, and good luck with
25:29
Speaker 1: you and on. That's part of the story. You'll have
25:32
Speaker 1: to tune in to see what we're talking about, but
25:33
Speaker 1: that's what you do. It's a fun. Results of mileage
25:38
Speaker 1: may vary on the fun, but we always inject some
25:41
Speaker 1: fun into the proceedings, even if it's a heavy topic.
25:43
Speaker 1: We sure tried and always sure try. So Let's say
25:47
Speaker 1: you go to see a seaweed display and someone's like,
25:50
Speaker 1: look at the seaweeds I have collected. What would this
25:53
Speaker 1: look like? Um, there's a cool website from Harvard University's
25:59
Speaker 1: library that talks about the process. Basically, first you you
26:03
Speaker 1: clean it in salt water. Then you place it on
26:06
Speaker 1: the special mounting paper, and then the collector kind of
26:11
Speaker 1: cleans it up. They might trim stuff they don't want
26:14
Speaker 1: on there. They'll spend some time carefully arranging it just
26:18
Speaker 1: so in a way they find aesthetically pleasing. Then it's
26:23
Speaker 1: layered between another kind of paper, blotting paper, and you
26:26
Speaker 1: just put a lot of weight on it until it
26:29
Speaker 1: dries and all the moisture is God's like fifty pounds
26:32
Speaker 1: of something, you know. And and in that way, it's
26:34
Speaker 1: similar to pressing flowers. Uh, here's what happens when you're
26:39
Speaker 1: doing this. See we starts exuding a gunk like a
26:45
Speaker 1: gelatinous material that sticks, that replaces adhesive. It's kind of
26:50
Speaker 1: it's almost like okra, which is a muse ilogenous vegetable.
26:53
Speaker 1: That's why okra has snot. And that's another word I
26:56
Speaker 1: never get to say. I have knocked him off the
26:58
Speaker 1: list here, man, But yeah, seaweeds not. Yeah, but I
27:00
Speaker 1: just have to say ocraf for me, is is pretty
27:03
Speaker 1: useless unless fried and dipped in some sort of sauce
27:07
Speaker 1: because I don't really particularly need snot inside my vegetables,
27:11
Speaker 1: thank you very much. Yeah, you know, teach their own
27:14
Speaker 1: teach though, And some people look at okra and say,
27:17
Speaker 1: I've got enough snot already. But there you just have.
27:21
Speaker 1: It's tricky to cook it, you know. Well that anyway,
27:25
Speaker 1: before I before I accidentally turned this into a segment
27:29
Speaker 1: on weird ocra facts, it's pretty neat that the seaweed
27:34
Speaker 1: itself can produce its own glue, so you don't see
27:39
Speaker 1: actual glue holding the specimens down. And as far as
27:42
Speaker 1: the Harvard Library is concerned, this was a pretty great
27:48
Speaker 1: a pretty great process because it also removed any uncouth smells. Uh.
27:54
Speaker 1: They say that the album they have doesn't have an odor,
27:59
Speaker 1: but they they're still on the fence about whether it
28:02
Speaker 1: doesn't smell because of the process of precedent or just
28:06
Speaker 1: because this book is also more old. And then and
28:11
Speaker 1: then going back to Collector's Weekly dot com article that
28:14
Speaker 1: you mentioned earlier, No, there's a great moment in there
28:17
Speaker 1: where the author says the Victorian era was also a
28:22
Speaker 1: more pungent time. So I suspect they either wouldn't have
28:25
Speaker 1: been bothered by the smell they would have used a
28:28
Speaker 1: creative method to minimize it. I love just thinking an
28:31
Speaker 1: air of time is generally more pungent. I mean, sure,
28:34
Speaker 1: we talked about in in the past episode the Great
28:37
Speaker 1: Stink of London, I mean, sewage for a time just
28:43
Speaker 1: ran rampant through the streets. It was a smelly, smelly
28:46
Speaker 1: time to be alive. Bathing was a real luxury for
28:50
Speaker 1: many folks, even the upper class. You know, And and and
28:53
Speaker 1: what what didn't they like wash their whites in urine
28:57
Speaker 1: sometimes too, well, yeah, you know, sometimes you get into
29:01
Speaker 1: situations bad. That's one of those responses we just won't
29:08
Speaker 1: follow up on. Let's give some shout outs to notable
29:18
Speaker 1: seaweed hunters. Right now, we don't know in terms of
29:23
Speaker 1: solid numbers. We don't know how many people were out
29:28
Speaker 1: hunting and displaying seaweed. We mentioned Queen Victoria's She's one
29:32
Speaker 1: of the most famous seaweed collectors. Author George Elliott has
29:38
Speaker 1: talked about an interest in seaweeds and some people did
29:43
Speaker 1: make some coin off of it, people like Margaret Gatty,
29:47
Speaker 1: who was an author of children's books and then started
29:52
Speaker 1: collecting seaweed while she was convalescing recovering from illness in
29:58
Speaker 1: eight in the southeast of Written. She was what people
30:01
Speaker 1: started to call a sea weeder. Her book British Sea
30:06
Speaker 1: Weeds describes a ton of local seaweeds and it's really
30:12
Speaker 1: nice book. It's got colored plates, it's it's prestigious. It's
30:16
Speaker 1: what you would have like put on a coffee table
30:18
Speaker 1: to impress your guests. Absolutely, and think about it. Back
30:21
Speaker 1: in those days, I mean, there wouldn't be mass production
30:25
Speaker 1: of these types of you know, very bespoke books, so
30:28
Speaker 1: they would have been much rarer and like cooler, you know,
30:31
Speaker 1: with like engraved printing and and you know, gold foiling
30:35
Speaker 1: and things like that. I mean, that would have been
30:37
Speaker 1: a really cool book. It makes me like start wanting
30:39
Speaker 1: to get into like vintage book collecting. But that is
30:42
Speaker 1: a slippery slope, my friend, very deep and expensive rabbit hole,
30:46
Speaker 1: it really is. And I've you know, I've got some.
30:49
Speaker 1: I've got some nice books. I've got some. I have
30:51
Speaker 1: a few from my dad, like old Dickens books that
30:54
Speaker 1: are very very very beautiful. That's awesome. Yeah, and I've
30:57
Speaker 1: got I've got some friends who collect books as well.
31:00
Speaker 1: But it can be you can be a very expensive hobby.
31:04
Speaker 1: So you could. You might, if you are a bibliophile,
31:08
Speaker 1: you might have a seaweed book of this sort somewhere
31:14
Speaker 1: in your collection. It's possible because we we know, just
31:16
Speaker 1: based on the number of these books that are around
31:18
Speaker 1: from that era, that it was a pretty popular pursuit. Now,
31:23
Speaker 1: even if you're at the level of Margaret Gatty, you're
31:26
Speaker 1: still not calling yourself a scientist. You're saying I appreciate
31:31
Speaker 1: God's grace and Nature's beauty. And if you read some
31:37
Speaker 1: of the statements that people make about this in this field,
31:40
Speaker 1: like Dr Hunt points out, a lot of the writers
31:44
Speaker 1: were kind of self deprecating. They really took pains not
31:49
Speaker 1: to anger those those boys clubs that wouldn't let them
31:54
Speaker 1: into the meetings, which stinks because they're doing valuable work.
31:58
Speaker 1: And in some cases people came to rely on it
32:01
Speaker 1: just to spice up their day, to spice up the weeks.
32:05
Speaker 1: They called it a necessary repast. That's at least what
32:10
Speaker 1: Gaddy said when she wrote a letter about seeweed collecting
32:12
Speaker 1: to her sister in law. And because they like the
32:18
Speaker 1: language they use is so evocative. It doesn't have the
32:22
Speaker 1: same kind of dry classification technical writing aspects of what
32:29
Speaker 1: of like male seaweed hunters in British seaweeds there's this
32:34
Speaker 1: one description is cool and this was in uh this
32:37
Speaker 1: is an Atlas Obscurity too. One specimen seaweed is described
32:42
Speaker 1: as get this. I thought you would like this word delicately,
32:45
Speaker 1: Member Naceus, Oh yeah, Memberinus And yeah, is this the
32:54
Speaker 1: same person that kind of gave some tips on how
32:58
Speaker 1: to go about it the process like for a for
33:01
Speaker 1: a novice, Yes, yeah, she's popularizing this. Getty is popularizing
33:06
Speaker 1: this and also is kind of an an evangelist for
33:11
Speaker 1: Seaweed Collective. Yeah, evangelist. As you mentioned earlier. I mean
33:14
Speaker 1: there there there was a kind of religious reverie attached
33:18
Speaker 1: to this, um, you know, process of of somehow getting
33:21
Speaker 1: closer to what God hath made, you know, and all
33:25
Speaker 1: of that stuff. Um. But Gaddy gives some tips, you know,
33:29
Speaker 1: to kind of further democratize this process and and let
33:32
Speaker 1: you know, maybe women that are wanting to kind of
33:34
Speaker 1: dip their toe in the and seaweed collecting, uh, some
33:38
Speaker 1: tips on how to go about it. One I mentioned
33:41
Speaker 1: earlier about the idea of wearing your petticoats, you know,
33:44
Speaker 1: while on the seaweed hunt, that came directly from her.
33:47
Speaker 1: She encouraged would be seaweed hunters too, continue to wear
33:52
Speaker 1: their petticoats on top, she said, but she refers to
33:55
Speaker 1: them as necessary necessary draperies, right, um, but then suggests
34:02
Speaker 1: that they should wear men's boots and own it. She
34:06
Speaker 1: has this quote, Uh, feel all the luxury of not
34:10
Speaker 1: having to be afraid of your boots, feel all the
34:14
Speaker 1: comfort of walking steadily forward, the very strength of the
34:19
Speaker 1: souls making you tread firm. And I will say, I
34:24
Speaker 1: remember I had this boss that's really cool, older dude
34:27
Speaker 1: named Alan Cook, who he's a great guitar player. I
34:29
Speaker 1: worked from a radio station and he like did this
34:31
Speaker 1: classical music show. But he gave me this really good
34:33
Speaker 1: piece of advice one time. He said, if you're doing
34:36
Speaker 1: yard work, where those really thick leather gardening gloves, he said,
34:40
Speaker 1: because they make you stronger. And he's right. If you
34:44
Speaker 1: have if you're not afraid of, you know, digging up
34:47
Speaker 1: your delicate you know fingies, you're gonna grip things harder
34:50
Speaker 1: and you're gonna be more confident. And I love this
34:52
Speaker 1: idea of like feeling the souls making you tread firm.
34:57
Speaker 1: You know, it reminds me of that piece of advice
34:59
Speaker 1: I got. Yeah, Yeah, that's great advice. Honestly, there's another
35:03
Speaker 1: piece of advice that Gaddy gives where she says she
35:08
Speaker 1: basically tells people to use the buddy system. She's because
35:13
Speaker 1: you know, they're still getting a little further away from
35:18
Speaker 1: urban areas. Chores can be dangerous, they're slippery rocks, tides
35:24
Speaker 1: can be tricky if you get too far out, So
35:27
Speaker 1: that leads Getty to write a new water mark expedition
35:31
Speaker 1: is more comfortably undertaken under the protection of a gentleman.
35:35
Speaker 1: So she also talks about how to convince the guy
35:39
Speaker 1: to go with you on this thing. Uh, And she says,
35:45
Speaker 1: you know, try to sweeten the pot with enticements. And
35:48
Speaker 1: she notes he may fossilize or sketch or even if
35:52
Speaker 1: he will be savage and barbaric shoot gulls. So it's
35:58
Speaker 1: like saying to you know, a partner or someone you knows,
36:02
Speaker 1: the dude saying, I want to go seaweed hunting, but
36:05
Speaker 1: it'll be fun for you too. You can shoot some
36:09
Speaker 1: seagulls I don't know. Man, make the most of it.
36:13
Speaker 1: That's how they would try to get a chaperone because
36:15
Speaker 1: chaperone chaperoning was still very much a thing. Right And
36:19
Speaker 1: now that we've kind of laid out what this was,
36:22
Speaker 1: how popular it was, even though a lot of people
36:24
Speaker 1: today have never heard about it, we have to ask
36:27
Speaker 1: why is it not around today? Why did it eventually?
36:32
Speaker 1: And we're not we didn't make up why did it
36:35
Speaker 1: dry out? We we've seen this pun referenced in multiple sources,
36:40
Speaker 1: this word play, and this was a fat. It was
36:43
Speaker 1: very popular fat. It was a fat, And no, what
36:46
Speaker 1: if fads do just kind of go away after a
36:49
Speaker 1: time sometimes, I mean, I don't know, sometimes unfair to
36:52
Speaker 1: label something as a fat. It could just be cyclical, right,
36:55
Speaker 1: Sometimes things are really hot and then they kind of
36:57
Speaker 1: go away and they come back into fashion. So just
36:59
Speaker 1: because something as labeled as a fat doesn't mean it's
37:01
Speaker 1: like forever irrelevant. Who knows, there could be a new
37:05
Speaker 1: seaweed craze come back. People love all this kind of
37:08
Speaker 1: vented stuff, and everyone that I've told about this, he
37:11
Speaker 1: had no idea this was ever a thing. And B
37:14
Speaker 1: is instantly like, oh, that kind of makes sense. That
37:17
Speaker 1: sounds kind of cool. But also it does require sort
37:20
Speaker 1: of a position of privilege, doesn't it, Because you have
37:22
Speaker 1: to be near the seaside, you have to be geographically
37:26
Speaker 1: adjacent to a place where seaweed naturally occurs, or I
37:31
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe you can get it by mail, but
37:33
Speaker 1: that doesn't seem right, That doesn't seem like that would
37:34
Speaker 1: do the trick. I mean, I'm sure there's there's fancy
37:36
Speaker 1: ways of preserving this stuff in the mail, but that's
37:38
Speaker 1: sort of like takes half the fun out of it,
37:40
Speaker 1: doesn't it right. So this is weird because it became
37:43
Speaker 1: a little less popular as Victorian society began to be
37:49
Speaker 1: less uptight. It began to be okay to just say
37:52
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go have fun, you know what I mean.
37:55
Speaker 1: And so even if you look at a lot of
37:58
Speaker 1: the experts, they're not hundred percent sure exactly when seaweed
38:03
Speaker 1: collecting became less cool, but they're guessing it happened in
38:08
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth century as Victorian as Victorian thoughts give
38:14
Speaker 1: way to what we call modernism, and it's kind of
38:17
Speaker 1: hard to find scrap books who are guide books past
38:21
Speaker 1: that area of time, But we can safely say it
38:25
Speaker 1: was probably still practiced by a few people. It was there.
38:28
Speaker 1: There may be people with this hobby today because for
38:33
Speaker 1: some folks there's a lot of nostalgia in it, you know,
38:36
Speaker 1: like I went and collected seaweed as a young child
38:39
Speaker 1: with my mother, and now I meet my sister every
38:44
Speaker 1: summer and we collect seaweed for our family seaweed book.
38:47
Speaker 1: That's cool. That's wholesome. It is. All of this does
38:50
Speaker 1: pretty wholesome, you know. This is one of the most
38:52
Speaker 1: wholesome episodes. I think we've done in a while, aside
38:54
Speaker 1: from the whole rampant misogyny that sort of forced women
38:57
Speaker 1: to trapes around in ponds, uh, in men's boots secretly,
39:02
Speaker 1: you know, obscured beneath their petticoats. But at the end
39:04
Speaker 1: of the day, this does kind of mark one of
39:07
Speaker 1: those crossover moments, ben you know what I mean, between
39:10
Speaker 1: like a generation almost where it's like the softening of
39:14
Speaker 1: the attitude, like well, women can maybe collect seaweed and
39:19
Speaker 1: make scrap books, and then before you know, and enough
39:21
Speaker 1: time goes by, women can look through microscopes and then
39:24
Speaker 1: women can you know, work outside the home. Crazy to think,
39:29
Speaker 1: but it is little steps like this to lead to
39:31
Speaker 1: those larger overarching changes in the way, uh you know,
39:36
Speaker 1: society treated women. Yeah, exactly. And there's another change that
39:41
Speaker 1: maybe on the way. Scrap Booking is still very popular
39:44
Speaker 1: and I think our pal Diana Brown or or Ridiculous
39:47
Speaker 1: Romance told us she actually went to a scrap booking
39:50
Speaker 1: convention one Time's right, that's right, yeah, and do check
39:53
Speaker 1: out Ridiculous Romance. We are Key's huge fans of the shows. Um,
39:57
Speaker 1: so it's weird that we think, like we see another
40:03
Speaker 1: sea change because scrap booking is still around. But what
40:06
Speaker 1: happens when the idea of preserving ephemera like this shout
40:12
Speaker 1: out to you Max, what happens when it moves into
40:15
Speaker 1: the digital realm? Like, yes, everybody has a camera on
40:19
Speaker 1: their phone or a lot of people have cameras on
40:21
Speaker 1: their phones, and they take excellent photos. But what are
40:24
Speaker 1: your odds of printing that and making a little book
40:27
Speaker 1: with it? Your You might you probably just forward it
40:30
Speaker 1: and say like, ha ha, last night was epic. Oh,
40:32
Speaker 1: it's a really good point. B It's something that we
40:34
Speaker 1: haven't discussed at all, but I think we talked about
40:36
Speaker 1: a little bit off podcasts. Yeah, the idea of you know,
40:39
Speaker 1: my mom is very, very still fixated on having printed
40:44
Speaker 1: things because she doesn't really be comfortable with the digital realm. Um,
40:49
Speaker 1: she you know, it's a really good Christmas present for
40:51
Speaker 1: her if I like take some cell phone photos and
40:53
Speaker 1: like get them printed, because there are you know, websites
40:56
Speaker 1: that will make a pretty nice, high quality print out
40:59
Speaker 1: of these high resu you shouldn't phone photos, but most people,
41:02
Speaker 1: you're right, don't go to those steps, and that's what
41:04
Speaker 1: puts things in the realm of ephemera. Shout out to
41:07
Speaker 1: Ephemeral UH show that are our buddy Alex Williams and
41:11
Speaker 1: super producer Max Williams uh make together um in addition
41:15
Speaker 1: to a few other amazing folks. But it's a show
41:18
Speaker 1: about things that kind of disappear over time, whether because
41:23
Speaker 1: they're lost or they just deteriorate. There is something finite
41:27
Speaker 1: about these things, but in a way, something more lasting,
41:32
Speaker 1: Like I don't know, like for some reason, like a
41:34
Speaker 1: digital file to me, while sure it's technically indestructible, you
41:40
Speaker 1: couldn't reproduce it given an apocalypse event anymore if you
41:45
Speaker 1: didn't have the technology to uh encode it or too
41:47
Speaker 1: to decode it um. Whereas a wax cylinder or like
41:52
Speaker 1: a vinyl record or a photograph or something like that,
41:55
Speaker 1: you could find ways to probably rake something up to
41:58
Speaker 1: enjoy that, you know, like you could probably make a
42:00
Speaker 1: turntable out of a coconut and some pine needles or something.
42:03
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm I'm sort of half choking, but I'm
42:05
Speaker 1: also not analog technology and just objects are in some ways,
42:11
Speaker 1: you know, more real inherently. Yeah, That's why I like
42:14
Speaker 1: older cars. That's why I prefer physical books because the
42:21
Speaker 1: it's just different reading a book that way. Uh, the
42:26
Speaker 1: tangible aspect of it makes, in my opinion, whatever you're
42:30
Speaker 1: whatever you're digesting, feel more real. And that's a great point.
42:35
Speaker 1: Now this is where we get we we're drawing a
42:39
Speaker 1: bit to a close. Margaret Gaddy had a long life
42:44
Speaker 1: and she loved seaweed collecting up until her up until
42:50
Speaker 1: she passed away in eighteen seventy three. Her collections have survived.
42:56
Speaker 1: You can see them today at the St Andrew's University
42:59
Speaker 1: and Scotland, and curators have been going working to restore these,
43:04
Speaker 1: to organize them. Uh. And she even has a species
43:09
Speaker 1: of Australian algae named after her, the Daddya pimeella. So
43:17
Speaker 1: congratulations to you, Margaret Daddy. Although it took way too
43:21
Speaker 1: long in my opinion, you did finally get your doe
43:24
Speaker 1: as a scientist. Getting something named after you is pretty great, right,
43:31
Speaker 1: it is pretty great. And um, wasn't there a spider
43:35
Speaker 1: or something that was named after Dave Coolier recently? I
43:38
Speaker 1: don't know. I'm also a fan of like celebrity namings
43:42
Speaker 1: of creatures. Others are David Bowie spider, you know, because
43:45
Speaker 1: like the spiders from Mars and all that there are
43:47
Speaker 1: some incredibly funny ones, but I can't I'm trying to remember. Uh.
43:52
Speaker 1: There were some examples I saw of names that were
43:55
Speaker 1: meant to be insulting, like you name a hum bowl
44:01
Speaker 1: dung related animal after some politician or celebrity didn't like.
44:05
Speaker 1: But just just for fun, let me read you, guys,
44:08
Speaker 1: some real names for things from our friends at mental Floss,
44:12
Speaker 1: because we always love to shut up Mental Floss. These
44:14
Speaker 1: are real scientific names. Mhm, Turtise Maximus, that's a bird?
44:22
Speaker 1: Is that like the turd ferguson related that? I'll Ben,
44:26
Speaker 1: I've already shouted you after this, I believe, maybe not
44:28
Speaker 1: on this show. But Ben gave me the most wonderful,
44:31
Speaker 1: thoughtful gift. It was a book called Dumb Birds of
44:34
Speaker 1: North America, and the cover of it has a bird
44:38
Speaker 1: on it called like the North Kentucky butt Nugget or
44:41
Speaker 1: something like that. I'm not sure if if how much
44:43
Speaker 1: of it is real and how much of it is
44:45
Speaker 1: just total first, but it's like the only bird book
44:48
Speaker 1: that I would ever want to own, and I thank
44:50
Speaker 1: you again heartly for that. I have it in my bathroom.
44:54
Speaker 1: It's like the bathroom reader for when guests are you
44:56
Speaker 1: know taking repost that is a place of prestige. Uh.
45:00
Speaker 1: And all the entries just to shout that book out,
45:03
Speaker 1: the field Guide to Dumb North American Birds or Dumb
45:05
Speaker 1: Birds in North America. All the entries are max bleep
45:10
Speaker 1: me on this are stuff like you know, the Great
45:12
Speaker 1: American and the first paragraph that says something like this
45:15
Speaker 1: motherfucker is a real piece of crap, you know what
45:19
Speaker 1: I mean? Like the it's not for children, but if
45:23
Speaker 1: you have you have some I don't know. I think
45:26
Speaker 1: teenagers like that book to write like your daughter likes it,
45:30
Speaker 1: I bet absolutely, And my girlfriend day loves it. I
45:33
Speaker 1: think she she is absolutely in love with that book.
45:36
Speaker 1: So it's a lot of fun check it out. But man,
45:38
Speaker 1: who knew that we could talk about seaweed scrap Book
45:41
Speaker 1: And for forty five minutes Tuesday I had a suspicion
45:45
Speaker 1: and off air I had, um we have been talking,
45:48
Speaker 1: and I had said, Okay, we might need to lean
45:51
Speaker 1: into the banter on this one and see what you know,
45:53
Speaker 1: if we have any tangents that will take us someplace
45:56
Speaker 1: really crazy, which is leading to I think first ever
46:00
Speaker 1: tangent Teas it turns out they are good buddy. Mr
46:04
Speaker 1: Max Williams is an expert the sport of curling, and
46:12
Speaker 1: I I don't know about you know, but I have
46:14
Speaker 1: at best a very vague understanding of what curling is.
46:17
Speaker 1: So one day, in an upcoming episode, we're going to
46:20
Speaker 1: have Max introduces to curling. If you would be so kind,
46:24
Speaker 1: Mr Williams, it seems like you need a lot of stuff.
46:27
Speaker 1: You know, first you need an ice drink, than you
46:29
Speaker 1: need those stones and the weird brooms and special shoes. Yeah,
46:34
Speaker 1: I mean, honestly, it's a lot less than you think.
46:36
Speaker 1: But Ben, I do have a good, you know, teaser story.
46:39
Speaker 1: I remember it was the year was It was in February.
46:44
Speaker 1: I was actually hanging out with the esteem Noel Brown
46:46
Speaker 1: at a cabin and yeah, I'm about I'm about to, like,
46:50
Speaker 1: you know, watch the gold medal matth United States versus Sweeden.
46:54
Speaker 1: No I think just like A looked at me. He
46:55
Speaker 1: goes okay, and then went to thought of sorry, I
47:00
Speaker 1: didn't mean. I didn't mean to be dismissive. You know,
47:03
Speaker 1: I just never met a curling inuzzy as before. I
47:06
Speaker 1: remember you just being very confused the entire You're like,
47:09
Speaker 1: so wait, you're gonna stay up because you know it
47:11
Speaker 1: wasn't created. It's very late. It's like, you're gonna stay
47:13
Speaker 1: up really late and watch this. I'm like yeah, He's like, okay,
47:17
Speaker 1: all right, you know you do you buddy, that's how
47:21
Speaker 1: to go. You remember who one? Oh? Yes, the United
47:23
Speaker 1: States won the gold medal. Oh my god, congratulations a
47:26
Speaker 1: year later. Two years later, so four years it felt
47:29
Speaker 1: worth it, right, So this is just one example of
47:34
Speaker 1: many many niche hobbies that came about during this time.
47:38
Speaker 1: There are other examples. Diet tom arranging in particular is
47:42
Speaker 1: really neat. They kind of look like kaleidoscope if you
47:45
Speaker 1: ever had a kaleidoscope as a kid. But maybe those
47:47
Speaker 1: are a story for another day. I had a blast
47:50
Speaker 1: doing this. When we beat the curse, I referenced, I
47:53
Speaker 1: guess we should mention that we wanted to do this
47:55
Speaker 1: episode for a while, and we started wondering whether it
47:58
Speaker 1: was cursed. Yeah, was largely because of guests, m obligations,
48:03
Speaker 1: not obligations. We love all our guests, and we had
48:06
Speaker 1: some incredible ones recently for some shows in the Extended
48:09
Speaker 1: Ridiculous Universe. The e R you right, is that the one?
48:14
Speaker 1: And then we had some illness that that caused some
48:16
Speaker 1: problems and some scheduling things. But you're right, it's definitely
48:19
Speaker 1: one that we've punted quite a few times. But the
48:21
Speaker 1: good news is that because of that, I think we
48:23
Speaker 1: both got to spend a little more time with his
48:25
Speaker 1: material and realize that it is a really cool story
48:28
Speaker 1: and not in need of nearly as much banter as
48:31
Speaker 1: as we and originally might have thought. But I'm glad
48:32
Speaker 1: we got to fit some of that in there at
48:34
Speaker 1: the end here. Thanks Max for sharing, and thanks thanks
48:39
Speaker 1: for tuning in. Fellow Ridiculous Historians, we would love to
48:42
Speaker 1: hear your stories about weird hobbies from days of your
48:47
Speaker 1: Let us know. You can find us on our Facebook page,
48:50
Speaker 1: Ridiculous Historians. You can also hit us up any pretty
48:55
Speaker 1: much anywhere on social media, not just as a show,
48:58
Speaker 1: but as individuals. I am appen bulling on Instagram. If
49:02
Speaker 1: you want spoilers for upcoming research and just weird rabbit
49:05
Speaker 1: holes I've found I've fallen down. You can find me
49:08
Speaker 1: on Twitter appen bull in hs W. How about you
49:11
Speaker 1: nol catch me outside seaweeding or on Instagram exclusively where
49:15
Speaker 1: I am at how now Noel Brown, how about you,
49:18
Speaker 1: Max Williams. Yeah, you can find my personal stuff on
49:21
Speaker 1: Twitter at a t L on the score, Max Williams.
49:24
Speaker 1: And since we've talked about a lot of ephemeral on
49:27
Speaker 1: this you can find out more about ephemeral on Instagram
49:29
Speaker 1: and Twitter at femeral dot show. We actually have an
49:33
Speaker 1: episode of two part coming out this week. It's about
49:35
Speaker 1: Earling Kagi. I believe I'm saying that name right. If
49:38
Speaker 1: you like the Peter Fersion episode of this show, you
49:40
Speaker 1: would love that episode as well, very Peter. I saw
49:44
Speaker 1: Alex post about it saying that it was one of
49:46
Speaker 1: his favorite conversations he's ever had for this show, so
49:49
Speaker 1: I think it's going to be a really good one.
49:50
Speaker 1: I can't wait to check it out. And let me
49:52
Speaker 1: say really quickly ridiculous stories. When Max says his personal
49:55
Speaker 1: stuff on on Twitter, it gets quite personal. Let me
49:59
Speaker 1: tell you, very spicy. It's pretty much your Your Twitter
50:04
Speaker 1: is just default setting on after Dark Hot tub Duck
50:10
Speaker 1: with Max Williams. Williams. I'll get there one day. So
50:13
Speaker 1: thank you, of course to Max for spinning this straw
50:18
Speaker 1: into audio gold. Thanks of course to Mr Casey Pegram,
50:23
Speaker 1: Thanks to Alex Williams uh and thanks to our at
50:27
Speaker 1: this point long lost, much missed, sort of missed nemesis,
50:33
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland AK, the Quister Christoph roscionis Eve, Jeff codes
50:37
Speaker 1: here in spirit. Uh, everyone else, my mom um, the
50:43
Speaker 1: ghost of Abraham Lincoln, Tom waits, you know, please what
50:47
Speaker 1: that no no one knows? Yeah, the Colonel uh and
50:52
Speaker 1: and and and everyone else that we've forgotten. We love
50:54
Speaker 1: you all, uh and we'll see you next time. Focus
51:00
Speaker 1: m HM. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit
51:06
Speaker 1: the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
51:09
Speaker 1: listen to your favorite shows