Citation Needed - Chrome Tab Cleanout

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

Tom cleans out his unrelated chrome tabs on interesting wikipedia articles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ironing https://woodcarvingillustrated.com/deep-sea-jack-o-lanterns/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_tunneling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_drop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Thomas_Knight

Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnik and I'll be first at this buffet of buffoonery tonight, but I'll need a merry band of sneeze guards. First up, two men for whom a change of topic should probably be called early onset at this point, Cecil and Noah. It's all early onset.

I go to bed after Perry Mason, do I? Yeah, no, I feel like I've graduated at the point in my life where it's just onset now. Sure, yeah. And also joining us tonight, two men who always order off menu, Heath and Todd. No, no, I know we're supposed to yes and or whatever. I'm not yes anding off menu ordering. Go fuck yourself. Fair.

Fair and fair. The menu is a list of things that are available. You choose from it. Or you can not choose and just order the whole menu. You build whatever you want after that. It's great. Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons.

Patrons, without you, we'd have to bore people at dinner parties with today's selection, but instead, we get paid to do it. Feels like a major step up. And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around until the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us, Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today? Whatever the fuck Tom feels like.

Yeah! So Tom, you, um... Whatcha doin' here, Tom? The weave. Alright, listen. So, throughout the year, as I come across interesting stories or factoids or tidbits that may make for a good topic for a citation-needed essay, I open a tab in my Chrome browser as a reminder. Some of these ideas become essays for the show, and many, many more just become digital

clutter. For the most part, it's not because the neglected tabs and topics aren't interesting, but rather it's because on further investigation, I can't squeeze 2,500 words out of them, but I'll be damned if I want to let some of these things go, which brings me to today's digital purge. Today, we are going on a journey where I close out browser tabs and without any attempt at maintaining any narrative thread, you, dear listener, get to learn a bunch of truly random stuff. Okay, this would be a bad idea for my Chrome tabs. Or a great idea. Anybody?

Nope. I'm just saying, no, it doesn't. No, everybody wants to challenge the form. It's just, you know, don't you, don't you dare blame this one. I would have found like a, like a cemetery that connected all of these or something like that Any votes for a great idea was that I didn't hear anybody Zero this brings me right to an almost episode that I very nearly did but it just wasn't enough and although I could have Stretched it the real juice wouldn't been worth the squeeze

Like that sentence there Cecil I'll remember that. Alright. Nonetheless, I do want to tell you about some truly bizarre hobby because being human and staying interested in staying clocked into life is hard. And this brings me to extreme ironing. Fuck yeah. Now for me, any ironing that I would have successfully accomplished would be extreme. But to devotees of extreme ironing, it's all about location, location, location. We're talking here about ironing while skydiving with an ironing board and an iron,

which would not be plugged into anything because you're skydiving and which, if it slips from your grasp, would reach a terminal velocity well beyond what is needed to crush a human skull. Or ironing on a cliffside, or whatever other stupid fucking place you can imagine to extreme iron. Yeah, it's mustache tattoo on your finger,

the hobby, everybody. Now, if that's too much excitement. Oh, it is. You may want to opt for the rather more sedate and serene hobby of worm charming. What if when you hear this, you imagine a worm and an adorable little clay pot. Are you talking about masturbation? Not yet. You can just say that you want to go. That's That's also extreme ironing actually if you think about it. That was one of your tabs, that's fine. It's a lot of my tabs. That was his sole idea.

But not this one in particular. If you're imagining right now an adorable worm just swaying back and forth in front of a little clay pot to a flute, I'm sorry to disappoint you. That is not what worm charming here is. Worms can't do that. They have no bones. Instead, worm charming is the art of attracting worms to the surface through vibrations, sounds,

or other means of human to worm attraction. Worm charming is said to be surprisingly captivating. It does not indicate compared to what though. Well, yeah,, that's the thing We get a single iota of captivation would be surprising so that's probably technically true You can do this with really loud sounds at night in an apartment building with humans, but I wouldn't call it charming Yeah, we really don't know what kind of mood the worms are in when they get there. They're probably pissed.

Shut the fuck up! I'm trying to sleep down here! I just turned off Perry Mason! We're trying to bang on the soil with little tiny brooms, you know? That's it. Heath is, by the way, Heath is just a fucking apoplectic right now trying to come up with a Perry Mason worm pun. He's going to get there.

Barry Mason. He's the he's close. He's close. So every Halloween homes and families across the nation carve up a pumpkin into a delightful jack-o'-lantern so teenagers can steal them and throw them into the street. That's easy and it's lame and it's boring because most of you are carving your pumpkins on land like a bunch of jerks. But for those engaged in the hobby, neither sport, neither calling of underwater pumpkin carving, no gourd art is considered complete if it is not carved on the floor of the ocean while you are outfitted in scuba gear. Chumming the water for vegan sharks? No thanks. Absolutely not.

It's the worst because they swim by you real fast and tell you that beans have a lot of protein. It's like, oh yeah. All right. And then there is the hot rice or it's not complete protein. Good start. They almost never come back. And then there is the hobby that inspired me to look up bizarre hobbies. And this one is hobby tunneling.

Now what pray tell is hobby tunneling. It is the recreational creation of tunnels, which is an awesome hobby. And at least more than none of our audience engages in it and tells me about it regularly. Uh oh. It's cool when you do it. Boy, are you guys changing a lot of jokes here this.

Always know you're not. What? What amount of our audience on a scale from one to furry? How concerned do we need to be about the next few paragraphs? Because I'll just hit delete and end the Zen answer call. No, I think it's just the one. So yeah, we should be all right. And how does one get into hobby tunneling? You may ask.

Well, for one such enthusiast- Don't regret it if you do though. Let me tell you. Sorry. Sorry. If you have to ask, you can't afford it. And how does one get into hobby tunneling, you may ask? Well, for one such enthusiast, he was, quote, shoveling dirt to put a walking path around

his house when he just felt the urge to keep going. This particular hobbyist has now completed a tunnel 16 feet deep that runs 82 feet long. And according to the utterly mad article I read about this, he is quoted as saying, if I could, I would do it every day. Okay. It feels like he was clearly doing a bank heist, right? And he got like caught pretty early. Now he has to like, making hoppy tunnels forever as a cover. I kind of like that. Now others in the know about the hobby may be familiar with the hobby tunneling tick

talker tunnel girl whose own tunnel is 22 feet deep and it runs under her house. Or at least it did until the town decided that undermining the foundation of your very home is a fantastically stupid and dangerous thing to do. Huh? You know, because the house could collapse on you while you are inside your stupid fucking home is a fantastically stupid and dangerous thing to do. Huh. You know, because the house could collapse on you while you were inside your stupid fucking tunnel. Okay. To be clear, there are lots of exciting things you can teach yourself on the internet.

Structural engineering probably shouldn't be one of them. Right. No, it's like surgery in that way. Yeah. YouTube has its fair share of hobby tunnelists, but perhaps the most famous is Colin Furs who built a tunnel connecting an underground bunker to his backyard shed, a tunnel which he built using hydraulic machinery so as not to wake his neighbors at night. And guys, this tunnel wasn't just a hole in the ground. I mean, I mean it was, but it

was also a hole in the ground reinforced with steel girders mean it was, but it was also a hole in the ground reinforced with steel girders and it had a rail and cart system to haul out the hundreds of tons of rock and soil, which is not dissimilar to what the cartels build to smuggle their wares across borders. Okay. Again, very clearly doing a crime. And then the cops showed up and he was like, Hey, Oh yeah. You guys remember remember do you remember that level in Donkey Kong Country? Mark my words now Elon Musk is about two canceled boring company projects away from pretending he's just been into this hobby the whole time. Okay and hobby tunnels they're fucking insanely dangerous.

Besides the risk of the tunnel collapsing and burying you alive, there is the risk of you hitting water or gas or sewage or electricity or other infrastructure. There is a possibility of being killed by poisonous gases or the tunnel filling with water and flooding before you can escape. This is a truly... Spending time with your family. There's a lot of risks. This is a truly unhinged thing to do. And I absolutely cannot express to you

how big and elaborate some of these are. So I am including here some pictures of hobby tunnels. And I am deeply lamenting as well that I cannot show these to the audience. Now he put three photos in the notes and if you look from like left to right, each photo gets more red so it looks like a series of photos you'd see on the wall for a colonoscopy clinic for like good to bad. I will also say that hobby tunneling is the perfect libertarian metaphor, right?

Because you want to do something stupid and pointless because the societal benefits you like don't count and if it goes wrong Don't worry that society you're ignoring and aren't a part of will come rescue you like a toddler All right, alas as bonkers as hobby tunneling is, it's not a whole episode. So that brings me now without any real transition to the story of how 76 beavers skydived into the Idaho wilderness in 1948. Oh my God, that's actually one of my Chrome tabs too. Holy shit. All right, so it turns out that the problem of habitat destruction is not a new one.

And in the years following World War II, there was a massive expansion of building into new territory across the country, including for some reason in Idaho. Well, if beavers just fall out of the sky, they are. Now while people could build homes pretty much anywhere, beavers, it turns out, could fuck those homes up. Beavers are, as you may have heard, rather hardy and industrious creatures. And so when their habitat is disrupted, they fairly readily find their way to new environs,

building dams and lodges and other beaver stuff, which frequently caused flooding and other problems for new developments. And here, here I am heartened, because I would have assumed that the solution would be to just shoot or poison or otherwise kill the beavers. But instead, the government embarked upon a rather extensive beaver relocation program. And this was not without its problem. Guys, guys, local beavers in your area, not eager to leave it.

Leave it. Leave it. Eager. The landscape of Idaho is mountainous, wooded and rugged. And while it is a fact that beavers do well, once they are relocated, actually moving them far enough away from settlements to a place where they can settle down often involved a rather dangerous and arduous trek on horseback into the wilds of Idahoan wilderness. Listeners, if you're not picturing a bunch of little beavers with the little cowboy hat sitting on the saddles of horses with their little stirrups, you are listening to the

episode wrong if that's not what you're picturing right now, okay? Little lassoes. All right, so transporting these beavers was a problem. And here I'll let the article on this from Scientific American describe the issue. Quote, beavers cannot stand the direct heat of the sun unless they are in water. During transportation, they must be constantly cooled and watered. Sometimes they refuse to eat. Older individuals often become dangerously belligerent.

Noah, are you a beaver? You have to tell us if you're a beaver. Put me on horseback and find out. Rough trips on pack animals are hard on them. Horses and mules become spooky and quarrelsome, loaded with a struggling, odorous pair of live beavers. Some other beaver relocation solution was clearly needed. And since the war was over, there was a surplus of airplanes and parachutes. Naturally, the problem pretty much solved itself,

but some testing would need to be done. Initially, the government beaver relocators started parachuting boxes full of rocks. And when none of the rocks died from the experience, they needed a new test subject. So they selected an older beaver and they named him Geronimo. And again, there's just nothing here that can substitute for the words direct from the article, quote, satisfactory experiments with dummy weights having been completed. One old male beaver, whom we fondly named Geronimo, was dropped again and again on the flying field.

Each time he scrambled out of the box, someone was on hand to pick him up. Poor fellow. He finally became resigned and as soon as we approached him would crawl back into his box ready to go aloft again. Beaver goes back to his buddies later, you're not gonna believe the fucking day I just had you, it was ridiculous. And all his buddies of course would go, daaaaaamn, cause they're beavers. Now you might be thinking as I was, this is rather unfair to poor Geronimo, but the Relo guys, and from this next part of the story we can be assured they were all guys, had

a reward for the lucky beaver once his skydiving tour was over. You may be sure that Geronimo had a priority reservation on the first ship into the hinterland and that three young females went with him. Even there he stayed in the box for a long time after his harem was busy inspecting the new surroundings. However, his colony was later reported as being very well established. Beaver name. You have.

Now all told 76 beavers were captured boxed, taken aloft, shoved out of an airplane over their intended new habitat and parachuted gently to the earth. The boxes were cleverly constructed in such a way that they were heavy enough to deploy the parachute, but light enough that they landed with a gentle thump into their new Eden. And the box doors were kept shut by the pressure of the parachute so but light enough that they landed with a gentle thump into their new Eden. And the box doors were kept shut by the pressure of the parachute, so that once they landed, the doors would readily open and the beavers were free to scamper off into the wild, having had the rather unique experience of being the only known cohort of skydiving beavers.

You guys picturing like a high school science club making popsicle stick boxes for these beavers and dropping them like eggs? Me and my parents just hurling a beaver out of a plane in a dog carton. Hey, sorry about this. I don't try hard at things I'm not already good at. Smash. All told, all but one of the beavers survived relocation by air, which was a much better survival rate than transporting them by horse.

Alright, well, so far Tom's internet history has way more beaver in it than I was expecting. So I introduce him to Cookie Clicker, we'll take a quick break for some apropos of nothing. And then, from there, the parachutes will gently carry the crates to Earth where the beavers can redeploy Bing Bang Boom. No more beaver problem. Uh, us, sir? Yes, Johnson, question. Um, I don't want this to sound hard-hearted, but what are you, bastard and cheeper, just to kill the beavers?

I thought so too, but the new director said it had to be done this way Sorry new director. Yeah, just came in from Washington today big fella would have been I didn't meet this guy Yeah, me neither Let me see. I have his card right here. It's mr. Beaverton Okay, a director named Beaverton Beaverton came in and told you you had to relocate the beavers rather than kill them. Exactly.

Look, we even took a photograph together. Yeah, that's three beavers in an overcoat. Is it? Damn. Yeah, it's definitely three beavers, man. That explains why they wanted lunch from Just Salad. Ugh, hate Just Salad, right? It's not even good salad.

["The Good, The Bad, The Good"] And we're back. When we left off, our show was rapidly sliding into whatever comes into our minds next, otherwise known as podcasting. What's up next, Tom? All right. And now without any other meaningful transition. I feel like I did okay. I want to tell you the story of Christopher Thomas Knight, a man who became a modern day hermit in the woods of Maine

for just no discernible reason at all. Born in 1965. Okay, so not that modern day, but yeah. The first 20 years of Knight's life were pretty un-extraordinary. He went to high school, after which he got a job installing burglar alarms and like most men with jobs, he didn't much like it.

In 1986, he abruptly left his job in Massachusetts and barked upon a road trip to clear his head. It didn't work. Or maybe it did. Maybe too much. I don't know. Enlightenment is dangerous. Anyway, by the time he made his way up to Maine, he just drove until his car ran out of gas and night ran out of fucks.

And in the middle of the woods in Maine, just up around a town called North Pond, Chris put the key to the car on the front tire of his dead car and then he just walked into the woods. Hey Tom, this is called a psychotic break buddy. Does it, does it not sound like that to you? This person's doing. That's kind of nice. Hey, he would live in those woods completely alone for the next 27 years, which is a hell of a thing. Considering that winters in Maine, they are notoriously brutal with temperatures routinely falling well below zero and deep intense snowstorms making movement difficult. And Knight didn't go into the woods with a bunch of going into the wood stuff.

Like this guy just ran out of gas and walked into the goddamn forest. There's nothing in his biography to suggest that he was some great woodsman or a trained survivalist or even a Cub scout, but survive he did though often by stealing. Just him in a tug of war over a branch with Geronimo out there. 50, 50 beavers parachute out of the sky and start helping. What the fuck is happening? Oh yeah. I just, just for the record,

it's not like surviving off the land. If whenever you get cold or hungry, you just steal pieces of the civilization you left and then go back. I mean, I don't think this counts. Well, the residents around Northpond knew something was amiss, but none of them knew or suspected a thieving hermit was stealing into their homes, yards, and garages in the middle of

the night. Nonetheless, batteries would disappear out of flashlights, tents, winter coats, food, all started to go missing. Sometimes new propane tanks would inexplicably be replaced with old, empty ones. Knight was, according to him, a reluctant thief, and by everyone's assessment, he only ever stole the most necessary and minimalist of supplies. But over the course of an unbelievable 27 years

spent hiding in the deep woods of Maine, he committed hundreds, if not thousands, of small robberies. Oh, I really hate to take what isn't mine, except that I've centered my entire survival around it and I could just not do this and get a job at a hardware store. Oh man. I am torn asunder by this choice I've made. And don't stop making every time and could stop making any time I wanted.

Just at a moment's notice. To survive the coldest nights, he would wake in the deepest part of the night to pace his camp to try to keep warm. He would avoid making fires to keep from being spotted from the wood smoke, and instead he used the purloined propane tanks to heat water for cooking, heating drinking water, and cleaning himself.

See guys, he had to steal to avoid being caught for all the stealing. The propane. When he needed to swap out a propane tank, he would borrow a canoe from nearby camps and in the pre-dawn hours paddle across the lake to homes nearby where he would swap the empty canister for a full one. He was so paranoid about being spotted he spent the spring and summer stockpiling his supplies so that from November to March he wouldn't need to leave his Deepwoods camp and thus make footprints in the snow that he could be tracked by.

Nobody'll ever figure out my sweet gig, I said to myself as I wiped my ass with a pine cone. He regularly kept himself clean, sponge bathing in streams. He kept his hair and his beard trimmed all to avoid suspicion in the event that he was spotted. But over the fever stealing my pine cone, get the book back. This is an episode with a bunch of different topics in it that are crossing over.

But over the course of 27 years of hiding, he only ever happened upon one pair of hikers and according to Knight said only hi to any other human being over the span of nearly three decades. He also claims that in the 27 years he spent in the woods, he never once got sick saying you only, you had to be near people in order to get sick. I feel like we're scraping the bottom of the benefit barrel here. It's like, also, I never got, nobody ever got my order wrong at the drive through and all that time.

In April of 2013, Knight was burgling a camp when he was caught, first on camera and then at gunpoint by a game warden who had set up the cameras to catch whoever had been burglaring there for decades. Knight didn't put up a fight or run, but rather allowed himself to be handcuffed to a chair and quietly waited for the police. He was sentenced to seven months in jail for the burglaries, which Knight expressed deep misgivings about, but which misgivings didn't prevent him from doing literally hundreds of times over two dozen years. I love the version of the story where he was just desperately trying to get caught so he

could sleep in a warm jail cell the whole time, but everybody was too sympathetic to turn him in. And this last part is my favorite. Knight kept no journals or diaries. He only allowed one reporter access to him and from the very excellent GQ article on this guy, he was reluctant about that as well. He didn't go into the woods as part of any plan. He wasn't at all prepared when he was pressed about what he learned though. He offered only that quote, solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. My perception.

But when I applied my increasing perception of myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. To put it romantically, I was completely free. Just pan over to Eli in a tree fort doing a sketch with a puppet of senior pets made up of mind-totals. Now, many may be tempted to compare Knight to Thoreau, but Knight himself resents this comparison calling Thoreau quote, a dilettante and noting that Thoreau has spent only two years in the woods and all that while his mom was still doing his laundry, saying Thoreau

was quote, just a show off who went out there and wrote a book saying, look how great I am. Yeah. And all he produced was Walden. You had that super tight quote just now that sounded like a meditation teacher trying to wrap up a class because he has diarrhea. So I think he could learn a thing or two from you about stealing. How dare they compare you to one of the greatest and most influential thinkers of his century.

Jesus Christ. And this is, I think, a great place to close out the cleaning of my digital closet of a few stories that have absolutely nothing to do with one another, but all of which were still too good not to tell. And while I still have a smiling face rather than a number of tabs open in my phone full of ideas, I have a few less than I did, and I'm not at all unhappy about that. Alright, Tom. And if you had to summarize what you learned and sent one sentence, what would it be?

Uh, if you ever get tired of tunneling around a bunch of flying beavers, just head off into the woods. All right. Sounds like a cry for help to me. Are you ready for the quiz? Sounds like Heath's browser tabs. It does. Okay, Tom, after Geronimo got a taste for skydiving, he became a stunt beaver. What was the name he used for that profession? A, Bevel CanEvil.

There's no other choice. I'd stop there too if I wrote that. That's great. Bevel CanEvil. All day. That's great. Nicely done. Yeah. All right, I have a question for you, Tom. What else were you thinking about the other day? A, how lazy the guy who named the months got at the end. B, how weird is it is that we never came up with a better name for it than Fireplace? C, the way old people used to say hey is for horses when you would greet them by saying hey and how that should have seemed weirder to us at the time than it did, but it didn't or D

Fuck how the hell am I supposed to write a citation needed essay by Friday if I don't have an idea for a topic Oh no, I am caught All right, Tom which of the following rules had to be applied to the official extreme ironing Facebook page, the EIB? A. Quote, absolutely no firearms, training or not. B. Please be respectful of national monuments and memorials. Emphasis there's. C. Post depicting ironing in places where it is illegal to be in the first place will be deleted or D. Jesus Christ.

You looked this up. I sure did, baby. D all of the above. Sure fucking is. Sure fucking is. All right, Tom, we were talking earlier about proper Chrome tabs being open, and I'm going to finish on one of those here. Here we go.

Beaver banging normally ends with this finishing move. A, sap tapping. B, a gaping aspen. C, raw dogwood. Or D, chestnut. Oh! Bravo, Cecil, bravo. It is the chestnut. I'm sorry it is a gaping aspen. Well you fooled him Cecil so you are this week's winner. Awesome I'm gonna choose Noah next time around. Alright well for Tom, Noah, Cecil, and Heath

I'm Eli. Thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week. And by then, Noah will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to Cecil's brand new show, No Rogan with the one and only Michael Marshall, available wherever you get your fucking podcast. You can also listen to our stuff. But why would you bother with something like that on the horizon?

I'm just going to jump in here during the edit. Eli didn't say the name correctly, so I'm going to say it now. It's the NoRogan experience. That's K-N-O-W. You can go to norogan.com, K-N-O-W-R-O-G-A-N.com, and you can check out the podcast. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or leave us a five star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect us on social media, or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citation pod.com. No pleasure meeting you gentlemen. Thanks again. Can you believe that Johnson?

That sanitation contract is a steal. I don't know what those guys were thinking. That's because they're raccoons man. Damn it all to hell. Yeah, just like text me when you meet a new person. I know, I know.