Bittersweet Infamy - #25 - Mount Vesuvius

Episode Date: August 22, 2021

Taylor tells Josie about the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79. Plus: letters home from a COVID-era summer camp.

Welcome to Bittersweet Infamy. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy, the shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. Taylor, did you ever go to summer camp, like sleep away summer camp? I went to a camp once on a field trip. It was a sleepover thing, but it was it was like a class field trip. And I was a counselor at a camp for queer youth for camp. I was a counselor at camp out for three years. Three years. I did it three times. Nice. Was it all summer? It was no, it was I think like three days. Okay. So I never I didn't I knew people who they all went to

Kwanos, which I guess was the local VAT. I think it was like a Christian summer camp, but it was like the only game in town. So even if you weren't Christian, you kind of went there. Yeah. And I know people would have these like talk about like Kwanos memories or Kwanos crushes or whatever. And I would think that they were just like aliens. Like I would be like, what are you? I'm from Newton. I don't I don't know this life. I really stopped doing your tracks. Well, as you could probably imagine, summer camp in 2021 is a little rough. Mm hmm. We bet for various reasons, especially sleepaway camp. And there is one camp in

Maltenboro, New Hampshire, that experienced some pretty rough times this summer. Let's hear about it. Camp Quinn barge. It's 80 years old. It's been running for 85 years. Just those are two different numbers. Yeah. Okay. 82 and a half. Let's let's just let's just split the difference. Just do that. No, it's definitely 85. I don't know why I said 80. But camp Quinn barge has been running for 85 years. And it is a classic kind of rustic sleepaway camp. All I can see is wet, hot American summer in my brain, right? You know, canoes. Yeah, the whole thing. They run it typically in two week installments. So kids come for two weeks. And then the next batch comes in for two weeks, two weeks that costs parents at

least in 2021 $3,400. And yet this two week camp, their first session had to close, they had to send every camper home after six days. Okay. So it has been called according to the Boston Globe where this information comes from. It's been compared to the fire festival. Oh, no, that's bad. Sleepaway camp. I know when that's your when that's your comparison, it's a little rough. Yeah, there were a few warning signs that maybe told the directors of the camp and even parents because they were sharing that information with parents that this might not be the best season of camp coming up. One early issue was that they were having hiring problems. So they couldn't hire enough people. Okay. There was short hiring shortages is the term that the camp director

use. And then when they did have a few people hired last minute, they either dropped or they just ghosted. They said, Yeah, sure. I'll sign up. And then they never heard from them. That's a bad sign. So the weekend before camp starts, they have a crazy hiring frenzy. And 19 year olds, 20 year olds apparently put in their resume and the camp gets back and they say, Okay, can you come tomorrow? Great. Okay, cool. We'll train you. Training involves playing around a kickball, looking at the turtles. Yeah, maybe some CPR. And then you're good to go. That sounds about right. So yeah, yeah. For any other year, that sounds about right. For any other year, maybe, or maybe if there's enough staff, but they can't even with this like a fast tracked hiring, they can't, they

get enough to run the camp, but it's not as much as they would have liked to have the camper to counselor ratio is not super great. Not what it should be. It's like 20 kids to each counselor, which is a lot for sleepaway camp considering you have to deal with, you know, it's not just like, Oh, Johnny didn't bring a lunch today. Let's figure it out. It's like, that's extraordinarily difficult. You have to do that 20 times each. Yes. Yeah. And your training was looking at turtles, you know, like, you know what's going on. Yeah. So some of the issues that came up, a counselor got punched in the face by a camper. That's tough. That same camper hit a fellow camper in the head with a wooden block. It seems to me we've got a bad apple.

That camper was removed from camp. That did solve a few problems when they asked him to go after the first. The wooden block meanings have gone down 100%. We can track the statistics. I think it was this one student or this one camper. Apparently, one of the dishwashers in the kitchen broke and on several meal times, dirty dishes were served. Yum. Meals were served on dirty dishes. How is that different from any other summer camp? Well, enough, I guess that in addition to the dirty dishes, the kitchen also had an issue with undercooking some meatballs. Oh, that won't do. There were four campers who suffered from bouts of vomiting and they had to be quarantined because it's 2021 and if anybody's sick,

you've got to like be shut. My summer in the corn cabin, that's so depressing. I know, I know. That's such a uniquely 2021 shattering childhood memory. Yeah. Oh, big time and you know the Wi-Fi is shitty. It's gotta be. Yeah, you ain't getting on looking at your Minecraft videos. Sorry, bro. No, it's not happening. Do kids still give a shit about Minecraft? What is it now? Friday night at Freddy's? Yeah, I think so. What's that other one, the Battle Royale? Fortnite. Is that old team? Fortnite, yeah. The flossing, the flossing. Yeah, kids to this day, to this very day, love flossing and do it all the time. He says while dabbing. I dab a lot and I don't regret it. You do, I like it. I don't regret it.

The camp gets its food shipments from Cisco and it is confirmed through Cisco as well as the camp that they delayed a shipment by one whole day. So the camp was out of food for an entire day? Oh, this is like on Camp Cresty. Yeah, yes. I totally forgot about Camp Cresty. This one is a little sadder. The camp had, I mean, it's 85 years old. They had some newer additions or some newer like policy and inclusivity additions to Camp Life, which was meant to make it more inclusive for LGBTQ plus campers and counselors. But counselors said that that was not really the case and they were not made to feel very comfortable. There were campers whose parents removed them from the camp because they had trans counselors, which is tough. No one's having a good time

on that one. A lot of, or I should say with the very limited number of counselors, there were still counselors who had to be fired because they didn't follow procedures or they didn't do things properly. There were, of course, a lot of counselors who just quit. They're like, no, I'm not doing that. No, thank you. I'm not going to watch 20 kids. Yeah. And do all of their laundry or and you're trying to kill me with the cooking and exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I'm cutting out. This kid's trying to hit me with a wooden block. I don't know what that's about. Yeah. Punch me in the face. This is a letter written home by a camper. Oh, no. I'm so scared. Go ahead. Are you ready? Yes. We have been in tears, bored and devastated the whole

day. The camp director is lying to you all. You have to trust us. You have to. We are not joking and we are not having fun. So many things are wrong with this place. Oh, my God. That was the father of that camper mailed that into the globe. I would do. I would do. But requested that his son's anonymity be retained. I am happy about that. I am happy about that. That's fine. These poor children, are they still there? No, no, they don't know because after six days, the camp counselor, a man named Eric Carlson, who took over, he had been a counselor and had done some administration for the camp, took over the camp and became director in 2020. And he, he wrote everybody about some difficulties that they were having. He admitted it was not

the best camp time, but the kids were still having fun. And then the next day he sent a letter home or sent an email home being like, you have to come collect your children because camp is done. A lot of, a lot of that information or that communication was based off of the late Cisco shipment of food, which technically was not the camp's fault. So. Yeah, but ideally, ideally you want to be able to survive a situation like that without the children going feral with boredom and devastation. Right, we are devastated. We are devastated. Or I don't need to laugh. It's only because it's over and everyone's okay, hopefully. And every, yeah, hopefully, hopefully there's no mental scars. Eric Carlson, the director,

wrote home to everybody or, you know, wrote to the parents after camp had closed and had apologized sincerely. And he, he writes to them upon reflection, we know that camp is only good for the kids if we can ensure their health and safety. That is why as soon as we finish our closing work for 2021, we will begin preparing for summer 2020. I knew it in my head. I knew it. I was like, he's going to do what they all do, which is offer them, which is all tally forth. The discount coupon. He didn't even offer him a discount. Oh, it would have been the sport. I don't, I, yeah, this is a, this has shades of that Watt Christmas Village, Lapland, New Forest. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally, at least like this camp has like 2020 to kind of back up its,

its demise, but Lapland didn't even have that. So. No. Fuck. Well, that sounds like a real, that sounds like a real summer camp from hell. Yeah. Yeah. We are bored. We are devastated. We are devastated. The one word you don't want to read in your child's letter from camp is devastated. No. Uh-uh. Also good letter writing. Well played. Well done. Yeah, no, very good job. You've got a feature in blowing the whistle if you want one. Yeah. What you got for me? So this episode drops August 22nd, which is two short days before my birthday. Taylor's birthday. The most important holiday of the year. So just as a big jerk off, I decided that I was going to give you the most infamous thing to

happen on my birthday, August 24th. Cute. I love it. Right? It's fun. And I've got a good one. Oh, I've no doubt, but I'm. I've got a, it's like a, if it's not an A-lister, it's like a solid B-plus, you know what I mean? You know, B-plus is underrated. Yeah. The grade of scraping along, but you know, every now and then you put it in, you put in the work. Before we get into that, let me tell you just some little snippets of some other infamous things that have happened on my birthday, August 24th. Okay, I'm ready. 1857. The panic of 1857 begins. I don't know what that means. Wait, you didn't Wikipedia? Yes, I clicked the link, but all it said, it's one of the most severe economic crises in the United States history. But it looks, it looks dry. I'll take that. I mean,

do they teach you about the panic of 1857 in your high schools? Oh, you know. Maybe not? No. Okay. No. 1857, that's before the Civil War. Maybe it like, maybe it fed into the Civil War. I don't know. You're a historian. I like it. 1989, the year that I was born. Oh, hello. Hello. Same year, Pete Rose banned from baseball for gambling. Yeah, Peaty. America's lovable loser. Bye. Yeah. 1991. I don't know if this is actually infamous, but it's Ukrainian Independence Day. Okay. I don't know either. No, but it's, they succeeded. They were, you know, everyone was getting out. The party, the party was starting to suck. So yeah, 2004, two aircraft are destroyed by Chechny and suicide bombers near Moscow killing 90. Oh, 90. Yeah, a lot. 2006, Pluto is reclassified

as a dwarf planet. Fuck that bullshit. I love how pissed off people get about this, because it's so arbitrary. It's, and I love watching people get like, like legit rattled, defending Pluto's right to be a planet because no, it's not August 24, 2006, bitches. It's a dwarf planet. Planet's still in there. Just chill. That's true. That's true. Okay. Like your view on that. Thank you. I feel the same about the Oxford comma. Fuck it. Who cares? 2010. Mexican crime group Los Zedas kill 72 immigrants in San Fernando in one of the worst atrocities ever committed by Mexican drug traffickers. That one, I did a little like, yeah, I did a little click into that one and I would be interested in learning more about it.

It sounds awful. They, they killed like 72 undocumented immigrants, like execution style all in a row. Oh my god. Yeah, it sounds horrifying. That's, yeah. Same day 2010. Hainan Airlines flight 8387 crashes killing 44, so it was a bad day in 2010. Yeah. Oh my god. But the one that I'm gonna talk to you about has an even more massive toll than all of these. In terms of obviously in terms of like sheer numbers, not, not like, not in terms of like emotional weight necessarily, but in terms of sheer numbers. Okay. As I said, it's a pretty well known one. You may have heard this one, which is important because you've quietly accumulated quite a little streak. So in episode 25, I feel like it might be finally time to do one that you've

heard of. That's right. We're, we're, we're a quarter today. We are a quarter. We're halfway to 50 quarter the way to 100. Uh huh. Uh huh. Quarter life crisis. Feeling uncertain about our past choices, but we're young. We've got time. More choices to feel regret about in the future. Yeah. And we can rent a car. Yes. Very important. So this is gonna be, we're gonna get in the time machine for this one and we're going back further than we've ever gone on this show. Prehistoric. I know Fran did some like evolution of man shit, but that's an asterisk to me. Like, that doesn't count. Like, so get in the time machine, back past the 1900s, past the 1800s, you see all these people churning butter, wave to them, say hello. Goodbye. Hey. Oh, my feet kind

of tingle. We're moving so fast. We're zooming. We are zooming through these past the 1700s, past the 1600s, past the 1500s. What? We are going all the way back to 79 AD. What? This gimmick will never have a better moment. Josie, what were you doing in 79 AD? In 79 AD. Oh, my God. I was probably dying. I don't know. I was in my old age. I don't know. I don't know. Were you Jesus? What are you? I'm for clumps. Well, I was born in zero. No, I'm thinking I'm like, I'm like 25 and I'm like at the very end of my life. I've lived a good life. I see. I see. It's time for me to go. I have my family surrounding me, my daughters, my great-grandchildren, my great-grandchildren. This is nice. You got busy, man. Yeah. You got in there.

Well, there's not a lot of time. It's fruit flies. You got to do what you got. You want me to do anything else, so. It was a good run. So, that is one possibility. Let me put to you another possibility. Please do. Josie, the year is 79 AD and you are a wealthy Roman woman. Dope. The upper crust, the top 1%. Okay. Okay. To give you a little snapshot of what Rome is like right now, Emperor Vespasian has just died from diarrhea. Poor guy. That's a rough way to go. No matter what year it is, that's a rough way to go. His last words on his deathbed are, I think I'm turning into a god. Oh no. No, you're just looping too much. Poor guy. Did you hear about this extreme slip and slide show that they had to shut down because everyone on the set got

diarrhea? It's not funny. I hope everyone's well. No, but now I'm just imagining a slip and slide. That's the problem. 79 AD. That's not the problem. That's you. That's what you think. So, his, if you want a slip and slide, you're that rich. You can have one put in. Oh, okay, goody, goody, goody. Vespasian's son Titus has newly taken over as emperor. In the past 10 years of his reign, construction has started on what will become the famous Colosseum. Oh, okay. After some recent times of turmoil, including civil wars and a year that saw four emperors, Rome has settled into a slightly more stable era. And you, Josie, are reaping the rewards of that stability. Not only do you have a palatial home in the capital, you've recently acquired a summer house.

How fabulous. Man, you let that get to your head real quick. Okay. Yep, sorry. It was a slip and slide. That was my entry point. That's true. Once I told you you had a fuck around, get a slip and slide money, you just, you went mad with power. It's in the atrium. There's like wonderful marble stack shoes that surround it. Exactly. I love it. It's made of calfskin. So what do you, what do you know about kind of the Roman Empire as we talk about it? I've watched a few episodes of Rome on HBO. Nice. Uh, my mom loves it. Nice. So I took Latin in high school. Hey, wow. So, um. To what end? Yeah, I'm in, I, to the end of the night, can't speak it because nope. Yeah, bust out a bit of Latin for us. Eche. Puella.

What is Puella? Uh, girl. You're a girl. You are. Eche means look. Oh, look, girl. I'm too deeper. Look, girl. See, poor being my Latin also not very good. But it was really helpful in terms of like learning languages. Like you learn, you know, like the structure. Yeah, of course, because Latin is foundational for so many languages. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The main thing I got out of it was I had a really good Latin teacher. I had this really, really cool, cool guy who when we got into like translating stuff, we'd like translate some like kind of naughty, like Catullus and yeah, Catullus had a mouth. This is very, and my teacher, Mr. Eptograph, he always wore a suit. He always had a tie on and he always sprayed

binocca in his mouth. Like as a kind of a nervous tick, I think. But when we'd get to like a saucy bit in a Catullus poem, he would ceremoniously stand up from his desk and walk over to the door and close it. And that's how we knew. It's like, there's gonna be good. Move your textbooks on to your laps, boys. Exactly. But he also loved everything that we read and he would be like, sometimes he would be like emotional when we would read parts from the Aeneid. Aeneid, sorry. Yeah, he was really just like, he loved the work so much. And he was a good, he was a very like generous and kind teacher, even though the translation was kind of monotonous and you could be very, very stickler about it and very intense. And he was just cool as a cucumber.

Nice. I loved him. Love a good teacher story. Let me tell you more about your fucking fabulous mansion. You're never talking to this man again. He is not on your echelon. Okay. Also, I should say that what I'm seeing is the illustrated pages in my textbook. Oh, cool. No, I love that. Where, yeah. I love that. Where it's all like clean cut white people. Yeah. In togas. And the carriage is in the dish for like 10 chapters. I don't know what happened there. That's useful to me because I didn't know how much to draw the scene and I went for a moderate amount of drawing so that if you knew nothing about this, then at the very least I could kind of put you there a little bit, but it's not hopefully not over the top. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, Puella. I know what's going down.

Your summer house. It is an opulently appointed mansion centrally located in a seaside playground for the rich. The cool air rolls in off the water. You are in the shadow of a beautiful verdant mountain that is said to exist as a tribute to Hercules himself. It's going to blow up, isn't it? Listen, it's not about the destination. It's about the journey. Oh, I know this one. You know this one? Okay. Okay. Don't spoil it just yet. We're getting there. We're getting there. Okay. Okay. Okay. So let me describe to you your mansion that you should enjoy while you can. Okay, yes. Life is short. Yes, very much so. Olympic-sized swimming pool, heated, dozens of rooms. You could have a guest in every room of this house and still have

30 rooms left over. Are the Olympics... Oh, yeah. No, it's wrong. Yeah, the Olympics have happened. There is the size pool that it can be described as... That it could conceivably be, yes. I consider that. And it's heated? Yeah. I'm sorry, I got to cut up on the pool. You know me so well. No, I listen. You look lead with the pool. Always lead with the pool. Good work. Always lead with the pool. Yeah. You got gorgeous terraces, a lush garden, brightly painted frescoes of live, taut people fucking in all kinds of extravagant positions. Just like you like. Taut, live, vibrant. Got it. Sometimes three, sometimes two, sometimes men, sometimes women who can say. Beautiful. And you wake up a little late today. You slept in because you are so

fabulously wealthy that time ceases to mean anything. Of course. The best kind. And you think it's August 24th. It's Taylor's birthday. Why don't I go to the bakery to get him a nice loaf, pick up a couple pomegranates at the market, and then maybe I can go to a jeweler to get him something fine prepared from some silver and stones that I've stored away. I started off, I was like, oh, she could go to the bakery, get me a loaf, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, wait, no, she's rich. She has to give me jewelry. Yeah, why am I a loaf? I don't know. I don't. I had such a hard time making this first part come together. You have no idea. You're getting the best version of it. You're getting the best version of it that I got. I appreciate that.

And you think afterwards, since I'm out and about, why don't I go to the huge amphitheater outside of town to watch the gladiators train a little bit of blood sport on a summer day? Oh, yeah, that's good. Wakes me up a little bit. I'm a little sleepy from my sleep in. And you get bored of watching these these hot people fuck on your wall. You can go and watch hot people fight at the gladiator arena. Yeah, to the death. Great. So you go outside for your stroll. It's a hot day, dying days of August. You see people trickling in and out of the baths, flushed from enjoying the warm waters and great conversation. You consider it, but you're like, no, I'm horny. I want the gladiators. So you go. People are going about their daily tasks,

bringing their wares to the market, enjoying conversations in the city square. And then, from out of nowhere, an ungodly loud cracking noise echoes across the entire city of Pompeii. Oh, yeah, baby. Almost instantly, the sky begins to darken. The air fills with the noises of distressed Romans and braying animals. Lots of Latin, like a lot of very alarmed Latin going on. Yeah, yeah. The ground starts rumbling under your feet as an old woman yells, earthquake. The city is still under reconstruction from a recent earthquake. So it may be that, but that doesn't explain the column of smoke emerging from the mountain on the horizon. And now things are falling from the sky. At first, it's just tiles from roofs,

not loose by the rumbling, but suddenly it's rocks. You see the old woman get struck by one in the temple. She drops to the ground, dazed, and you want to reach over to help her, but more and more debris is falling from the sky, which is darkening further to a charcoal gray. You seek cover under an awning as more and more people are pelted by debris. They're tripping over each other now. They're trying to return to their homes or seek cover under nearby buildings. You hear a man exclaim to his wife that they need to get home to collect their children and their valuables, their gold. This stuns you from your days and you decide to try to make your way back home as safely as you can. But by now, it's completely dark and it's suffocatingly hot. You can feel your garments

sticking to your back. You can feel the sweat pouring from your forehead. People are screaming, wondering why the gods have forsaken them. Donkeys and sheep are braying and shrieking. The ground is so shaky, you can barely stand up, and the air is so thick with dust that you can barely breathe. Your chest feels like it's on fire. As you grow close to your home, you stumble on the body of one of your fellow citizens. On the ground next to him, two women are clutching a small girl between them, trying to soothe her as the air fills with ash and screaming and horrible rumbling. You pass a child clutching tightly onto his pet dog. You see the beginnings of a fire on the roof of the home next to yours and you hope that your mansion isn't next. Every time you breathe,

you feel like you're inhaling boiling water. Finally, you make your way into your home and you find the storeroom where you've been keeping food and wine. You reason that it's the most secure room in the house, the place where you're most likely to ride this out. You crawl into the corner and you curl into the fetal position and that's where archaeologists find you 1700 years later. BLEH BLEH BLEH BLEH Damn. Ugh, if I weren't sweaty already, I am now. Thanks. So this is obviously the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, which killed between 12 and 30,000 people. Tch. Those are two different numbers.

12,000 and 30,000. Got it. Okay. I'm there. So between 12,000 and 30,000 people died and the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed. Oh, Herculaneum. I haven't... okay, yeah, that's new to me. It's kind of like referred to sometimes as like the other Pompeii because it's a city, like I'll go into it a bit later, but it's like a city that that vibes like a smaller Pompeii, like the population is smaller, but otherwise it's got the same kind of vibe to it. Yeah, yeah, okay, that makes sense. But it's one of the most famous natural disasters in human history. It has inspired... So far. Oh, god. I'm just saying. No, you're not wrong.

It's inspired art, literature, movies, music, its legacy persists. I should say, just to the interest of full disclosure, that there is now recently some disagreement about whether this actually happened on August 24th or whether it happened like later in October, I think. But because I have a vested interest, we will be ignoring all evidence that this happened any date other than August 24th. Thank you. There must have been some calendars that got frozen in time. Everybody knows Pompeii happened on August 24th. Next question. Totally. If you like get out of elementary school at all, you know that. Yeah, exactly. They taught me that with Rogibib, man. Come on. And that Pluto was a planet. I'm just going to put that out there. Listen. Listen. Damn,

it caught my own logic. What do you know about the subject? I know that archaeologically, it's a really important site because the ash was able to preserve the entire town or towns. Yeah. Because I didn't know that. Because it fell so quickly and so completely, like kind of like everything was sandwiched by that ash, they've been able to pull a lot of knowledge about what a Roman town looked like. Yep. Let's start with a little bit about the volcano itself, Mount Vesuvius. It came into existence 25,000 years ago and is the only active volcano in Europe. It's situated about 10 kilometers away from Pompeii, about eight kilometers away from Herculaneum, and about 17 kilometers away relevantly from the city of Naples, which still stands in the modern

day. Oh, wow. Also, I did not know that that was the only volcano or, you know, active volcano in Europe. That is... What are the other ones? Name them. Isn't there some in like Iceland and stuff? Yeah, there are. They must mean continental Europe. They better mean because you've just made me look a fool. Correctly so. This podcast is over. Chuck the computer across the road. No, you are absolutely right. There are active volcanoes in Europe. I now take this to be continental Europe. The continent. The continent. So why would the ancient Romans build their outposts so close to an active volcano? The short answer is they didn't know. The last major eruption had happened 1500 years earlier. So by this point it looked like a very lush green mountain by all appearances. It doesn't... Now

when you see it, it kind of has like a caldera to it because it's been active for so long, but at the time it wouldn't have looked like that. So they'd never seen an active Vesuvius with their own eyes, so they were like, yo, rich soil close to the water. So that's not to say that Vesuvius was entirely dormant during this time. The volcanic activity kind of going on churning within Vesuvius would result in occasional earthquakes, including one in 63 AD and it caused extensive damage to kind of all the nearby cities. And then when the eruption came in 79 AD, they were still very much in the process of rebuilding from that other earthquake 13 years earlier. Yeah, you mentioned that, yeah. Yeah, they didn't know that the quakes had anything to do with Vesuvius. The Roman

understanding of seismic activity was pretty limited. They thought that earthquakes could happen anywhere, at random, and most likely as a divine sign from the gods, like an act of godly will. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, totally. I'm on that page. I get that, yeah. Sorry, I also just keep thinking as you talk about like eruptions and tremblings and the explosion. I just, I'm thinking of the Roman emperor who died from diarrhea. Vespasian, poor Vespasian. Don't let him use your slip and slide. I missed my slip and slide. I only had it for so long. I'm sorry, and I'm sorry that I killed you off in the intro. I know that's got to suck and I want to acknowledge that. It's funny, like, you sometimes when you're looking really hard for like a litter,

you want to start the story off with a bang as it were, right? And I did like a mental draft of that where it was like you and me, and then I did one where I like loaned you the house and I was like, why are you making this storyline so complicated? She's gonna die in three paragraphs. Why are you, you were buying me a loaf of bread, but I wasn't even in the city. That story does not hold up to scrutiny like at all. Although, I will say, when I was putting together that intro, you can actually watch, I forget exactly what it's called, but I'll shout it out in the credits, but they did kind of a big, I guess, about eight minute long VR installation for a like last day of Pompeii Museum exhibit. And it's on YouTube, obviously not in VR format, it's on YouTube, right? But you can watch

it and it really gives you the idea of what it must have been like when that was happening. I didn't want to use the phrase hell on earth during that preamble because the Romans didn't have the same concept of the afterlife that we did, so it wouldn't have registered that way. But to me, watching it, it looks like hell on earth, it looks like hell. Everything's on fire, everyone's screaming. Same split the slide, yeah. Every time the camera cuts back, the sky is a completely different fucking color, it looks horrible. At noon on 79 AD on a date that was definitely August 24th, Mount Vesuvius, absolutely, Mount Vesuvius finally erupted, destroying the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and everyone in them. First, there was a loud bang. Next, the mountain ejected into the stratosphere

a 10-mile mushroom cloud of gas, ash, and pumice stones up to three inches in diameter. Ten miles? Yeah, so one of the properties of a volcanic eruption is that it short circuits the connections between the earth and the upper atmosphere, producing continuous lightning. So it really would have seemed like the sudden vengeance of the gods. Whoa, whoa, yeah, yeah. The sky all of a sudden goes pitch black, lightning, you have the ground is shaking, and everything's raining down on you. The eruption took place over a period of 12 hours, although many would have died within 15 minutes. Ooh, because of the suffocation of the atmosphere? That was the original theory. Basically what it

is is that it's a giant cloud of lethal gas and volcanic debris, but the temperature is 570 Fahrenheit or 300 Celsius, and I saw estimates that put it as high as like 900 Fahrenheit, 500 Celsius. Oh my god. Like hotter than you can even conceive of. Yeah, like another planet. These clouds, they're called pyroclastic surges. They were surging at 100 miles an hour down the western flank of Vesuvius and engulfing the city, and as you say it would have either asphyxiated them or cooked them alive. Oh my god. For reference again, Pompey is 10 kilometers away from Vesuvius, that's about 6.2 miles. There was no getting away. There was most likely no register of what was even happening potentially. Oh, one thing I should say is I say there's no

getting away, but there were no boats found at Pompey, so maybe some people were able to escape via boat, but if they did there's no record of those survivors as far as I'm aware. The eruption had 100,000 times more thermal energy than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sorry, numbers again? 100 times? 100,000 times. 100,000 times? 100,000 times. Jesus, louises. Okay. One victims, and I used the word victims under advisement here, but victims of a natural disaster, you know, I can't think of a better way to put it. I think there's a tendency because it was so long ago and because like everyone from so long ago is certainly dead, 10 times over, 100,000 times over. Certainly. Yeah, there's such a separation that you don't,

you're just like, well, yeah, no, you gotta die some way, but it's like we all have to die some way. And this sounds like an awful way to go. It's awful, terrible, and if it were 1983 and this happened, it'd be like, ah, that's freaking terrifying. It's just as terrifying if it's 7980. It's funny that you say 1983 because in 1980, Mount St. Helens exploded and that they have this vulcanivity index that they use to measure the powers of, it goes from one to eight and it's like kind of like the Richter scale for volcanoes. Right, or like for tornadoes, the F1. Yeah, exactly. Or hurricanes, category four, category five, yeah. Mount St. Helens was the same on the explosivity index as Pompeii. I think they were both fives. Oh, okay, okay. One victim's brain

was found to have vitrified or turned to glass due to the heat. Not like the entire brain, it's not like a beautiful crystal brain, but like little fragments, like they found little flecks. Wow, Jesus. Many people's vital fluids and tissues completely evaporated, leaving only their bones and an impression of their bodies in the ash, as you said, that rained down upon the earth, and the ash would have been what collapsed most of the buildings and buried the dead, or if by some stroke of God, there was a survivor in one of these buildings, the roof shortly buckled due to the rapid accumulation of ash. Yeah. The rate was of accumulation for the debris was 15 centimeters an hour in Pompeii. In Herculaneum, the ash fall was five times deeper and five times

hotter, which resulted in the city being entombed in 25 meters of solid rock. Whoa, solid rock? Like solid, like pumice, I guess. Solid like a rock. Just like that. Yeah. But that was not... Wait, I have to say too, 25 meters? That's... That's quite tall. That's quite tall. So there was a, what's it called, a British fellow that I really liked who did one of these documentaries. His name was Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. He did the Herculaneum one, and he was standing on this very tall, tall pillar of rock, and he's like, this is 20... It's like a... He's a speck on this thing, right? Yeah. And he's like, this is 25 meters, a shaft of rock, this is how deeply buried Herculaneum was. Wow. The other person who did the Pompeii one that I watched at my friend's recommendation

that I really liked, her name was Mary Beard, and she was... She was also like a very charming guide through this kind of world of Pompeii. Another thing that I learned in my Latin class, and now I'm just imagining it in Pompeii. So the Romans considered the penis to be really ugly. It was not seen as a beautiful human organ. It was everywhere because, you know, nakedity. But images and sculptures of it were used in homes to ward away bad spirits because they thought that it was so ugly and such like a show of strength at the same time that if you had this like gigantic dick in your yard, more or less, or your atrium or whatever it is, then the bad juju would stay away. And so there were homes that had these like ginormous dongs just like, and they were always

like erect kind of column-esque. You don't want to flacid caulk in your atrium, do you? No, it's uglier when it's like, yeah, tree, tree limb. But now I'm just imagining them encased in ash and like perfectly preserved. We're gonna be talking a lot about dicks. Oh, good. We're gonna be talking a lot about dicks. So because Herculaneum was entombed in all this rock, it was harder to get to, but it also was a better preserver in the end of things. So there's been some kind of unique archaeological discoveries courtesy of Herculaneum. Okay. The sites were basically forgotten until 1748 when archaeologists began undertaking the process of excavation. Okay. Pompey and Herculaneum offer rare snapshots, as you said, of entire cities frozen in time. So they're beloved by enthusiastic

scholars hoping to uncover more about everyday Roman life. Yeah. Pompey is famous for its castes of citizens frozen in their final moments. So they look, they look like what they are, they're plaster castes. Right. So many are curled in the fetal position or locked into unusual poses. Okay. Hence why I am fetal positioned up. Yeah. I get you. I get you. It's a numbers game. I can't be dabbing for millennia, but whatever. I would have, I also wrote a draft of that where your last thought was I should have told Taylor how I felt about him. But I was like, not needed. Not needed. My last thought was happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. It's definitely August 24. So one late Pompey and went viral because he looked like he died in the middle of

yanking it. Yeah, dog. The reason for this is heat induced cataviric spasm, which is something like rigor mortis brought on by extreme heat, which locks the bodies into their infamous position. So the poor guy probably was not actually jerking off. Okay. Well, you mean like jerking off in terms of the shape of his body and the placement of his hand on his organ? Yes. He looks like he's fully like sprawled out and being like, well, if the world's gonna animal, he's gonna give her a tug one more time. And that is apparently maybe not the case. Okay, okay. The way these casts were made was in 1863, Italian archaeologists injected plaster of Paris into molds in the ash and pumice because it perfectly preserved the sis since final moments. And some of the details are apparently,

I didn't see this in anything that I looked at, but apparently in some of these plaster casts, some of the details are so fine that you can see like what clothes the person was wearing when they died. Oh, wow. Wow. Unfortunately, this process destroyed the bones of many Pompeians. I guess they did the ash with the bone in because they couldn't disturb the bone. I don't know. Wait, sorry, you mean the plaster of Paris process or the process of Mount Vesúzias blowing up? The plaster of Paris process. So basically, because it's like the 1800s, we don't have any means as like certainly not compared to what we do now to extract information from bones, we extract more information by creating these casts, and then we can see them exactly as they

were, right? And now, modern archaeologists are very frustrated by that because they're like, imagine what we could have got from them delicious bones, but... Yeah, delicious. I got you. Sorry, I'm a dog archaeologist. It's like a wishbone-esque kind of vibe. Yeah, I saw a dog that reminded me of wishbone the other day and I was like, I love it. What's the story, wishbone? We should collab, I'm just saying. With wishbone? We should collab with a wishbone. He's long dead, like for sure. I remember the dog's name was soccer. It was one dog, they didn't have more than one dog. Yeah, wishbone was a highly intelligent dog. There wasn't, you couldn't, and he had the shape, he had the spot in the shape of a paw print, you can't pick that.

That's true. Soccer, what a cutie. Okay, continue. Fortunately for these archaeologists who are quite upset about the destruction of these bones because they are puppies, these skeletons at Herculaneum have been preserved completely undisturbed, so that's why, that's why Herculaneum is some top-notch shit as far as archaeological discoveries. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And also that it's like a top-notch site now because we can, they probably can't even access, yeah, they couldn't access that 25 meters solid, solid like a bra. Here are some of the things we've learned by studying the remnants of Pompeii and Herculaneum. We'll start with Pompeii, although much of what I'm about to say applies to Herculaneum as well. Okay. Pompeii was a thriving shore city

with a dense population of around 20,000 people in around one square mile. I say it's a port city because it actually used to be right on the water, so right where, if Italy's a boot, it's right where the shoelaces are, and it used to be right there on the water, and because of like tectonic activity, now it's moved, it's not directly on the water anymore, but it was at the time. Okay. It was discovered by a group called the Oskans in the eighth century, and then it became a Greek city, then it became a Roman city, you know how it goes. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Due to its proximity to the water, the population included Europeans, people from the Middle East, and people from both North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Okay, yeah, crossroads. Crossroads, right there in the Mediterranean.

The city was a playground for the hedonistic rich of Rome, that's you, with lavish mansions, bougie frescoes, think Vegas. Vegas on the sea. So Atlantic City, I got a little less shitty Atlantic, no, oh god, I've done it again. Okay. Oh man. Monte Carlo. Sure, yeah, it's like Monte Carlo, it's like Monte Carlo. Some mansions had hundreds of rooms, so for example, one family called the Valentes, they were the most lavish, opulent crew in the city, they endorsed politicians, they put their names all over everything, they threw a fuck ton of parties. Mm-hmm, probably with a lot of fucking in them, yeah. Oh yeah, a ton of fucking, yes, absolutely, good one, you nailed it. Every nook and cranny of their house is painted in these nuts, frescoes, there's this one mural,

it's like painted on the shed out back next to the pool. Mary Beard, who's one of these historians is there and she's, points out that she's like, this is a, it's like a, it's a picture of Venus reclining in a clamshell. Okay, okay, it's on the pool house also, Taylor, it's not on the backyard shed, it's on the pool house. Some fucking shed, I don't know. I don't, I was, I'm not a Valenti, I don't know these things. And, but when you get close to it, it's clear that like the leg is really like janky, like it doesn't look like it was actually done that well, like it's kind of sticking up at a weird angle. Nice. Mary Beard in her wisdom is like, this is my vibe on this family, I'll show no go, like you, they have, it looks pretty from afar, but when you get in close, it's

like, you know, Teresa's house from the Real Housewives of New Jersey, You Knock and the Marble Echoes Back kind of thing. Right, yeah. I think there is a line from Clueless, she's a total Monet. Yeah, Monet for sure painted this, this backyard. Yeah. Rich people loved Pompeii, but many who lived there weren't particularly rich. The wealthy lived side by side with everyday workers, including merchants, manufacturers, and farmers, taking advantage of the fertile soil that comes with living near a volcano. Yep. The nicest room in someone's home might adjoin the place a neighbor kept their donkeys. Additionally, everyone ate pretty well, lots of bread, nuts, fish, chicken, fruit, vegetables, they ate better than me. Well, they didn't have the preservatives, you know?

That's true. They ate better than a lot of people. That's true. Pompeii was a two-story city not dissimilar to nearby Naples, so if you or anyone listening to this show has been to Naples, it's a same samey same. It was also covered in sex and dicks. Yeah. It has a very horny reputation. Oh, okay, okay. Even among Roman cities. Which apparently seems, I think the take is that like, Pompeii was a slightly less horny city than its reputation, but still reasonably horny. Okay. Many murals in public buildings depicted acts of fallatio and conilingus and threesomes and taking it up the ass. One image featured two people fucking on a tightrope while drinking large glasses of wine, which is the dream. Wow. That's decadent. That is a decadent. Yeah, god. I wish

I had that kind of core. There are phallic symbols everywhere you look, which according to Mary Beard, so I didn't hear this thing about them not being into dicks. Maybe again, maybe it's true. I don't know. But her thing is that they're less about sex and they're more about projecting a very masculine Roman idea of strength, which you also said. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the word for penis is the same word for sword, gladium. Men, anyway. But if you did want sex, you could stop in at Pompeii's brothel, the Lupinar, which resembles nothing more than a fucking prison, like hardcore. It's like stone cells that you'd lock. I don't know if you'd lock the door, but you'd close it behind you and it was these hard, like fuck, put a throw pillow down, man.

I don't know. Not for me, not for me, but very popular. You could also gamble, watch gladiators train at the ancient world's largest amphitheater. You could enjoy artisan markets and 150 fast food stalls. They would just like make plates and you could come up and take them and pay or pay a little extra and sit down and do some people watching. Wow. You could sit by one of 25 fountains or you could enjoy yourself in a public bath. These were hubs of social activity in Roman life where the rich mingled with the poor, but don't get in the baths if you have an open wound because there's no drainage and you might get sepsis from bathing in other people's piss. Oh yeah. Okay. Just in case you needed a hard reminder that it is 79 AD right now.

Yeah. There's a lot of shit we still haven't figured out. Right, right. I feel like this is just such an excellent tour guide, tour book, blow by blow of like when you visit 79 AD Pompeii, don't forget that you gotta watch out for sepsis. Another popular pastime in Pompeii and ancient Rome in general was graffiti. In many ways, graffiti was the original social media. Are you ready for this? Instead of posting something on someone's wall, you'd post it on their wall. Oh, wow. Yeah. That one, you like left the computer after you, after you typed that and you're like, I think I'm gonna get a drink or something. I just gave myself a nice pattern chuckled knowingly to myself, oh you. So young and old, rich and poor, everybody liked to tag.

Here are some examples from Pompeii and Herculaneum. I don't, I think this is a name. It's it's either Chai or Chie, it's C-H-I-E, but that might just be like Chai, like I don't. I don't know either. So it said, Chai, I hope your hemorrhoids rub together and hurt more than ever before. That's a good one. That's good. One said, the one who buggers a fire burns his penis. Words to live by. I agree. Next to a picture of a dick, someone wrote, handle with care. That one ages well, I feel like. That one does so well. I think I saw that the other day on a bathroom stall. Someone wrote, if anyone does not believe in venus, they should gaze at my girlfriend. Another romantic one, I don't want to sell my husband not for all the gold in the world.

Okay, slavery. I guess that's modern times too, but intense. Yeah, that's intense. I like it. Yeah, so you bring up slavery, so I didn't want to include it in the intro part because I didn't want to start the show glamorizing slave ownership, but the reality is that if you were a Roman of any kind of means, you had slaves, and I will talk about that a bit. Yeah, yeah, that was in Eche Romani, the Latin textbook with the illustrations. They were stuck in a ditch, and guess who got them out? It was the slave. Yeah, that sounds all right. More graffiti. Weep you girls, my penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men's behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity. Aw, see ya. Bye. No, stop, don't. We'll miss you so much.

This one was written in a bathroom. Deficator, may everything turn out okay so you can leave this place. Aw, that's like you embroider that, you know, and you hang that in the bathroom. I like that. Theophilus, don't perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog. Why not? If there's sex everywhere, gosh. It's true, true, true. In the gladiator barracks, somebody on the wall, somebody wrote, on April 19th, I made bread. Good, a little, a little journaling expertise there. I like that, and I like that, I like that fucking 2,000 years in the future, we know that this person baked bread on April 19th, that's fun. Yeah, yeah, that's really cool. And one last one, oh walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed,

you have not already collapsed and ruined. And they never will. So as we were saying just now, many members of the Pompeian, the Pompeian population would have been slaves or descended from slaves. Okay. Over in Herculaneum, half the population was descended from slaves. Okay. In very broad terms, slaves in the Roman context were acquired through military action, through human trafficking, through trade and commerce. And they held jobs ranging from menial labor to physicians and accountants. So you could be a slave and still have a very high status job. Okay. Slaves didn't have the same rights as full citizens. And if slaves were found guilty of crimes, they would be publicly flogged and those marks would prevent them from ever becoming a citizen.

Ooh, rough. Yeah, no, gnarly. I think in Herculaneum, they have a big like pedestal where they do this shit. But one thing to note too, sorry, is like slaves could become citizens potentially. There's all these little like loopholes, yeah, and like paths to citizenship. It's much more fluid than our modern understanding, I think of slavery. There's actually a preserved document. And again, this is from Herculaneum, it's like a wooden tablet. And it details a slave challenging her owner in court. So we know that there was some mechanism for slaves to challenge their masters in court. Slaves could also be freed by their owners, at which point they took their previous owner's last name. Just outside of Pompeii, there's this mausoleum with these three bodies,

these three statues on it. And it's for a former slave named Publius Visonia. Visonia, who was his former owner, hence Publius Visonia, he took her name as his last name. As his last, yeah. And a third, so they actually got married after he was freed. He married her, then became like a person of some means enough that he could erect this mausoleum, not just for the two of them, but for this third guy, who I guess was a buddy of his. But they had some sort of falling out to the point where he etched off this guy's name and had another inscription made to the effect of like, this guy was my best friend, but he stabbed me in the back and he took me to court, but they found me innocent, praise be to the gods. And now he's

a piece of shit and I don't fucking talk to him. So no, he is not here. Shit, dog. That's good. Some good drama. Some like graveyard drama. Yeah. Never bury your best friend, I guess. No. Never meet your heroes. Never bury your best friend. That's the gist on slavery. A very little bit about Herculaneum, as as, like I said, much of it overlaps with the Pompeii info above, above. You can tell I wrote this on a document above. Herculaneum was smaller. It was only four to 5,000 people. Vived like a mini Pompeii, as I said. Herculaneum was loved by wealthy Romans. It had many public amenities. It was named after the professional wrestler Hercules Hernandez.

Oh, wow. I love a little time loop like that. The time machine. That joke was for like zero listeners of our podcast, but it made me happy. That's what counts. That's what counts. You gotta make yourself laugh once every day. It was named after the Roman god Hercules, as the population thought nearby Mount Vesuvius was a divine tribute to him as, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Swole, a swole mountain. The big fucking rip mountain with sexy pecs, like a fucking shelf. Like the, you know, those ones where the nipples are kind of half ass pointing down. That's what Vesuvius was like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Just, just fucking shredded. So much of the information that I gave you about the diet of these people came from Herculaneum. Right. Both because the bones were able to be preserved, but also so was the sewer system. Scientists were able to undertake the world's largest archaeological excavation of sewers, and they sorted through knee deep fossilized human shit until they came away with 700 bags to inspect. And I don't know how bags these, how big these bags are, but I'm going like hefty. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even if they're like a little bit like a sandwich bag, it's like that's still a lot of poo, you know? Why would they be doing a sandwich? I like it. I'm just saying it's a lot of poo, no matter what, when you need a

measurement, your bag is. That's what you give to like your least favorite grad student. You just be like, take these sandwich bags and go fill them with shit. And if you fill them, you come back and you get more and you do that again. Yeah. Remember that lecture where you kept interrupting me all the fucking time? You. Get over here. Shit duty. Poop Smith, go. So all of this shitting came to an end in 79 AD when the pyroclastic surge arrived. I should also add that the two of the images that I used in the opening, the fictionalized version of the eruption, the two women holding a child close and the child hugging his dog were among the skeletons found at Herculaneum. Oh, wow. So I took a bit of artistic license there. I know, I like that. But I thought you were taking

more. I thought you were just like, yeah, what else would be in an ancient, a boy in his dog? Okay, yeah. I'm not trying to manipulate people like that. Well, oh, okay. That makes one of us. Yeah. Stories. Bring back sex cult, Josie. That's what I say. So after the eruption, the sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum were visited by grave robbers. And then after some summary relief efforts, the new emperor Titus, I think visited the site the next year. They were forgotten by time until their discovery by 18th century archaeologists. But that doesn't mean that the area has been vacated. And it does not mean that Vesuvius has become inactive. I see what you're saying. Okay, yes, yes, yes. There are still many other cities,

hamlets, small farms, Naples is 17 kilometers away, and Naples is fucking huge. Yeah. Since 79, it has erupted 27 times. It erupted in 1631, killing thousands. It erupted in the 1700s, the 1800s. 100 people died when it erupted in 1906. And its most recent eruption took place in 1944, right as the Allies invaded Italy. So a stressful time. This one was a VEI-3 on the index, so less spectacular than the 79 eruption. And these all happened on August 24th, correct? I didn't get exact dates, but I believe yes. Yes. It's the only way I can make it make sense. It only erupts on August 24th. Okay, yeah. Listen, it's a fiery cusp, but Leo Virgo cusp. It is what it is. Yeah. Oh gosh, yeah, yeah. Well, so 26 people died in the 1944

eruption. But despite that, the evacuation carried out by the Allied forces seems to have been very competently conducted. An analysis in the, yeah, isn't it nice when something is competently conducted in one of these? So rare. An analysis in the January 2007 Journal of Historical Geography concluded that despite all the problems of wartime, management of the emergency by Allied Control Commission was both impressive at the time and holds important lessons about the manner in which eruptions may be handled in the future. That's the most recent incident of a Vesuvius eruption, although in May 1998, heavy rain turned ash deposits from previous eruptions into debris flows near the town of Sarno, which is about 15 kilometers from Vesuvius,

and that killed 150 people. Oh, that's a lot. Wow. Yeah. So it's, it's quite dangerous, kind of living there. All in 600,000 people still live in what they call the red zone, which is the nine mile or 12 kilometer radius around the volcano. And that's, that's the area that will be most devastatingly affected should an eruption take place, right? Right, yeah. Three million more people live close enough to be affected by an eruption in general. It's the most densely populated area in the world with an active volcano. My gosh, I did not know that, yeah. Since I think 2004, the Italian government has offered people in the red zone $46,000 U.S. converted if they're willing to relocate, although there have been very few takers. Yeah. People feel connected

to their land, you know. I mean, who I live in a very dangerous spot where nobody really should be living as well. Houston? Well, it's so, it's susceptible to hurricanes like crazy. Yeah. Oh, I got you. I got you. It's a freaking swamp. It's so freaking hot here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not, it's not quite the same as maybe living around Mount Vesuvius in terms of like, in the red zone spot that way, but in the red zone. But like also Vancouver has very famously been supposed to get hit by the big one for God knows how long and other places are in tornado alley and other places get wicked monsoons and like, everywhere's got something. Some places have droughts. I mean, we've all got everything more and more. Thank you fucking carbon footprint, but

you know. Yeah. So evacuation drills have been performed and it's been determined that authorities would need two weeks notice of any eruption to evacuate effectively. So they'd need to know two weeks ahead of time that it was happening. Is that a possible, a possible thing? Could they get two weeks notice on that? What did the seismologists say? I don't know. My hope would be yes, but I don't know how refined that sort of prediction is able to be. Yeah. One final note to close out the story. Mount Vesuvius has been under surveillance since 2019 when magma was seen. They saw magma? Yeah, but it's an active volcano. They're gonna see magma from time to time. Lava? Yeah. Magma's just underground lava. Magma's lava before it gets big, you know.

Is there? I'm like laughing at my own dumb joke before I even say it. Do it. If you put a lava lamp in a basement, does it become a magma lamp? Yes. Absolutely it does. You've got it. I nailed it. I nailed it. What a human story will we ever learn from history? But I guess we have because we've learned so much about ancient Rome. Yeah, I know. Through Pompeii. There are always gonna be people who, like, this was my grandfather's vineyard and it was his grandfather's vineyard and it was his grandfather's vineyard. I'm not leaving. I can't imagine a life that isn't this place, you know, whatever. Yeah, yeah, that's true. And I guess understanding that cases like that are inevitable, if frustrating from a public safety perspective, what do you do to kind of ensure

that those people are safely evacuated and whatever. But pretty much every eruption of Vesuvius, I believe every major one, has had some kind of casualties. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like it would, just with the density surrounding it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like Naples is right there. So if the blast zone, the red zone, sorry, if the red zone is 12 kilometer radius, Naples is five kilometers from that. It's 17. Yeah, yeah. They're getting some debris, some ash. And who, yeah, wow. It's a very interesting dynamic of Pompeii is that like a tortuous ending, totally horrific. And yeah, now the way we think about it is like, oh, isn't that fascinating? Look what was in their

stomachs. Like, wow, look, you know, like their clothing. And like, you know, like there's there's a bittersweet interfacing happening there. That's some of my trepidation about archaeology. And this is actually, I took a Latin American archaeology class in my like first year of university that it was like a second or third year course. It was a little too smart for me. But I learned a lot from it. So maybe, maybe I, and I had a lot of knowledge coming in because I played Nancy Drew's Secret of the Scarlet Hand and they just go real into my and shit. And so I was like, I know, I know Ymcox the Corn God, come on, let's go. But I remember having this real conflict when they were talking about how these mummy bundles had

been discovered at the top of a mountain together. So two people had gone up to the top of a mountain to kind of die of exposure. And they were referring to them as mummy bundles. And I just had this thought of like, when does a person stop being a person and start being a mummy bundle? Right? Yeah. No, for real. And I think that I think that a lot of it, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of archaeology dabbles in other cultures. And I think that people are more brazen about doing things to the remains of people who don't look like them or don't come from the same culture, because there's not, they don't have that same connection or whatever. So it's like, it can be very kind of colonial in that way. I also think that as we've kind of,

we've talked about it a few times on the show that there's this distance that time creates where we feel more comfortable disrupting and joking and laughing and whatever it is about things that happened a very long time ago that are like a historic concern, let's say, as opposed to something that, you know, maybe there are living survivors or maybe, you know, whatever it is, right? Right. Yeah. No, but thank you for bringing an ancient, ancient story to life. Thank you for helping me celebrate my birthday. Yay. Happy birthday, Taylor. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts. We usually release a new episode every other Sunday. And

you can also find us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy.com. And if you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review or just tell a friend. Stay sweet. For this week's episode, I watched two documentaries. I watched what life was like for Pompey's citizens, Pompey with Mary Beard, posted on the YouTube channel Timeline. And I watched the secrets of life in Pompey's neighbor town, the other Pompey on absolute history. Other videos I watched included Pompey's graffiti and ancient form of social media and Mary Beard on Pompey's showiest family, both on the Smithsonian channel. How the volcanic eruption turned people into stone, Pompey, posted by The Infographics Show. And A Day in Pompey, which was the full length animation that I refer to, it's hosted on

the YouTube channel Zero One, and it was originally commissioned for a 2009 exhibition held at the Melbourne Museum. For the examples of graffiti that I mentioned, those resourced from ancient graffiti on the walls of Pompey by Zdravko Batsarov, Professor Brian Harvey's graffiti from Pompey, Harry Mount's What Can We Learn from Rome Graffiti from The Telegraph, 1st October 2013, Stephanie Pappas' Pompey wall posts reveal ancient social networks in live science, and Pompey and Herculaneum, A Descriptive Study, written by Michael Joseph Wright. I also read the BBC News article, Mount Vesuvius eruption, extreme heat turned man's brain to glass, BBC News January 23rd, 2020, This Day in History, August 24th, Mount Vesuvius erupts

on history.com, and benchmarks March 17th, 1944, the most recent eruption of Mount Vesuvius, by Sarah E. Pratt in Earth Magazine, March 15th, 2016. The song you're listening to is called Teastream by Brian Steele. Thank you so much for listening, we really appreciate it.