Good Job, Brain! - 164: What the Folk?

Episode Date: October 18, 2015

What is folk and what counts as folklore? We get folked up by imbibing a lot of trivia nuggets about stories, rituals, and music passed down from generation to generation! How come every nursery rhyme seems to have a hidden murderous and/or political origin? Colin goes on a Fool's Errand and opens our eyes to hazing and camp pranks that keep getting passed down. Get folkin' excited for animal proverb origins, and a *challenging* Greek mythology quiz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Ahoi, awesome, alliance of attentive alert and adorable attendees aching for action. Welcome to Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and Offbeat Trivia podcast. This is episode 164. And, of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your beautiful, bumbling bunch of brains. You made that one, yeah. I'm Colin. I'm Dana.

And I'm Chris. Because it was a little bit mean. Right, right, right. A little bit mean and a little bit positive. So, yeah, it's out. Yeah. Well, before we get started, I want to at least thank everybody who showed up to our first ever good job brain live show. Yes.

Yay, yes. That was so much fun. I can't believe we did it. That was crazy. That was the best. We should do that again. We were going to do it again. I think when I first got up on stage and started talking, like I said, I did the first segment and I kind of started talking. 30 seconds into it, I thought to myself like, oh my God, what are we doing? They can't possibly want to hear this. There is a lot of what do you call imposter syndrome. We got our friend Justin to take a, using professional photos because he's a professional photographer. And I'm looking at these photos.

I was like, this looks like a legit. Before our show, I was like, oh, yeah, we rented out a theater and we sold it out. And then as I said it, I was like, oh, what did I agree to do? Yeah. And it was great. It was so much fun. And everybody seemed to really like it. So, yeah, thank you, thank you guys.

Yeah, that was really fun. It was great to meet everybody, too. We did some audience games. Those were really fun. Yeah. Some smart people Next time we'll do some physical challenges Yeah

Oh my god Definitely we need it We need the slime We need some whipped substance Jellop pools Yeah Feats of Strength Yeah

That would be That would be That would be awesome That would be great or bad Depending on the venue I think Yeah We're gonna have to start Get a people to sign waivers

Yeah What is that show Legends of the Hidden Temple? Legend of Hidden Temple Oh so we'll construct The UK version of Crystal Maze To look through the foam

pool Yeah. Right. And assemble the monkey. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we'll do that. We're not going to do that.

So if you haven't listened to the episode immediately prior to this one, you can get some flavor of what it was like to be there. You can listen to it. Yeah. On purpose, I did not include the whole show because half the show was audience games. And as someone who wasn't there, it might be like a lot of pausing and stuff. But we put in Q&A and then our normal parts of the show. So we would have these meetings. about the live show and we'd make everybody would make about 10 or 15 like jokes about things we

should do with the live show and then it was funny to show up and like not all of them but like five percent of those jokes we turns out we're actually going to do them uh and i showed up at the live show and there were already we joked about putting ponchos on the first row of seats as if you were like going to that Gallagher show or sea world the first row was the splash row and we They were really confused. And we just made everybody put on the rainbow ponchos. And then they thought that they were going to get

splashed at some point. At like a theater. And then at the very end, we were just like, oh yeah, we were just kidding. Make sure you check out our Facebook page, Facebook.com slash good job brain. We have photos. One of the jokes we made was like,

oh, it wouldn't be fun if we had like those movie theater, movie trivia, like anagrams and stuff. And we actually did do that. and it animated in a really cheesy way and it would dissolve out. So all of those slides are also on our Facebook page for your enjoyment. Look at them. They're so good. They are so good.

You have to go look. So check out our Facebook page for that. All right. And without further ado, let's jump into our general trivia segment. Pop quiz, Hot Shot. Are you guys ready? No. I have a random trivia pursuit card that randomly grabbed from the box.

And this is 80s. We've never... Trivial Pursuit, totally 80s. Rad. Oh, rad. Everybody get your barnyard buzzers. Here we go. Blue Edge for TV.

What TV series did Steven Spielberg name for one of his dad's favorite sci-fi magazines? Call it. I believe that was Amazing Stories. Correct. That was a fun little show for a while. Have you tried to watch it recently? No. Does it hold up?

No. It was fast. All right. Pink Wedge for WC. I don't know what that might mean. What First Lady of the 1980s was shocked to find a tremendous rat swimming with her in the White House pool? I mean, Chris. There's only the two, so I'm going to guess just based on, you know, Nancy Reagan?

Incorrect. Oh, well. Barbara Bush. Barbara Bush. Barbara Bush. Quote, a tremendous rat. Or like Rosalind Carter in January. Right, right.

Right. On the three days. One week, oh, she had her last access. Next question, Yellow Wedge. What counter-revolutionary group was denied U.S. aid by the Boland Amendment? Oh, Chris government guy. Counter-revolutionary group, the contras? Correct.

Yeah. Like the video game. Yeah, like the video game. And life. And real life. All right. Purple Wedge. What Pop Starlet got Diane Keaton to direct the video for her hit,

Heaven is a Place on Earth. Oh, that was Dana. Belinda Carlisle? Correct. I didn't know that. Oh, babe. Oh, so, wow, Diane Keaton direct. I didn't know.

I did not know that. When I was a little kid, my best friend's mom loved that. song and would always play it in the car so now it's like oh laura's mom and belinda carlyle are like intermixed my mind i think belinda carlyle looks like laura's mom all right uh green wedge who got an oscar nod for her role as the dirt poor farmer jewel ivy in country wow i haven't heard of any of those words have you heard of uh colin go for it no i'm thinking of a different movie I was going to say Sally Field, but I'm not thinking of the right movie. It's like Coal Miner's daughter.

No, that was a place in the heart. Incorrect. Oh, yeah. It is Jessica Lane. Ah, sure. Lang. Lang. Lang.

Lang. Lang. Not lange. No. Not Mange. Not Mange. All right. Last question.

What was the top selling imported beer in the U.S. throughout the 80s? Everybody. Hyniquin. Oh, I was going to, I was going to say Corona. Oh. Hi, Nicky's! Toy for Chris. Woo!

Good job, brains. Totally 80s. Woo. Poo, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. I don't know what. Lasers. The 80s. I guess arcades.

You know, space invaders. Lots of you wrote in clamoring for a mythology episode. But we're going to blow it up. We're going to go bigger and we're going to go with folklore and world mythology. It's time to get foked up. Yeah. Fault Foll

To the water Every morning just at night Hit her foot against a splinter Fell into the foaming brine Oh my darling Oh my darling Oh my darling Clementine You are lost and gone forever

Dreadful sorry Clementine I'll start us off. So, like, when you say, when you say folklore, all right, Webster's defines folklore. No, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, yeah, no, no, no, no, I, that's one of my least favorite rhetorical devices, yes. But for a lot of people. Unless you're giving a valedictorian speech at high school. Yeah, probably got a best man speech.

Oh, my God. That's the only place that should be. Oh, like, I think that's like, success is defined by, oh my God. But I do. So it is helpful to talk about what a lot of people think. When you say folklore, I think it's fair to say that for a lot of people, they think, you know, myths, legends, you know, like proverbs, folk tales. That's kind of what they think.

And some people maybe it's just like, oh, myths and legends. That's folklore. But, you know, really, like folklore is a lot bigger than that. Folklore includes folk music. It includes customs and rituals. I mean, it's, you know, broadly speaking, it's just any part of our cultural lives that's passed down either as an oral tradition or person to person or you kind of just, oh, I just learned it on the playground, you know, like that's all folklore.

It's anything that's passed down that's not official. There's not, it's not coming from a guidebook or this is the way we do it, you know. It's so many of the things like, you know, we've all had those conversations with friends like, oh, I learned it this way. You learned it that way. Like, that's a feature of folklore. It's like it kind of mutates on its own and gets passed down person to person. When I was in college, I took some really cool classes on folklore.

And what I loved the most about the intro class I took in particular was how much time professor spent on humor. Just, I mean, almost all of our classic jokes. That's all folklore. It's like, who wrote that joke? I don't know. It's lost to the midst of time. It's transmitted person to person or I heard it and it kind of, you know, you tweak it and

you make it your own. Your mama jokes. Your mama jokes are a class. We spent time talking about your mama jokes and the dozens, you know, as they were called before that. Absolutely. That's great classic American folklore. I was always really interested in pranks, what they, like the very technical ritualized pranks and jokes, you know, so this would include stuff like April Fool's pranks would fall into there and a lot of hazing and initiation rights. Okay. And I don't mean the kind of hazing like where you're, you know, paddling people and making them drink too much, although that could be its own study of folklore as well. I love the idea of fools errands. These are my favorite. favorite category of initiation rights and pranks. Okay.

So you guys know what a fool's errand is, right? Like a snipe hunt. Yeah. Snipe hunt isn't up. It is, yes. He told Russell to go find the snipe. He's a bird. Right.

And he gives him directions on how to do it, right? He says you've got to bang the sticks together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's right, yeah. That's a classic one at camp. You know, it's like the new campers come in and you're telling them, here's the snipe hunt.

And it's, you know, the classic version is, you know, you give them a pillowcase in a flashlight, and you send them out into the woods, and you're like, all right, so you've got to beat the bushes, because that's where the snipe hide. So when they run out, you've got to shine the flashlight in their face, it'll freeze them, then you catch them in the pillowcase. So does it classify as lore? Like, I feel like lore is so, like, to me, lore means stories and old tales and stuff. So as I was saying, yeah, I mean, for a lot of people, I think that's where their mind first goes. But no, absolutely, folklore, it's just, it's any practice, belief, narrative that's passed down. without sort of being official.

This is one from my personal life. When I was a young camper, the counselor tried to convince us when we're out on the trail that you had to tuck orange peels behind your ears to keep the spores out of your ears. And we're like, well, the spores,

like, oh, yeah, they're like little insects. They'll climb inside your ears. And like, you know, part of me is like, I don't think that's right. Yeah. But I'm going to do it anyway. It sounds scientific. It's told me about this.

It sounds scientific. So you're like, maybe. Yeah, yeah. Citrus. So it's sort of the running theme of a lot of these ritualized pranks, again, as I say, is initiation into a group. It's like you're the new person and you find them a lot in places that are very tight-knit or that have a lot of jargon, you know, hospitals, the military, the circus, any kind of craft or guild, you know, that has very specialized training. So what I did is I wanted to find some of the best fools errands, ritualized pranks I could find. And this is a very classic one.

I've seen this one in many places. If you're on a painting crew, for instance, you might, your first day, the supervisor sends you to go get a gallon of striped paint. So the guy goes up to the store, yeah, I need a gallon of striped paint. Like if you're a carpenter's apprentice, you know, a common one, I guess, is you might be sent to find the board lengthener. It's like, oh, this board is too short. Go in the back and find the board lengthener.

And the joke is, how long is it going to take this poor person to realize they're being made fun of? And they get passed down from generation to generation. No one knows who the first person asked for a board lengthener or a gallon of striped paint. The cycle of abuse continues. These are kind of like in dad joke territory. Oh, a lot of them are very dad joky. Yeah.

On a farm, you can send the new kid to go gather hens teeth. It's like, yeah, go out. Don't come back. I need like, I need a bucket of hens teeth. Go to collect pigeon milk. Ew. Oh, my God. Bring back something, creamy.

I stopped counting at 10 of how many variants on this next one I've found. If you're in, like, a mechanic shop or a tool shop, you will often send the new guy to go find a left-handed wrench or a left-handed screwdriver, et cetera. Go find a box of straight hooks. Oh. Right, right. Go get me some sheets of smooth sandpaper. Wait, do they, do people still do this?

People still do variations on these. Absolutely. I was reading them some of submarine sort of initiation rights on a sub. The new semen on board, you send them to the engine room and tell them to get a machinist's punch. So they go to the engine. Yeah, I need a machinist punch. So the machinist mate will punch them on the arm. Is that like a Hertz donut?

It's a lot like a Hertz donut, yes. What's a Hertz donut? It's like, this is your sibling doing it. It's like, oh, do you want a Hertz donut? and you're like, yeah, I want a donut. And then they hit you. And they're like, hurts donut. And you're like, mm.

I think Karen is going over the list of times people have asked her to do all that these things. It's like, oh, no. That's why. Straightened all those hooks. They say nothing of the pigeons. Right, exactly. Poor pigeons. What did I bring them?

I'm not going to. I know. I'm thinking, like, I feel bad for, like, the hens who this kid is like, right? Putting the mouth. In a hospital setting, if you're a nurse's aide, you might be sent to fetch 10 feet of fallopian tube. Oh, my God. Ew. It's like, you can't find it.

What do you do? You go up to the nearest person and you say, hey, I have to get 10 feet of fallopian tube. And of course, since they're in on it, they're going to tell you, oh, yeah, just go see them in, you know, down in room 3C down the hallway up the... Exactly. There's a tradition, again, among these initiation rites of the long stance. So your boss, you know, says you, oh, go and see this person in Office 10. Tell me to know a long stand. So you go over there and they're like, oh, I don't have the long stand.

The long stand is down in Department C. Eventually, it dawns on you that the long stand is you standing there for a long time. Right, right. It's like, it's not mean enough that you would never do it to somebody else, but it's memorable enough that you would use that power when you are the old person. So that's why it carries on. It's interesting. It's like, and, you know, it's a lot of abuse.

It's really mean. It's like, I feel like you might go to HR if you do that now. It happens in cultures where it has built up over a long time. You know, and Karen, you know, I mean, back to what we're talking about before. Another aspect of things that are in the domain of folklore is a lot of people are going to have heard it and have heard different stories. It's like, oh, I thought my company came up with that. Or it's like, oh, no, I thought my troop was the one that came up with that. It's more widespread than you think.

Yeah. This one made me laugh. I don't know why this one tickled me the most, but I was reading about a fool's errand. This was sometimes done in an April Fool's Prank in Norway, okay, in the mid-1800s, you would send children to the neighbors to ask to borrow warmth out of a bed. Oh. That's sad. It might help if you have a Norwegian sense of humor.

I'm freezing. Why don't you go sleep in their bed? there was a scene even in Game of Thrones both in the books and on the TV show when Ned is talking to King Robert Barathean early on and he's talking about where his squire is and he says oh I sent him to find a breastplate stretcher and basically the joke is he's running around

just out of my hair looking for something that doesn't exist which is also kind of the role of fools errand get out of my hair for a little while yeah all right and I will close it out here with one little extra trivia nugget of the snipe hunt. So the snipe, the snipe is a real bird. There is an actual bird called the snipe.

They are reportedly very hard to catch, very hard to hunt, so hard to catch and hunt that you tend to have to shoot them from a distance. This is where the word sniper comes from. Oh my goodness. Get out. To snipe at comes directly from to hunt snipe, which was the technique you would use when you were hunting these little birds. And from there is where we get our sniper,

someone who is good at shooting things from a distance. Mind-blown. As in a snipe. Whoa. So you don't put the flashlight on them. You will not catch them. You just put this crosshair. A sniper rifle.

A rookie mistake. Hitting the bush where this is out. That's the part is you just whack those bushes really good. Yeah, you're for sure not going to catch you. Yeah. So another. major part of folklore, as I think you mentioned, Colin, is folk music. And I am a big fan of Irish folk music.

And so I'd like to talk about that. I'm going to start off by reciting some words that were written 1913, just for the heck of it. Folk music, then, is the true national melody handed down traditionally for centuries with surprising fidelity until, in the more civilized and cultured time, it has been interpreted into musical notation. Irish music has been admired wherever its melting strains have been heard, and it has been said that the Irishman's whole life is set to song.

He is crooned to sleep in his cradle by immemorial lullabies, and the weird wail of the keen follows him to the grave. Whoa. Okay. These words were written by a guy named Francis. O'Neill, and he is considered one of the most important figures in traditional Irish music. Is he a historian? But why?

We'll find out. He was born near County Cork in Ireland in 1848. Now, does anybody want to tell me what was going on in Ireland, 1848? Or they're about... The potato famine. The great potato famine, in which millions of people died. Lots of people died, huge population decline, and a lot of people left Ireland. When he was 16 years of age, Francis O'Neill left his native Ireland to become, this is great, a cabin boy.

Who among us has not dreamed of becoming a cabin boy, setting sail on an English merchant vessel. It does sound very romantic. Doesn't it? It does. See the world. I will share one story of his travels, which was relayed to. us in a book written by one, Francis O'Neill. So, you know, I don't know if he's unreliable or whatever, but he's the only one who told

this story. At one point, they shipwrecked on Baker Island, which is halfway between Hawaii and Australia, as in, like, the ship broke apart and was totally destroyed. Now, this is where they were going. Oh, yes. Luckily, and the United States was actually occupying this island with a few people to collect and export guano. Oh, that guano?

Bird poop. No, bird, bird guano. Because of the saltpeter in it to make gunpowder. And the importing of guano, like, they were doing a lot of this, apparently. Like many, many islands that had

guano deposits that were in the Pacific, the United States was, like, sending small groups of people there to fill ships full of poop. I'll take that poop off your hands. Yeah. Yes. So, Luckily, there were people on this island, and they supplied them with the crew of the ship that Francis O'Neill was on.

They supplied them with hardtack and water to live on. What's hardtack? It is like the worst bread that you've ever eaten in your life. Hence hard. And then a ship finally came by to take them to Honolulu, and they were rescued off of Baker Island. And then on the ship, again, they were eating hard tack and water. and everybody, once they got to Honolulu, was malnourished. With the exception of Francis O'Neill and a couple other people,

and he says it is because one of the Hawaii natives, who was the crew of this boat, had a flute, and he borrowed it, and he played tunes such as Yankee Doodle. This endeared the Hawaiian to him, and they became friends, and he, quote, shared his daily ration of coy and salmon. with me. Oh. Because they bonded over music on this ship. Man, they didn't share it with other people.

No. There's only so much. Not everybody's cool about Yankee Doodles. Musicians get paid, man. You know, if you could play music, you could buy your drinks, or in this case, your poe and salmon rations. So he lands in San Francisco. He goes all around the United States.

He gets married. He ends up finally in Chicago, which is where he stayed. And so, Francis O'Neill joins the police department. And then from 1901 to 1905, after many years of service, he was actually Chicago's chief of police for four years. Very well liked. Apparently, people said that he lasted, like, through a couple of political administrations, but because that job was really a political appointment, like, that meant that he was, you know, really good. Yeah, he's just charismatic. He's a charismatic guy.

So he would take his powers of persuasion to really interesting places because while he was in Chicago, he, devoted himself to what would become his legacy, the preservation of Irish traditional music. So a lot of this music, you know, centuries old, was never really written down. It was passed in the, you know, in the oral acoustic tradition from musician to musician. But meanwhile, the population of Ireland is plummeting. All the Irish people are going all over the world. So it's possible that the music will actually get lost. Right.

It was starting to get lost. And also, it was not high culture. It was looked down upon as low culture. So, how did he get the music? Here are some anecdotes from WTTW. That's the PBS station in Chicago. One person says, as soon as he heard of Piper's coming to America, he would bring them all to Chicago, put them on the police force, and write down their music. What?

So he'd give them jobs as police officers. What? So they'd have jobs, but reason to say, I mean, they need jobs. But then he would just sit with them and just, like, write down on them. Yes. So basically just, you know, kind of abusing his power. Right. As police chief a little bit.

Yeah, but that police department is like the most musical. Incredibly musical police department. He would, another quote, he would travel the street cars of Chicago in civilian clothing, listening to people on the street humming and whistling tunes. Whoa. Just tap you on the shoulder. Yeah. And he would basically, like, you know, whistle or hum that for me.

And he would learn it on the whistle and he'd go back. He could not write musical notation, but one of his sergeants did. So he'd go and he'd play it for him and the sergeant would write it down. It's like a three-step process. Yep. After he retired from the police force in 1905 and until his death in 1936, he just tirelessly, passionately tracked down every tune he possibly could. He had musicians sent him wax cylinders of tunes over the course of his life. I mean, just in the books that he collected, there are 3,000.

500 tunes that he kind of collected and put into publication. I think he is probably better known in Ireland than he is in America or Chicago. In Ireland, there is a statue of him in County Cork. Thanks to him. Right. Probably the only, like, American police chief who has a statue in Ireland. That's awesome. Francis O'Neill, crazy. That's really cool.

So we talked about Greek myths on the show before. before we've talked about it a few times because it does come up in trivia and we do enjoy talking about it and we do it's fascinating fascinating there's so many stories yeah there's so many stories and they are i mean i was going to say crazy but they are outlandish they're very like i don't see those motifs showing up like in that way and other stories are very creative and they don't really know who wrote it or you know who wrote it down but you don't know where it came from. They got to be crazy,

you know, in order for you to remember them. To be sticky. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. So,

I mean, we've talked to turn into a swan and had sex with a lady. I mean, yeah. There's so much

bestiality. So much. Well, you got to keep everybody interested. You say, you say your interest is waning and then you're

like, and then you're like, what? You're like, excuse me? You start to nod off a little bit and so.

on that while then a horse walked turned into a horse and they're like oh wait there's a horse something's got something freaky's going to happen right now so I made a quiz about the Greek gods and we've talked about the Greek gods before I made like a weird mnemonic

like with the Greek and Roman gods so this is Oh sorry I'm going to interrupt you really quickly because I think this is very very important Okay There's a very famous statue in the Louvre That is a torso, and it has no arms.

What do you call it? I think you're looking for Venus de Milo. Oh, okay. Apparently, you're not supposed to call it Venus de Milo. It's Aphrodite de Milo because it was created by a Greek person, not a Roman or Italian person. So saying Venus de Milo is actually wrong. It is Aphrodite de Milo. And the Louvre says that.

The Louvre tells you that. Yes. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Is that cool? Anyways, that's sorry. So, I mean, that's a Greek god, a Roman name thing. It's a Louvre, um, actually.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Louvre. Yeah. So I decided for this quiz, we've moved past, like, what these gods are, like, what the, you know, 12, 13, 14, it depends on your definition of the gods of Olympus. We already know their names. We know what they're the gods of. So this one is a little bit deeper of a cut.

It's like, which one was in this story? Okay. Okay. For example, who turned Medusa into a monster? Which Greek God turned Medusa into a monster? She was a woman. Yeah. She had sex with a god.

Is it Zeus? No. It was Poseidon? No. She had sex with Poseidon. Oh. Juno? In the temple of Athena.

Athena did it. Right. Right. Yes. Yeah, that's a wall. There you go. There you go. Few cuts.

Do you know who made Medusa? It was Athena. You guys buzz in, and we'll get through this. We'll get through this together. We'll work it out. Who showed Helen of Troy to Paris, which started the Trojan War? Chris. Aries.

No. Oh, that's a good guess. By showing Helen of Troy to Paris, Paris was struck with great desire for her. Aphrodite. Aphrodite did it. Oh, gotcha. So Pandora in Greek mythology was the first human woman, and she was created by the gods. Oh, I didn't know that.

First human woman created by the gods who created her. Oh, man. Who crafted her. Yeah. Who was the crafty god? Crafty god. Yeah. There's one who was a maker.

He made robots as well. That's my way. Hephaestus. Hephaestus. Yes. Yeah. That's right. He is crafty.

Yeah. He's a maker. What's his other name? Vulcan? Yeah, the Roman. God of the forge. He's married to Aphrodite. Who is the great-grandparent of Odysseus, the famous traveler?

Odysseus. Is the descendant of a Greek god, according to myth. Okay. Apollo. No. Poseid? No. Because I thought he's a sailor.

That's a good, I mean, good reasoning. It's a traveling god. Hermes. Hermes. Yes. Oh, that's what I was thinking of. Would you, wait, would you say? I said Apollo.

He's the sun god. Yeah, I was thinking, I was thinking of the winged messenger, yeah. Who had dominion over the sky and air? Sky and air. Oh. Chris. Apollo? No.

Damn. I mean, he had dominion over the sun, but no. Sky and air. Who got the sky and air? Was that also Poseidon? No. Okay. One of the major gods?

Yes. Zeus. It's Zeus. Yeah. Thunder. We're overthinking. We're like, yeah. They divided the world into three.

Sky and air. Yeah. Water and the underworld. And so Zeus was that Poseidon's the water. Hades is the underworld. Which Greek god was Hercules name for? Chris. Hera.

Hera. She hated him. I mean, he's Heracly. Heracles. Heracles in Greek. But it means, like, the fame of Hara. Right. Like, they were trying to kiss up to her, but she...

But she did all the bad things to him. That's because she was married to Zeus, and that was Zeus's... Illegimate child. So, Hara is responsible for the milky way, according to Greek legend. Why? Was it like a bridge? No, it relates to Hercules. Was it his milk?

She was so mad that she smashed. Colin was on the right track with the mother's milk. They tricked her into nursing him. And then when she figured out it was Hercules, she, like, wrapped him off and then the milk became the milky way. Those stories are bananas. Which great gods symbols are horses, bulls, and dolphins? Karen. Zeus?

No. Horses, bowls, and dolphins? Yeah. Wait, is it three? It's one guy. One guy. dominion over at least those three. This is Poseidon.

That's Poseidon. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah. Randomly horses. And he's like earthquakes as well, right? And earthquake. Like almost everything.

He had. I feel like all the gods went around once, got like their primary thing, you know? And then like they had to keep going out and fill out. They're like, guys, nobody claimed horses yet. And Poseidon's like, I'll take it. It was like a draft. It was like a draft. The poo platter.

Everybody has a. Which God gave up their seat at Olympus to prevent Discord gave up their seat to Dionysus. Oh, yeah. Dionysus. Dionysus. Oh, yeah, who was it? Where did they go after that?

Yeah, did they become a person? No. It's like sometimes they're considered a god. Sometimes they're not. It was a goddess, right? Yes. Series? Dimitri.

I don't even know if these are. She's like grains. Yeah, grains. That is a god, but that's the Roman name for Demeter. Demeter, that's what I can't remember. It's going to kill me. No, what is it? It's a lady.

It's Hesja, the goddess of the hearth. Yes. There are not many stories about her, but she's pretty low-key. Yeah, she's like, eh, you can sit here. She's like, I don't have time for this drama. I don't know. Yeah. Who is sometimes known as the corn mother?

Deleater. Demeter. Yes. I just really like that name, the corn mother. The corn mother. Yes. And then lastly. Whose companions are Damos, which means terror or dread, and Phobos, fear, or horror?

Oh, my God. For Halloween. There you go. Is that Hades? No. Chris. Cerberus? No.

That's not a god. But what a dog. Yeah. So, terror and fear. Phobos sounds so familiar. Yeah. Are the companions of this god. Is it Thanos?

No. Thanos? No. It's Aries, the god of wars. Oh, right. Are they dread and war? Are they thing or what are they? They're like gods.

The way like nemesis is the goddess of. I was picturing like little hounds or something. Yeah, that's what I was like pain and panic from from cartoon. His cronies. Yeah, the Greeks didn't enjoy war very much, but the Romans did. So it's interesting how they have different relationships with that God in particular. Oh, that is true. Yeah.

Like in the video game God of War Yeah Just like in the video Just like in the movie Good job you guys Thanks Corn Mother You're a corn mother

You're a corn mother I'm a corn mother I'm a t-shirt They're just Yeah Corn Mother All right Let's take a quick break

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I feel like there's a lesson there. Oh well, this is the comment. Constant, a history of getting things wrong. I'm Mark Chrysler. Every episode, we look at the bad ideas, mistakes, and accidents that misshaped our world. Find us at Constantpodcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts. is a few minutes to hear the latest from IGN on the world of video games, movies, and television with news, previews, and reviews. You'll hear everything from Comic-Con coverage to the huge Diablo for launch.

So listen and subscribe to the IGN Daily Update, wherever you get your podcasts. That's the IGN Daily Update, wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Good Job Brain Smooth puzzles Smart trivia Good Job Brain Well, I know one good way to grab attention on good job brain is to hook a segment around animals

Yes, and butts And or And or, and or But in this case Are there butts symbol in this as well? Now I'm kind of regretting and I didn't include

any animal buds in this segment. They do. So, like implicitly. Yeah. They do. They do. So, yeah,

take that for what you will. I want to talk to you guys about, I have some proverbs and some sayings that are an animal related. And I'm pretty sure you guys have heard all of these before, but I want to talk a little

about where they come from, where we think they come from. You know, I'm the worst at this. Yeah. Idioms, expressions. Oh, really? Really? Oh, yeah, right, right, right. Do you ever watch Who Wants Be a Millionaire?

It's always like the $2,000 question is like, steady as a lot. Oh, right, right, right, I don't know. All right, well, you'll be a good litmus test for this one. Is heartbeat steady? I don't know. So let's get into it with some animal-related sayings here. So have you guys heard the saying, don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Right.

Karen, have you heard that one? Yes, but I have no idea what it means. Okay, okay. Have you heard the saying, this is related? I got it straight from the horse's mouth. Yes. Okay. Those are related, but they mean different things. You know, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Basically means if someone gives you a present, you know, don't inspect it too closely. Don't question it. Don't be like, oh, well, this isn't, you know, the one. It's just take the present, be gracious, and move on. Oh, okay. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. And then the saying got it straight from the horse's mouth basically means this is the truth. I heard it right from the source.

Primary source material, right? So what does this mean? What's the focus about looking at a horse's mouth? Why are horse, horse health? You can tell health of the horse from its teeth. Also from its hooves. The gums and the teeth, yeah, exactly. I would think it's something to do with the Trojan horse.

Oh, you know what? I think you're right, actually. No, no. I'm going to go ahead and say, no, you were right originally. You guys are definitely very, very close. It's really, it's even simpler than the horse's health. It's that you can tell how old a horse is by looking at the horse's teeth. So if someone gives you a horse, you don't want to be like, oh, this old thing?

Right, right. You just want to be like, thank you for the free horse. And then related, yeah, it's like, I got it straight from the horse's mouth, meaning I didn't just trust the person to tell me how old the horse is. I looked at it. I looked and made sure for myself. I really, I thought it was a, I don't know, Trojan horse. Like, if you look in too close, you'll see all the people hiding. Actually, then it's like, you should look at a gift horse. That was a gift horse that they should have looked in the mouth.

They should have looked in the mouth of that gift horse, yeah. Well, I like that you said that, though, Karen, because so the don't look a gift horse in the mouth is a proverb in sort of the truer sense. But there are also some sayings, you know, that are more like idioms where we can actually trace like, oh, this is where it first entered the language. But what I like about the folklore aspect of those is the folk etymologies coming up with these. Like you say, it's like if we don't know the gift horse, you've got to have to come up with an explanation for why it makes sense. Yeah. Like an egghorn, if you will, which we've talked about. All right.

You guys have heard of a red herring. Yes. All right. Karen, what's a red herring? A red herring is in a mystery. It's something that throws you off. It's like a, you think it's a clue, but it's not a clue. It's something there to throw you off. 100% correct.

Absolutely. On purpose. That's the metaphorical meeting, yes. You know, the guy, you read the Da Vinci Code, right? I did not. Okay, so half of this podcast read the Da Vinci Code. The guy they set up as the obvious villain of the story, who turns out to not be the villain of the story.

name is Bishop Arengarosa, which is a Italian for red herring. Is that really? Wow. It's that transparent. Oh, yeah, yeah, Stan Brown is that. It is. It is. Yeah, exactly.

Do you, okay, so, so where did this come from? Why do we, why is something that throws you off the trail, what throws a detective? Why is that a red herring? Where do we get that term from? This is good. Is that Agatha Christie? No. No.

You're thinking that sort of the right country of origin, though. England. It's much more British originally. I do not. I'm trying to remember. Is there no such thing as a red herring? No, no, in fact, so there's, let's break this down. There's two levels.

A red herring is red herring may need to distinguish it from other types of herring. So this isn't like the actual fish. This would be herring that you would eat. Red herring is smoked herring. Red herring, that's all that is. It's a herring that's been smoked and dried to contrast it with like white herring, which might be salted but not smoked or black herring, etc. Okay.

And where this enters the meaning of throwing someone off the trail is that it was it was part of a training aid for hunting dogs. Oh, of course. So they drag it across the trail or something like that? If you were sort of the classic British, you know, out hunting foxes, the fox and the hounds type of thing, as part of training the hounds to track a foxescent, you would train them, you know, with a dead fox or whatever your prey was. If you had a dog that was really tough to train, you could resort to using a red herring because it's so powerful. powerful a smell, basically like, you know, if you can't get a dog to follow the red herring, this dog may not be cut out for a life of fox hunting. But so then from there, the meaning got to be basically that if you wanted to intentionally

throw a dog off a track, you could use a red herring. And so from there, exactly, the meaning that you have, Karen, is, yeah. This goes back yet to at least 1800, you know, if not earlier. And in fact, there is a book called The Gentleman's Recreation from 1688, describing the literal practice of red herring in hound training. Wow. Yeah. All right.

Last one here. Have you guys heard the expression, the kangaroo court? Yes. This isn't a real court. This is just a total kangaroo court. Right. What does that mean, kangaroo court? It's like a crooked court, right?

You're not going to get justice in that court. Oh, it's not that it's just silly. No, no, no. It's not like the gavel was squeaky. Like a clown court. Yeah. That's what I think. Yeah, it's like an ad hoc court or like a mock court.

Like not legal in any sense of the word, but sort of thrown together by the people there. So you'll have a kangaroo court, say, in like jail, you know, or if you have some infraction, your fellow inmates might set up a kangaroo court, basically. Or like frontier justice, kind of. This is a, this is not a real court. This is a kangaroo court. Any guesses, any ideas. Australia, Australia, Australia. Well, yeah, but.

I would have guessed. Australia too, it actually is American as best as they can tell. It's slightly unclear, but it traces back to the America, about the mid-1800s. They would have had to have had knowledge of the kangaroo.

Yes, exactly, right. It can't be like 1,300s or, yeah. One prevailing theory and OED talks about this is that it may have had something to do with the notion of claim jumpers, because it dates to right around the period of the gold rush. I don't know what those are.

So if you, like in the gold rush, I'm staking a claim. Like, this is my plot of land. I'm mining here. And someone else comes along and jumps your claim, basically, you know, stealing it, squatting it on it. They're a claim jumper. And the idea is that miners would sort of set up their own courts, basically, to try these claim jumpers. And possibly it alludes to the jumping or the leaping of how quick the proceedings happen. And that's plausible.

That's possible. but what's also interesting is It's one of those things that sounds a little bit too good Yeah It does a little bit Yeah especially Yeah especially since there's no kangaroo The Old West though had really good words

Like they had bamboozle And they had like I mean like kangaroo is kind of in that Fun essay So here's what's interesting is that those kind of courts were also called Mustang courts In the West in the States So again That sounds cool

Well it sounds cool but the idea is more like a wild animal And I think that that is more plausible, that it's like a Mustang court, a kangaroo court. It's just sort of out of control and leaping along and coming to what knows, who knows what conclusions. Call it a bunny court. That's too cute, though. Yeah. It's like, oh, I'd love to be in a bunny court. Bunny court.

How was bunny court? Yeah. It's fine. Well, that was pretty good. Good job, guys. I hope you do not get caught with red herrings. and end up in a kangaroo court and have to look a gift horse in the mouth. Throughout history, royals across the world were notorious for incest.

They married their own relatives in order to consolidate power and keep their blood blue. But they were oblivious to the havoc all this inbreeding was having on the health of their offspring. From Egyptian pharaohs marrying their own sisters to the habson. Bergs notoriously oversized lower jaws. I explore the most shocking incestuous relationships and tragically inbred individuals in royal history. And that's just episode one. On the History Tea Time podcast, I profile remarkable queens and LGBTQ plus royals explore royal family trees and delve into women's medical history and other fascinating topics. I'm Lindsay Holiday and I'm spilling the tea on history.

Join me every Tuesday for new episodes of the History Tea Time podcast, wherever fine podcasts are enjoyed. And we have one last segment. So probably the first time in our lives that we ever interact with folklore is when we hear our first nursery rhymes. When our parents repeat these bits of weird poetry to us, they don't make any sense. And they don't make any very old time. at all, but they, but for some reason they think that this is the, this is so important to teach to children, like, as soon as they know how to talk, it's like, we should teach you these nursery rhymes that make no sense, don't apply to your life whatsoever.

It's nursery rhymes and farm animals. Nursery rhymes and farm animals. Oh, that's true. You interact with farm animals. Barn sets? Yeah. Yeah, like what the, what all the farm animals say. Yeah.

Very important for you to know this for success. Like, oh, that's right. It's all, it's like, I mean, I've only been to a farm like twice. So I want to go through a few nursery rhymes and just talk about them a little bit. See, there's this weird thing about nursery rhymes. I don't know why this is. But for some reason, everybody wants nursery rhymes to be, like, encoded death messages. Like, everybody wants, oh, did you hear that what this nursery room is really talking about?

And it's like it's either about, you know, the plague or it's a secret. Or it's a secret, yeah, pirate secret pirate codes, coded political satire. Oh, there are, though. You're right. I've never noticed that. Everybody wants nursery rhymes to be those things. Nursery rhymes are very often not those things. Off top of my head, I think I can think of five, like, origin story or, you know, propose.

And you always, you always hear about this stuff. I am here on today's episode of Good Job Brain to tell you that if anybody ever says to you, oh do you know what the real meaning of this nursery rhyme is they are probably wrong they they probably do not know because these these things are folklore yeah like we don't know where they came from and there's we don't have anybody to tell us like oh well this is what i meant when i did it and a lot of it is back solving you know a lot of it is sort of like trying to cram a meaning onto it later on or i'm you know a lot of them are eggorns that there was mistranslated at some point 200 years ago and that just sort of like playing tell telephone over generations. We get down to, and that's exactly what happens with the nursery rhymes. The version of the nursery rhyme that we have today was told and retold and told and retold. It was never really written down.

You know, I mean, it was written down, obviously. But, you know what I mean? Like, it wasn't like there was, like, one book where everybody got it from. Right. And so the version that we have that people are trying to apply all of this sort of, you know, knowledge to saying what it really means, those words are, those words repeat. by generations of school children and mutated in the giant global

game of telephone, those weren't the original words in most cases. So, for example... Were any of them, though? Any of them? Literally none of them that I have found have those explanations, has anyone said

that this explanation is true? Except for one, which is not folklore, but we'll talk about it. All right. That's a tease. Humpty Dumpty originated around 1797. Everybody says, okay, so first of all, this is Humpty Dumpty Dumpty in case you don't know.

Humpty Dumpty Stout on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again. Right. I don't know why they have all the horses. So a lot of people say, oh, Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III because he had a hunchback and because he lost this war. And after he lost the war, you know, he couldn't

figure it all out again and it's making fun of the king now so this is what humpty dumpty we know what humpty dumpty was i mean it was folklore so nobody knows where it came from but it it was a riddle it's a riddle i would say that to you and you have to figure out why that makes sense and is that why he's depicted as an egg exactly so the riddle is now part of the lore of humpty dumpty the answer to the riddle was he's an egg because Humpty Dumpty was actually slang for a clumsy person So I would tell you this And like oh a clumsy person fell off a wall

And you know nobody could could fix him And so it's the idea is it's an egg Because if an egg falls off a wall There's nothing you can do to put the egg back together Oh but now the egg imagery is built in Right yeah You know that he's an egg We know he's an egg because it's in all the pictures

But it used to be, there's even printed books in which is like, answer, he is an egg. Like that's, it's a written. Right, right. There's like the call, call in response, but it's like, yeah, asking like a knock-knock joke. It's a two-part performance. Yeah. But yeah, are horses good at putting things together usually? Well, again, so the horses and the men were not mentioned in the earliest early.

Oh, it's better because it feels like they made it worse by adding that more confusing. Like, what? But nothing else is supported by any kind of. of like evidence whatsoever. Ring around the rosy. Oh, I've heard this. Oh, you've heard this one. Well, Karen.

Okay, so I'll recite the poem and then you can tell me what it all means. So ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down. So what do people say about this measure? I think I've heard two before. I'm not correct me if I'm wrong. Well, let's just keep it to one. One of it's like, it's like smallpox or some sort of horrible disease. And then, like, Scarlet Feet, I don't know, whatever.

And people died. And, like, the pocketful of posies are supposed to, like, our flowers are supposed to keep the corpse smelling better. That's similar to what, to one I had heard of. I think about the plague. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. You get the ring rash.

That it's about the bubonic plague and that you would get a rash in the shape of a ring around your body. Right. And that you would carry posies with you for protection against the plague. People could do that. And then you, and then it's not. Ashes, Ashes, it's actually Atchoo, Achoo, as in you sneeze a bunch and then you die.

But that's not true. The problem is, again, there's much earlier versions of this poem, and the posies and the sneezing and all that is not in there, no. So those might be added in his back salt. And the thing is, so what is this? It's a

game. The kids are all in a circle around one kid who's in the middle, and he is the rosier or the rose tree in French. And in England, they say ring a ring of roses, you know? So, and then it's like, and when they say we all fall down, everybody falls to the ground, but the last person to fall has to be in the middle. Then they're the rose tree. We would perform the little dance when I was in preschool.

We would do the little ring and the dance and fall down. But I don't think we had it even as complicated as, yeah, a game. Right, right, just dancing in a circle and falling over. Yeah, well, yeah, dancing is early down is fun enough as it is. Yeah, exactly. So you felt on. You find version after version in which just it's like kids, you know, kids here started saying posies and kids over there started saying this and, you know, kids over there started saying that. So we arrive at this.

It's not, there is no official version. We arrive at it through many, many weird mutations. And, you know, probably what happens is like once one gets written down into a book that's popular. Yeah, then it kind of solidifies. Yeah, Jack and Jill, but up the hill. I mean, there's just a million different. Wait, what's the secret meaning for Jack and Jim? It's about the king, you know, he changed the standards of measurements because a jack was something like jack is a half a pint and a gill is a quarter pint or something like that.

And they were parodying, you know, the broke his crown is supposed to be a very pointed, yeah. No, none of it. It's a nonsense rhyme. I mean, somebody suggested, and I couldn't find another source to back this up, but like, it's a nonsense rhyme because you don't go up the hill to get the water. Why would you put the well At the top of the hill So they had to dig through the hill To get to the water table

The well would be love Why do they go up the hill for the water? This one really stick Merry Mary Quite Contrary Oh, this is This has got to be Bloody Mary Mary Mary the first of England

Who executed all the Protestants Right, I've heard that I've heard that And that's Mary Mary quite contrary And because the silver bells And pretty maids all in a row Those are her torture implement that she used to torture the Protestants.

The Iron Maiden. Yeah, unfortunately, Bloody Mary died in 1558, and the earliest version of Mary Mary quite contrary was in 1744. So that would be like me, like, writing some humorous dog-roll about George Washington. But keeping it all secrets, so nobody knew what I was really referencing. We really want all of these things that our teacher taught us in kindergarten to be about death and murder. We just want it to be like, oh, what they teach them of these kids? None of it.

It's for some reason, just people just want to go like backsolve all these things. But it's really just about trying to apply it later on. I wish they were all. But I will say this something that we know where it came from. And we can't call it folklore based on the fact that we know exactly explicitly where it came from. Mary had a little lamb. Mary had a little lamb was written about a girl named Mary Soyuz. who lived in Sterling, Massachusetts.

One day, she brought a lamb into the school, and there was a visiting, like, college student there. And it was very funny because she brought her lamb to school, and everybody thought it was hilarious. And he wrote a little poem, like, Mary had a little lamb, who was supposed to by the snow. Mary went, Lamb was here to go. He, like, gave her the poem, and he kind of passed it out.

It was like, oh, he wrote this poem. So, you know, we know who wrote it. Interesting. He ended up in a book, you know, and that was real. And actually, hilariously, Henry Ford, who he wanted to turn the town of Sudbury, Massachusetts, into a living museum of American history. So he bought the wayside in that Longfellow wrote about,

the stories of the wayside in, and a lot of the thousands of acres around it. He bought the schoolhouse that was in Sterling, Massachusetts, and this was the schoolhouse of Mary had a little lamb. And he had it moved to Sudbury, Massachusetts, on the grounds of where the wayside in is, because he was, like, collecting, like, Americana in the form of, like, actual buildings and moving it all together. Large-scale collector. Well, Henry Ford.

And that's where it is. You can go to the Mary Head, a little lamb school house. That is, that is real. A lamb stood here. On this spot. It was against the rules. And the lamb was the robber barons. And Mary was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.

All right, and that's our show. Thank you guys for joining me. Thank you guys listeners for listening and hope you learn a lot of stuff about Greek gods, what stories actually appeared in, folk music, and also no such thing as a 10-foot-long fallopian tune. So stop looking for one or stripe paint. There should be a store. There should be one store that sells all of these things.

That'd be awesome. One variant of that, by the way, in the UK is for plaid paint or tartan paint. Tartan paint. Tartan paint. I like that tartan paint. You can find our show on iTunes, on SoundCloud, on Stitcher, on Spotify, and also on our website, good job brain.com. And thanks to our sponsor, Audible.

And we'll see you guys next week. Bye. from the terrifying power of tornadoes to sizzling summer temperatures acuether daily brings you the top trending weather-related story of the day seven days a week you can learn a lot in just a few minutes with stories about impending hurricanes winter storms, or even what not to miss in the night sky. So listen and subscribe to Accuether Daily, wherever you get your podcasts. That's Accuweather Daily, wherever you get your podcasts.