Endless Thread - Snacktime: Snektime

Episode Date: January 23, 2020

Ben and Amory dissscusss sssome facsssinating ssstories about sssnakes.

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-Lab at WBUR Boston. It's snack time, the kind of endless threat episode where we snack. Which will mean something to some of you, but not nothing to a lot of you, probably. Well, do you know about snecks? I know about snacks. So let's explain. I want to shout out our technical director, Paul Vicus, from whom this brilliant idea came somewhat accidentally. I think it was like an autocorrect situation where he was typing snack time and it auto corrected

to snake time. And we were like, Paul, this is genius. We have to do a snack time about snakes. And then I think you were like, no, it's got to be snack time. You want to explain that part of it? Yeah, well, you know, snakes, like, snecks is the internet's way of saying snakes. Mm-hmm. Like, it's like the doge of snakes. Absolutely. Okay. No snacks, just snakes today.

Just snacks? Yeah, you want to go first? Okay. So I'm going to tell you about a response to an Ask Reddit thread. The question was, what's your worst encounter with a wild snake? Okay. Off to a great start. Top comment on this was from Prince Nebula 18, and they wrote,

When My Best Friends Slept with My Boyfriend, that was their answer. Oh. You know, it had to be. It had to be. But, okay, here's the real story. It's from user F4T45H35. Of course. Well, this is odd timing, they say.

Yesterday I became the owner of a snake. I went upstairs to the bathroom. Downstairs was occupied. I'm sitting. I'm chilling. Typical day until I glanced to my left and by the toilet is this two and a half foot snake coiled up looking at me. So I have a kid. I figured this was some kind of hilarious prank. Well, it wasn't. It was real. I poked it thinking nothing of it and it starts slithering towards me. Lucky for me, I was already in position to be scared that bad. It hid behind the toilet and I promptly finished and got up, went and found a bucket and came back and caught it. It's an albino corn snake. I was in no danger, so I wouldn't say a worst experience, though for sure, scariest. Everyone we've talked to says it was probably a neighborhood pet that climbed into the sink or toilet and made its way to our house in the plumbing.

What? Like it's right in the pipes? Yeah. Yes. Snakes can come up through my pipes. Yes. So now I'm going to tell you a quick other story. really fast about my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

This happened a year after I moved there. This is from a New York Daily News story in 2007. Forget the monsters under the bed. There really are slithery creatures lurking in the pipes. Nature's call forced Nadej Brunachi, 38 to the dark bathroom in her Cobble Hill, Brooklyn apartment in the wee hours of Monday morning. While washing her hands, she closed. glanced back at the toilet to find a seven-foot-long python staring back at her.

What? I turned on the light and screamed, oh, my God, said the hysterical restaurateur. That's very New York Daily News style. It still makes my heart race. Yes, this is a real story. It happened in my old neighborhood, Kabul Hill, Brooklyn. They had to, like, call the, I don't know, call the snake people to come and pull the thing out. What if it had come up while she was going?

I'm so... I know. I'm so upset to know. Like, that's one of those things that as a little kid, you would say, there could be a snake in the toilet. Right, it's like alligators in the sewer. And you're... Right, and your parents would be like, no, honey, that's not real.

Yeah. It could be... But it's real. I'm upset. I wish good things to all living creatures, but I do not want a snake in my toilet. That's not how you want to meet a snake. No.

Oh, man. All right. Let's take a little snake break. And then I'll tell you one. Snake break. 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. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know.

Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. What do you got? Okay, mine comes from a TIL. This was posted by a user named Labyrinth Luminary. And they say, TIL Bill Host began extracting snake venom at 15 years old. He founded the Miami serpent tail. and he injected himself with venom for 60 plus years.

His blood was used to save 21 snake bite victims. He created a venom serum to cure polio. He was bitten over 170 times and lived to be 100. Wow. Yes. I read in the New York Times that he handled more than 3 million poisonous snakes over the years. And it's true. He would like inject himself with venom as kind of like a scientific experiment. So he was building up immunity by doing this. And he actually was collecting snakes from all over the world, starting with in Florida, where there are a lot of venomous snakes.

He was housing these snakes in what they said were like strict lab conditions and then making their venomous. available to a broader scientific community in a way that they could be studied, they could be experimented with, they were trying to use them to cure certain diseases or as different remedies. And it said that this guy, his hands were like destroyed. He was missing a fingertip.

He clearly wore the signs of having been bitten over 173 times. Wow. Yeah. And he's regarded as a legend. And one of my favorite little factoid about him is that he bought his first exotic snake. It was a diamond back rattleer from a catalog. And this is way back in the day. And he sees that it came from Florida.

So he's like, oh, I've got to get to Florida. So he actually goes to airline mechanic school. He gets a job as a flight engineer with Pan American World Airways. And he started traveling the world and smuggling snakes. Oh, my God. And with these smuggled snakes, he opens this, like I said, this Miami serpentarium where he was housing them. And he was the pioneer of venom production for venom research. All right.

Bill Haast. All right. That's pretty good snack time. Can I tell you one other funny little story? Okay, sure. Okay, so this one is from TIFU. Today I effed up. Okay.

Okay. Yes. So here's the post. I'm just going to read it. So a little backstory. To my knowledge, I'm just about an eighth Native American. But when they found out that when you're applying to college, you just need to be like one 16th Native American in order to put that on your application. He was like, oh, this is great. I've been told that I am, you know, an eighth Native American and that I'm from this tribe of people called the Uanti. Does that name mean anything to you, Ben? Uante. Yuan tea. Have you heard of that before? No. Okay.

So he says, or she says, confirmed with my parents and sent in my application as one eighth Uon T tribe, I found out all these years that this is a fictional race of snake people from Dungeons and Dragons. You know what's so funny is I was going to say this. I was going to say, oh my God, I'm so mad at myself that I didn't guess this because I'm just starting. to play Dungeons and Dragons. I just, like, set up a new character to play Dungeons and Dragons. Mm-hmm. And I was, and I was like, I was going to guess that this is, like, a fictional snake people tribe.

And there you have it. I should have guessed. Yep. He says, T-L-D-R. I told everyone I know that I was a fictional snake person. So that's our little snake roundup, our snick roundup. Good snack time. We'll be back next week with a full episode.

Bye See you then Uh-oh