Endless Thread - Snacktime: Bushfires and Books

Episode Date: January 9, 2020

Ben and Amory discuss a Reddit deep-dive about the Australian wildfires and one man's very, very long reading list.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lap at WB-B-U-R, Boston. Hey, y'all. It's a snack time. Snack time. But this is pretty weak that our first snack time of 2020, there are no snacks. Well, we're in sight. You know, we're in recovery. Still. Did you have a favorite snack you had over the holiday? Yes. Go on. My. Mother-in-law makes something that she just calls crack. Mm-hmm.

It's saltines covered in... Pig's blood. I think it's covered in, like, onion powder and garlic powder and some oil or something. I don't know. I made a baked Alaska for New Year's Eve. Do you know what that is? Is it a fish? Does it involve a fish?

No, it does not involve a fish. Okay. No, I have no idea. It is a pan of brownies with a melted and refrozen mountain of ice cream. Whoa. Covered in brownie. What? All of which is covered in meringue.

The top of which is slightly dug out and filled with a liqueur that you light on fire. It's like the turduckin of desserts. Yeah, basically. Wow. All right. So my snack time contribution this week is a little bit unorthy. Are you ready? Yes, I believe so.

Okay. It's not necessarily a story in the way that we usually tell stories, but it is a thing that is happening in the news right now, which connects to the beginning of why Reddit exists. So what was Reddit used for way in the beginning? What was it used for? Yeah. Like a news? Yeah. Like just a way to share news?

Yeah, you got it. So this happens a lot still. and some of Reddit's really well-sourced posts are some of the best posts that you can still find there. Another form of this is videos, gifts, and photos of news events, right? And so this video that I'm going to play for you now sort of shot up to the top of our feed

just in the last few days. I don't know if you saw this, but I think we should watch this video together. This guy says, oh, I don't really want to shake your hand. There's a guy wearing kind of all yellow. He looks like a service utility worker, maybe a firefighter or something. He's standing up with his coffee. There's another guy in a hat. He's being followed by cameras. Oh. Do you know what this is?

Well, the caption gave it away a little bit. What was the caption say? Firefighter refusing to shake Australia's prime minister's hand. Yeah. Brutal. It's brutal, right? But, you know, this is a tough time. It's a tough time. So because you and I have reported a little bit on the Prime Minister of Australia,

Scott Morrison is part of our Hillsong episode. We know that he has connections to evangelical Christians in that country, right? We also know that he's basically a climate change denier, right? and his response to the massive wildfires there have been received, we could say, pretty poorly. And so poorly enough that they've reverberated here in the U.S. And so that video is showing him trying to shake the hand of a firefighter who apparently just lost his home to the fires, his own home, while fighting the fires. And that guy, it's hard to see, but that guy basically refuses to shake the prime minister's hand. and then the other firefighter,

the prime minister goes to shake the other firefighter's hand, and that guy picks up his coffee and says, time for a cup. And that's him basically make it impossible for the prime minister to shake his hand as well. So this prime minister is getting iced super hard. Yeah. And there's a best-of post that did also really well this week.

And it was really sort of a comment about a news story talking about how the federal fire official in Australia didn't find out that the prime minister was deploying National Guard to fight fires from the PM's office, but from the media reporting it, which is also not a great look for the prime minister. But then this user, and I don't know how to say this username, anewier dog. Okay. On weeer dog? On weeer dog? Sure. Do you know how to spell enwee?

No. The French word. This user does this interesting thing that users sometimes do in the best of subreddit, which is he does this really heavily sourced link-laden post detailing how the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, has completely screwed up the response to the widespread brush fires in Australia since before they even started. Okay? So this is like, I'm sure, can you see this?

Yeah. This is like 12. bullet points. A novella. It's a novella. So he talks about essentially a prime minister's climate change denial and how he like, the prime minister brought coal into parliament and told people not to be afraid of coal. During the wildfires when they started out, he suggested Australians watch cricket instead of worrying about climate change or these brush fires.

He also cut funding to fire services during his prime minister. Ship, of course, he sent thoughts and prayers as you do. Mm-hmm. He also went on holiday to Hawaii a month into the brushfire crisis, and he stayed in a $3,000 per night room with a butler. I guess maybe that was on another holiday. But anyway, this guy is like, this Reddit user really just takes this prime minister's response to the brush fires apart. Like piece by piece, there's probably like,

50 links in this description. And it's just a really interesting thing that I think we come across on Reddit sometimes where a really knowledgeable Redditer who's like super read in on a topic basically says, oh, really, you think that's interesting? Check this out. And we have some listeners in Australia. And I wanted to like send them good vibes. And thank you to the Redditors who, you know, it's really easy to scroll through Reddit

and just see gifts and pictures. but thank you to the Redditors who take the time to educate us all and break stuff down like that. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Also, we will put a link to this on our website. This is a Fast Company article that basically details all the different ways that you can help from the U.S. You can also donate to families of firefighters who have died while on duty. A lot of animals have died in the fires, as we know. And so you can support the Royal Society for the prevention of cruelty to animals in New South.

Wales. So we'll put a link on our site at wbUR.org slash endless thread so that if you want to contribute or support people in Australia, you can do that. One more story when we come back. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew.

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Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org. slash creative studio. Okay, Amory, you got a story for me, right? Yeah. So this comes from about a year ago.

A user with the username Jackety posted in the Books subreddit. Okay. And I don't know about you, Ben, But around the end of the year, beginning of the new year, I see a lot of people either celebrating how many books they read in the last year. I think that's a pretty common New Year's resolution. Or they are setting that as their resolution for the following year. Like, I'm going to read a book a month or I'm going to read two books a month.

Or give me book suggestions for me to read over the holiday. People do ask for that too. Yes. A lot of people come up with their best of 2019 lists. So here's someone who just blows everyone else out of the water, not that it's a competition, but the subject line of this post in our books from a year ago is, My grandfather has kept a detailed list of every book he's read since 1949. Wow.

The annotations on the right side are the genre, and then there are different codes for the books. So he says, you know, he uses the code F for fiction, PL if it was a play, P.O. for poetry. There's a nonfiction code. He also puts the average page count and the total number of pages read for that year. Dang. Yeah. Does he highlight all the books? Does he use a highlighter in all the books, underline stuff?

I don't think so. I printed out some pages like this. Oh, middle school notebook paper. Middle school notebook paper. Yep. It's handwritten. Okay. It says 1976 continued.

And then he's going by month. So he's numbering the books and he's showing, you know, in the month of seven months. In September, he read books 30 through 33, and in the month of October, he read books 34 through 37. And that's just for that year. What does the inside of this guy's house look like, is a question I have. Right? Yeah, did he rent all of these, or does he have copies of all of these? And then he has, you know, the title of the book and the author. So it looks like he started out September with a week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers by Henry David Thoreau.

It was 410 pages, and by the time he completed that, he was up to 12,312 pages for the year. When he walked into the library, would everyone just high-five this guy? Everyone just like stands up from their chair to recognize and then puts out their hand for a high-five. Probably. I printed out another page that kind of made me tear up because my grandfather was a typewriter man. Everything he wrote to me was done on a typewriter. I had similar grandfather vibes. Yeah, and so this page happens to be from 1951.

Same thing, numbering the books, going by month, but it's all done on a typewriter. Beautiful. So people eat this up on Reddit, especially in the book subreddit. And not only that, but he had scanned all of these handwritten and typewritten pages, but he didn't have a comprehensive digital copy of it. So he also said in that original post, like, if any, wants to help me digitize this, I'd love your help. And two Redditors did jump in and help him digitize the whole list. Wow. So now there is a spreadsheet, which we will link to on our website where you can see all of the now 3,090 books that this man has read at least since 1949.

Wow. The sad update to give is that he just passed away. His name was Timothy Blodgett. He just died this January. 2nd. He was from Concord, Massachusetts. He was 90 years old. I'm going to say this. If there is an afterlife, Mr. Blodgett is in the sickest library of all time right now with a huge stack of books. Yep. Just tucking in. So either, you know, rest in peace, rest in power, or read in peace. Read in peace. Read in peace. I like that. Read in peace, Timothy Blodgett. And, Thank you to his grandson, Jackety, for posting this and sharing his full list of 3,000 books.

All right, that's our snack time for this week. We'll talk to you next week. Bye.