Good Job, Brain! - 207: A Hobby a Day Keeps the Doldrums Away

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

We're decoupaging our way through trivia and facts about hobbies! Since there are very few official terms for specific collection hobbies, Karen's got a quiz about made-up hobby names with the help of our Twitter fans. Chris gives us a glimpse of some *wild* stuff that has shaken and changed the world of video game collecting. Boot up that Cricut to slice through Dana's arts & crafts quiz. And Colin introduces us to the most amazingly irrational hobby as we record on Pi Day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, Antipasto, anticipating antics about antiques, antipodes, and antibodies. This is good job, brain, your quirky quiz show, an offbeat trivia podcast. Today's show is episode 207. And of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your snippy omnipresent snipes full of snippets of catnip and parsnips. I'm Colin. I'm Dana. And I'm Chris.

I probably do have some catnip somewhere in my system. Can humans eat catnip? Yeah, I've eaten it before. Does anything happen? Or, I mean, like, its effects is not. I was rolling on the floor and eating. But aside from that, no, not for people. Like, at best, it just has like a vaguely kind of herbal sensation on your tongue.

In the UK, I think in British English, they call it cat mint. Oh, how refined. Sounds cute. Yeah. All right. Well, without further ado, let's jump into our first general trivia segment, pop quiz, hot shot. Here I have a random trivial pursuit card. You guys all have your barnyard, buzzers, blue wedge for geography.

Oh. Which U.S. state is the closest to the country? continent of Africa. Oh, U.S. state closest to the continent. Okay. That was Dana. Oh, interesting.

Is it Florida? Incorrect. I would have guessed Florida, too. Colin. Is it Maine? It's Maine. Okay. That was my other.

Yeah. It pokes out just a little bit more. Yeah. That's, oh, that's a good. That's a good for you question. Pink Wedge for Pop Culture. What's the name of Eric's Vampire Bard? HBO steamy

Supernatural series True Blood Oh Dana This is in the punch Oh man What is it called The Witcher

It's in Baton Rouge or something Blood Bar It's a pun Is it a pun? Is it a pun on singing vampires Vampire-related Physical Characteristics Fang something

Yes It is Fang to That's right. Yes. I knew it was something stupid, but I couldn't remember what. Fantasia. Fantasia. All right. Yellow Edge. How many minutes long was Martin Luther King Jr. stirring I have a dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. Multiple choice. Colin just knows. You want to give the answer. I was going to do like closest too. But no, please go ahead. Go ahead. So how many minutes long? Six, 11. or 16. Chris. Six.

Incorrect. Colin. 16. 16, correct. He was the last speaker of the day and didn't take the podium until 5 p.m. Purple Wedge. In the lion, the witch, the witch, leers Edmund with witch sweet treat. Chris.

Oh, my God, I'm blanking. It's, um, it's, uh, no, no, no, it's, um, Turkish delight. Which to me as a kid is disgusting. Oh, yeah, super gross. There's a British show where they show what people were eating during different periods of time. And so during that war, they, like, didn't get to have very much sugar at all ever. So they were, like, super pumped to get this disgusting candy. Yeah.

Green Wedge. Which crazy illness meant that folks living in Great Britain between 1980 and 1996 couldn't donate blood in the U.S. Can you read that again? What was that? Which crazy illness meant that folks living in Great Britain between 1980 and 1996 couldn't donate blood in the U.S. I think we both got at the same time probably. Is it mad cow disease? Yes, mad cow disease.

It says here, eating UK beef put you at risk, but even vegetarians were banned. Oh, like vegetarians couldn't donate blood. Well, I think it's because a lot of it is just like, you know, did you eat meat over the last 10 years? And people say, oh, no, I haven't. But it's like, yeah, but you might have. Yeah, yeah. You don't know.

Yep. All right. Last question. Orange Wedge, which is the key ingredient that helps preserve India pale ale beers and gives them their distinctive sharp taste? Chris buzzed in. I mean, I want to say, India Paleo Air was their distinctive sharp taste. You're one of those people on Jeopardy that buzz first.

Is it just? Yeah. Well, no, I mean, because there's no penalty here. We should readjust the scores with penalties. I want to know what I was going to say was hops. Correct. Oh, it is? Okay.

I think they meant like extra of. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't want to like overthink it. But at the same time, it seems a little basic, but okay. It's, I mean, you all, you all, I don't need, I hope I don't need to prove to you all that I like beer. But I just, IPAs are just, it's just an area. I've just never been able to, just never been able to muster up. enthusiasm for it. It's just not my, it's just not my thing. Like, I want to like it. I want to

like a lot of things. It's just going after that one specific type of beer drinker that wants things to be super hoppy and it's just, it's hopier and hoppier to the point. Like, even in my younger years when it was just like, oh, I want to, you know, I want to get some alcohol. I want to, you know, I'm going to drink and like get buzzed. Like, you're like, here's an IPA. It's like, ah, yes, get through half of it. Like, do you have any splendor? You know It sounds real bad Today's topic

We did suggestions with our listeners Miss Lorna Mirison wrote in And she suggested A topic about hobbies Strange and unusual things that people do around the world And throughout history

To keep themselves entertained I myself have been heavily inspired by Miss Dane here and all of the laser stuff she made I want to be created to and pick up a new hobby and I picked up two one of them is ceramics I also watched this show on HBO Max called The Great Pottery Throwdown and like many things I watch a show and I'm like oh I want to do that too and the other strange hobby I picked up making shoes from scratch when I saw the first

thing you posted online of the shoes you made I was like oh my God I'd even know she was doing this. It was incredible. Fun fact. What is the term for a shoemaker? A cobbler? Cobbler. Aside from cobbler, yeah. You're looking for something different than cobbler. A cobbler fixes shoes.

Right. Okay. A cord wainer makes shoes. Nice. Get out of you. Excellent. Excellent. So you've been waning a bunch of cords. Cord wainer. Wane all the cords.

So today we're talking. I found a hobby. I found a hobby. Out in the lobby. I went insane. A voice inside me said, kid, you love it. I think you're into a heavy pain. Well, I have a hobby.

I can share. So I'll tell you some words that I learned in the last 24 hours, let's say. Okay. You can try and guess what hole I fell down. Pymns. Piku. Pylish.

And Pithology. You guys can probably guess. People who memorize the digits of pie. This is all the linguistic pursuits around pie. So today is Pi Day, P.I. the most famous irrational number probably. So 3-14 March 14th, we are recording. I started off, I just wanted to just kind of look up and see

if there were any kind of cool pie mnemonics. I really didn't mean to sort of fall into a pie hole, if you will. So again, just very quickly, you know, you guys all, of course, remember that pie never ends, right? 3.1, on and on and on, because it is an irrational number, which means it neither repeats. You can't get it to listen. You just cannot.

You want to however much you want to just like, now listen. Once upon a time, I remember in one of our trivia nights, I remember we were together, we all learned this mnemonic. May I have a large container of coffee, cream, and sugar? And the mnemonic there is that in each word, the number of letters in that word corresponds to the digits in that position of pie. So that would give you three, one, four, one, five. nine, two, six, five, three, five, three, five, which is a very, a very good approximation of pie.

Yeah, and that is a good one. It is good, easy to remember. I found a really good one here that I liked out to 15 digits credited to Sir James Hopwood jeans. And I can imagine some, some. He was knighted for this mnemonic alone, his service to the British crowd. Yes, advances in the field of pie philology. How I want to drink. alcoholic, of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics. That's good. That's just some of the basic mnemonics.

Now, people, of course, because, I mean, you've got the intersection of math and, you know, word nerds, and just hundreds, thousands of years of time. And just not knowing when to stop. I'm going to go ahead and write a whole poem. I'm going to write a haiku. That's a pi-ku, if you will. A pie poem would be a pylum. Pylish, sort of the blanket term for writing, a constrained writing style where the lengths of all the words have to match the digits of pie.

People have written novel length. No. Yes. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yes. So, yeah, a full-length novel, which apparently holds the record for longest pylish text, 10,000 digits. I make absolutely no promise it makes for good reading.

I have not read it, but it exists if you want to go find it. A long time ago, over 20 years ago, I met somebody who had memorized Pi out to, you know, 200, 300 digits or something like that. And he said the way that he did it was he envisioned a number keypad on a computer keyboard. He drew out the shapes that each sequence of numbers would make going around the keypad, and then he memorized those shapes. and they just recall that order of shapes and then just went around the keypad for the numbers. That's really cool idea. You got to have a really good visual memory for that.

It's a hobby, right, right. I wonder who he was trying to impress. I guarantee you that whoever it was was not at that video game convention. I just like, who are you doing this for? Because you have to show so. This is a performance. Because you can. I have a question.

Yes. What happens when you get a zero? Oh, Karen, that's a great question. I'm so glad you asked. In standard pylish, apparently the basic rules are you just, you make that a 10-digit word. Okay, so you just substitute a 10-digit word for zero.

There are, if you want to get into more elaborate pylish, there are some techniques where if you want, you can take a 12-digit word to represent the sequence one, two. You see what I'm saying? You're getting two digits and one. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Some people, some people work in punctuation if they want.

What? Yeah, exactly. So if you want to put, you know, a comma, you know, for a zero instead of using a letter, you could do that. It really, it's up to whatever works for you. Right. It is a field where you can just go crazy and just nerd out. This is a hobby. It is a hobby. It is a hobby. Absolutely a hobby. Yeah. So if you, If you just want to fall down in the same hole, you can just Google Pielish. And there's a good number of resources out there.

So happy Pie Day, everybody, although you'll be listening to this several days after actual Pi Day. But enjoy. So Karen mentioned it earlier, but I've gotten really into art and crafts lately. That's one way that I've been weathering the pandemic is just sitting around making stuff. And it's really fun to come back to it as an adult. There's like a very robust craft community. on the internet and on Instagram. This is a very nice way of saying it.

Yeah. Robust. Yeah. So I decided to make you all a craft quiz. And to me, I thought these were easy. And now I'm like, wait a minute. I'm reading them again and I'm like, maybe they're not. I don't know.

We'll see. Okay. Everybody, get your barnyard buzzers ready and we'll start the craft quiz now. Question number one, what is Ami Garumi? Karen, crochet like little stuffed animals or they're like felted little stuff animals. But I feel like they're cute. It's Japanese for cute yarn. So yes, it's crocheted or sometimes knitted little cute animals or people.

They're super popular right now. Perhaps I've made some of these over the pandemic. I actually have one right here because they made, they made amoebo figures that. are like Amiguram either. Yoshees. Yeah, it's made out of yarn. Okay, next question. Which type of wool comes from a rabbit? Oh, oh.

Colin. Angora? Yes, Angora from Angora rabbits. It's very breathable and soft and expensive. It's funny. I saw somewhere else the term rabbit wool. And I always thought it was kind of weird because, you know, for wool, I think of sheep. And you think of like...

Fur, rabbit wool. Like curly, fuzzy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a little fluff ball. Right. Yeah. Okay. Next question.

What is the name of the major social networking site that launched in 2007? Focuses specifically on fiber artists. Ah. They have like over 9 million users. PIN. Over 9 million users, none of whom are me. No. I feel like it's in my punch bowl.

Is it a Pinterest? Is it a Pinterest? Is it a Pinterest? because it's not Pinterest. It's kind of a yarny pun, I will say. Pass. It's ravelry. Oh, okay.

Okay. That's tickling some part of my brain now. Ravelry. That's clever. That's clever. It's a great site if you need to look up some amigurumi patterns. Oh, I see. Oh, I see.

You want to make a hat for somebody. Okay. Next question. What do pinking shears do? Colin. They, the pinking shears, they, they cut the little jaggy edges. I'm making little jaggy sign with my finger. They cut like little diagonals.

Yes, they're the zigzag scissors. They're for cutting fabrics, so it unravels less, basically. Oh, okay. They're not just called zigzag scissors. They're called pinking shears. And they were named for a flower, I believe it's called the pink that has kind of zigzag petals. Carnationy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, kind of carnation. Six-zag scissors, pinking shears. Next question. What type of craft am I talking about if I mention crow's foot, lazy-dazy, Chinese knot, and blanket? Karen. Macromay. No. Chris.

Crocheting. No. I was going to guess macramet. It's embroidery. Lots of knots and fancy little stitches at that. That's having a moment. Guess who got an embroidery machine in the house? That's me.

Have you used it yet? Yes. But so in order to, you know, they have some like pre-programmed like shapes and stuff that you can start embroiderer or they like fonts. But if you want to make your own design, you need to learn an entire suite of computer programs to program how the stitches work and what direction. and the density and stuff. And that has been very overwhelming. So you think you're like, oh, yeah, cool. I'll just put in a picture and I'll embroider it out.

It's very, it's very programming, actually. Okay. Which actor during his recreation time is a woodworker who produced the video of Fine Woodstrip Canoe Building? Woodworking actor, my guess, has got to be Nick Offerman. Yes, Nick Offerman. Nick Offerman founded the Offerman Woodshop. He was on Parks and Recreation.

He's on the crafting game show making it. Yeah, he sells wood and things, and he has other artists who work out of his studio who sell their woodcrafts too. So you can buy something from Nick Offerman's shop. Which former rapper had a show on the DIY network for nine years? Former rapper DIY network. For nine years.

Oh, is it? Colin. No, no, it was wrong network. I was, I was going to say exhibit, but it's the wrong network. Oh, for my right. Yeah, it's the wrong network. That is a, that is a kind of a, yeah, I don't know. That's sort of crafting.

You guys give up? Never, never. Oh, Chris. Snoop dogs, oh, I was going to guess that. Birdhouse challenge. I mean, I believe he would have a show. Yeah. Because he's like BFFs with Martha Stewart, but no, it's Vanilla Ice.

I was going to say, that was my other joke answer. Yeah. No, he literally had a show for nine years where they just like, do makeover, house by the way, I'll let him know that you call him a former rapper. I think he would call himself a former rapper. He doesn't do it anymore. It was a home makeover show. Yeah.

And like, if you wanted vanilla ice to decorate your house. He would do it. Okay, all right. Okay. What is the common brand name of the crafting staple initially called modern decapage? Uh, huh. Karen. Paper machet.

No. Chris. Scrapbooking? No. There's a brand name. Crafts staple. It's like at every craft store. Yeah.

Full on display of this. Karen. Modpodge? Oh. Yes. Modpodge. Oh, okay. Yeah, Mod Pod Podge.

It's a funky label. No, it's Mod Podge. For Modern DecuPage. I thought it was Mod Podge. Oh, I just got the second. Mod Podge, modern de coupage. That's, yeah. Yeah.

Wow. Okay. Do you know what it's for? Do you know what it does? No idea. I just used it as glue and glaze, basically. Anything you want to stick or cover. Yep, glue and glaze.

It's like you want to, um, have fancy cut paper glued onto something with varnish, and there's no sanding, and it dries very quickly. It used to be a really big hassle, but this woman, a crafter in the 60s, figured out a good formula for this kind of, uh, that's great, varnishy adhesive. She made it in her garage. A whole crafting, yeah, this whole crafting area just exploded because all of the sudden it became a lot easier to do.

figuratively exploded. Yeah. It's non-toxic and it doesn't explode. And still got that Austin Powers like label just yeah, hilariously, the whole idea, right? It must have been, oh, it's modern

so we're going to use the most modern right now today, design possible to let you know that this is something that happened just like 10 minutes ago and they never changed it. Yeah. No. Yeah, you feel like you went in a time machine looking at it.

I love it. Okay, just two more questions. What paper cutting machine shares its name with an insect? Oh, oh, oh. I pronounce it wrong on purpose. I say a cry cut machine, but I know it's cricket because it has, it's the logo has a scene with little like bug antennas on it. I thought it was cry cut because I've only ever seen it written. If you've only ever seen it and not heard it, yeah.

Like I think I first heard. Do you say cricket? Yeah, I first heard it. If you call it a cry cut, then people don't think you know what you're doing. That's what the pros call it. That's the geeky group. I'm a rebel. Yeah.

Yeah, you'll look like a fool if you call it a cry. Those things are fun. I would love to have one of those. Oh, man, I'm jealous. I would love to have one of those. I cut my sneaker leather, like the patterns and stuff. You want to borrow whatever you can. I think you'd like it.

It's fun. You can make your own stickers and stuff. Okay, last question. Buterick, Berta, McCall's, and simplicity, all make what? Oh, Karen. Sewing patterns. Yes, sewing patterns. McCall's is the only one I recognize.

Did you take Hamek when you were in school and like during your high? I actually did. I did, yeah. No, I did. We made, I remember making pillows. So like cutting out fabric. Was it a pencil? I made the pencil.

Oh, yeah, you could make a pencil. I forget what I did. You made the pencil? I bet that's the kit. I bet it's the same Homek like kit. I don't know. I made something, but it wasn't the pencil, yeah. That's cool.

No, they didn't have it at my high school. And I was actually like, I wish we had to, like I hear about it. Well, you went to a cool high school. Well, I mean, that's debatable. But, you know, I. Anyway, that's my craft quiz. That's what I, if you guys wondered what I've been up to this year. I went a little bit from every one of those.

No Frills Delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. Now in a previous episode of Good Job Brain, episode 149 to be exact, I think Karen, you kind of pointed out like, oh, Chris, you recently hit an interesting milestone. I was like, yeah, I had just finished up a collection of video. games that I was trying to do, which I was trying to get all of the officially licensed to buy

Nintendo games for the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. And I had just hit that milestone. I did not get. There was one game that at the time was worth like $8,000. It is now worth like $20,000. It's called stadium. And that's just for the loose game cartridge, not for the box and everything like that. It's called stadium events.

They only made a little handful of them. because I'm an old school video game collector, a lot of what I had concentrated on was what a lot of other people concentrated on this idea of piecing together a set, finding out what is the set of all these games and then trying to build the set. There have been some recent, very fascinating events

in the field of rare and expensive video game collecting. Things have really changed on the ground and like what is going on. What is the notion of what is valuable? So, I mean, the driving force behind collecting up until a couple of years ago really was that idea of, I want to get a whole set of games for this console. That's kind of what made stadium events, which otherwise is an unremarkable game. It's not a very good game. It's not something that people remember fondly from their childhoods.

It's not something that had a huge impact on the gaming industry. There's just not a lot of copies of it. And if you want to get every Nintendo game, like, you have to have it. So it goes up in rarity. What has been happening over the last few years is that people from other sort of more matured collecting spheres, people who had in the past collected comic books or baseball cards or coins even have been looking at video games as this cultural artifact of the 80s and 90s and saying to themselves, this is the next big thing that's like comics.

Because at this point, you know, comics, baseball cards, coins, you know, prices have really kind of stabilized across the board. We know what's desirable and what's not. With video games, they saw it as kind of the Wild West. As they came into video games are kind of changing the notion of what is desirable. One of the other kind of big things that happened is there's a new game rating service. It's called WADA games. Um, if you've seen, if you've seen episodes of pawn stars recently, the guy who runs Wada

Games is now called in as when the, when the Ponsars guy's like, I got a buddy who knows about video games, that that's he, the Wada Games guy comes in on the segment. The other hobbies all have their kind of official rating system. They, they do. Yeah. And so for games for a long time, there's this, um, there's, well, it had it. It's called VGA, video game authority. And it was an offshoot of the popular action figure, um, graders.

They only graded the sealed games. Wada games came in with a couple of big things, and they said, we're going to grade and authenticate, importantly, authenticate everything. And Wada really specifically did their grading system the same way that comic books are graded to give those, the comic book people, they can understand a little bit better when they see, oh, this is a 9.5. They know what that means in the comic world. So they just transfer that right over to the knowledge of the games. Oh, and also Wada got 10.

tied up with very closely with heritage auctions, which is the big auction house. WADA starts grading the games. The games start appearing then on heritage auctions. And so again, all these sort of things kind of came together to raise awareness of game collecting. And there's a gold rush going on right now where people are, there's the big money collectors that are paying a lot of money to get their hands on what they feel are the best to the best games. But their notions of what a desirable game is are different. So it's not, I got to get the this last game for my set, because they're not building sets. When you think about collectibles like comics, the more desirable comic books are not like

some random final issue of an obscure comic you've never heard of. It's action comics number one, the first appearance of Superman. You know, the detective comics issue, that's the first appearance of Batman. Those are the comics that are the, literally the million dollar comics right now. It's like cultural touch points. Yep. And not necessarily rarity. Not necessarily.

I mean, they're rare, but they're not the rarest. They're not the rarest comic books. They're keyed to like the first appearances of iconic characters. And the really expensive ones are the ones where they're in like amazing condition. Because you have people getting in to whom, you know, money is no object. You know, I mean, famously, right, like, you know, Nicholas Cage, right, like collected comics. Well, I feel like the Nicholas Cage of 10 years from now, whoever that may be, is going to collect expensive, rare video games

because Nicholas Cage looked back at the iconic characters that he knew of his childhood versus people are going to look back at Super Mario Brothers. So these collectors are kind of coming in and applying that set of standards to games to kind of determine what is,

this is what is desirable to me, this is what I want to spend on. So you're seeing a lot of like price explosions at the high ends. This is not to say every copy of these games because they're looking for, in most cases, is mint sealed, the highest grade possible of things like Super Mario Brothers. Super Mario Brothers, that's a game. You start collecting video games.

You probably already have a copy of Super Mario Brothers. To the old collector mentality, to like my mentality, it's like, yeah, I got Super Mario Brothers. And I never thought about it again. Mario Zelda, Mike Tyson's punchout is like huge right now. And then like Final Fantasy Mega Man, Pokemon, stuff like that. So that part's obvious, right? Condition, obviously.

they're looking for like these high grade, you know, sealed copies that were never removed from the shrink wrap. That's obvious too. Here's what's less obvious about what's going on right now. Because people are bringing in a sort of mentality from the world of rare book collecting also. And these new game collectors are spending big, big money to get the first printings of these games. Well, how do you identify the first printing of a video game? Yeah. Because with books, typically, especially modern day,

books, you identify a first edition because you open up the book and it says on their, like, 10, 9, 9, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Right. And then every time they do a new edition of the book, they delete one number off of that list. And then they rerun, or everything to do it printing, right? So if you see the one, great, that's the first edition, first printing. That hasn't, of course, it hasn't always been the case with books. And so with video games, it's kind of like older books where it's like, you have to do the

research and you have to know what ID is the first printing of the book. And so it's stuff like that. So it's just some examples like the Legend of Zelda. You are looking for on the box where it says Nintendo Entertainment System, you want it to say TM trademark. What you don't want is for it to have an R with a circle for a registered trademark. Because the first thing was right before they, and they switched over to the registered trademark like very shortly after the first run of the Legend of Zelda.

people who work at Nintendo today don't even know this because nobody was paying it like Right 95% of the people working there weren't even there when these games came out anyway Right So it's just the hobbyists putting all this stuff together With Super Mario Brothers

That's a very early NES game And it was before they shrink-wrapped games at all And so what they actually did was they took one of those It was like a video rental sticker Where if you peel it off it says void underneath it And silver They were popping They were taking little Nintendo stickers like that

and sealing just the flap of the box with a little sticker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that. Well, if you still have any, you're rich. They're gone. And I opened them, you know. I played them. I didn't.

Right. Well, the funny thing is nobody's ever found a first print of Super Mario Brothers that's still sealed. They found a second print because, again, funny thing, they switched from Nintendo stickers with a matte finish to stickers with a glossy thing. Oh, my God. And little glossy sticker is second printing. So again, it's all their, and if they ever find, if they ever find a sealed, I mean, basically at this point, it's just believed that there are no copies of the first printing theirs. Everybody opened them.

Yep. And it's just weird stuff. And then one of the big ones is, uh, that's gotten a lot of notoriety is called the left bros version of Super Mario Brothers 3. They actually changed, um, the design of the Super Mario Brothers 3 logo. This is not a little change. It's a pretty, you know, big change. Like they moved the word brothers. from the left side to the right side.

If you look at the original one where the bros was over on the left, it looks like the game's title is Super Mario Three Brothers. It just, it doesn't read, right? Got it. So they moved it. So now everybody knows that the first printing of Mario 3 is the one where the brothers is on the left. So it's just all, it's all kind of,

it's weird. So Mike Tyson's punch out, there's a list of bullet point features on the front. And if the, if the bullet points themselves are, white, then that's the first printing, but then they changed the bullet points to orange. These new collectors coming in, they knew all this weird stuff. But what's important is the video game, even the video game dealers, video game stores, the people that were selling at conventions, collectors, they didn't know any of this. Not only were they not going after these first printings, they didn't even know how to identify one.

So in 2019, it was announced and it's made big news. This is now getting into the stuff that might come up in your next trivia night. 2019, a sealed second printing Super Mario Brothers had sold for $100,150. And that was the first time ever recorded that a video game had sold for six figures. Wow. And one of the most common games in existence, but it was the nicest copy of a very early early edition of it. If you're listening, you're like, I have a copy of Super Mario Bros.

You should go check it. If it's in a box at this point, like, yeah, I mean, you should actually go check and learn a little bit about what version it is because even if you know it's, you might think it's worth $100, but it actually might be worth more than that. Some more recent prices, this is all from Heritage Auctions, recently a mid-production Mario, like one from later on, sold for $114,000. So now any, it's like now it's not just that early, early copy. It's now there's just sort of a gold rush to get in any sealed copy of the original.

It's funny, it's not even the origins of the Super Mario Brothers series because because the original Super Mario Brothers is a Japanese Famicom game, right, for the Japanese system. So that's the actual first printing of Super Mario Brothers who didn't come to the US until months later. And then you're right, Karen, the actual first, if you want to, to own the first appearance of Mario, you have to go buy a Donkey Kong sit-down arcade cabinet in Japan.

Good luck finding a shrink-wrapped one of those. All the people who grew up with it, you know, 30s, 40s, 50s, they're now able to, I want to collect some of these things. And it was always kind of theoretical in the past. What kids right now are getting that we can just get sealed copies of. Oh, well, you know, honestly, I do think actually that you're what you're, you're going to see is an explosion in Pokemon. Pokemon games might eclipse the Mario games at some point because once you start

getting into 90s kids and 2000s kids, once they start getting a bunch of money to mess around with, they might go back and start driving up the price of the Pokemon stuff, for sure. Wait, 30 years. These Paw Patrol toys will be for 30. A lot of things have to happen to make something collectible. Like a lot of, you know, there was a lot of, clearly a lot of, behind the scenes, um, with the setting up of the grading, you know, company and heritage auctions wanting to make it a big deal. That's, that's gotten the awareness. So it's really hard

to tell, um, what exactly it's going to be. But so he left a, a left bros, Super Mario Brothers three, uh, has now sold for a hundred and fifty six thousand dollars. That is currently the, the record for, um, uh, a video game sale. That's not, though, the highest priced video game item ever sold on Heritage Auctions. Does anybody remember what that was? Was it a gold cartridge, like a Super Mario 3? Good guess, but it was, so it was called the Nintendo PlayStation. Very, very quickly, yeah, just a recap.

Oh, the console. The console. In 1988, Nintendo was working on the 16-bit console, which would become the Super Famicom or the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. They made a deal with Sony, which at that point wasn't in video games at all. Sony wanted to manufacture a combo unit, but it also had a CD-ROM drive. Nintendo kind of like it was a bad deal for them,

and they ended up walking away from the partnership, but Sony made prototypes of this console, which was a Super Nintendo with a CD-ROM drive in it. So in 2015, there was a Reddit thread where people were discussing this prototype, which had been seen in photos and stuff like that, and talking about what it, oh, what would this have been like? And a guy in the thread

like, oh, my dad has one of those. And of course, it's Reddit. People are like, no, your dad doesn't have one of these. He's like, no, he's got it in his attic. And so eventually the guy gets back to his dad's house, goes up to the attic. And yes, he absolutely had one up in the attic. He brought it down. And the dad had worked for a company that was run by the guy who was the former head of Sony

America, Sony Computer America. And this was in the stuff that the guy left behind after he quit the company. And, like, it was just in a box. stuff and the guy ended up with it. And so they get it working again. It becomes a huge thing. They tore it around at gaming conventions for a few years until they auctioned it in 2020 and it sold for $360,000. So that's the highest price like video game collectible ever at 360. But I think we can see the way things are going that something will eclipse that pretty soon. For sure. I mean, in our lifetimes, we are going to see the first.

million dollar video game. Probably in the next 10 years, we will see the first million dollar video game. I don't know what it's going to be, but it's the money, the money is there. Yeah. No, you're right. It'll follow comics and baseball cards and all of that. Yeah. Hungry now. Now. What about now? Whenever it hits you, wherever you, wherever you are. Grab an O'Henry bar to satisfy your hunger. With its delicious combination of big, crunchy, salty peanuts covered in creamy caramel and chewy fudge with a chocolatey coating. Swing by a gas station and get an O'Henry today. O'Hungry, O'Henry! 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 Habsburg's 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. So we've touched on this before, that we love old words, old names,

Part of, you know, a lot of people's hobbies is collecting a time-intensive and very obsessive hobby for a lot of people. Stamp collecting. What is the term for stamp collecting? Philately. Philately. Philatally. And then for coin collecting, it is. Numismatics.

Yes. So those terms are pretty old-timey, I would say. It's philatily. The fill comes from fill-love in Greek affinity for something. And then... Like high philology. Yes. For example.

And then Adelaide, duties and taxes. Mm. Because of stamps, you know. So the word roots are kind of strange. A numismatist, numismatics, it comes from the root is omisma, Greek root for current coin and custom. So these are kind of obscure words. And importantly, like, they were made up by the nerds who did this. but even as a little, almost as a little in-jokey kind of thing, right?

Yes. And very similar to phobia names, which we talked about before, these types of words tend to use Greek roots. So I asked our fans on Twitter what are some of the things they collect, and I made up my own unofficial hobby collector. These are just as official as the ones you'd find elsewhere, yep. Yep. I used some Greek roots.

nothing too obscure or too ungetable. I pick the ones that I could really construct them into something that we could all get. So really, this is a quiz about if you can figure out what the Greek roots are. All right. So this is a write-in quiz. I will share a collector term I made up and your challenge is to guess

what is the item that is being collected for this hobby. All right. Okay. Okay. Actually, this is a real term. So, for example, if I say lotologist, it's a person who collects. Lottery tickets. Lottery tickets, lotto-ticket.

Laudolologist. Lotologist. Yeah. I mean, it's real because you said it. Yeah. Lotto lodgist. Okay, all right. Okay.

So here we go. I will give you the fake Greek collector term that I made up and then give you some time to write what you think, what item this person collects. Disco venal file. Disco venal file. Thanks to Twitter friend Brian McCoy, Aaron Hay, Kay Mae Mag, who all are involved with this hobby. Disco venal file.

All right. We all ready. Answers up. Colin says records. Dana says vintage records. Chris says records. I put record albums. Correct. You guys all correct. Guess what? Vinyl is a pretty new invention. So the creak word for vinyl is vinyl. Vinyl. Disco venal file. Okay. What does a magnetophile collect? This is from Johnny CX86. He says if we ever visit somewhere, we collect this item. Magnetophile. I'm trying not to overthink.

Yeah. Same. Answer is up. Magnets, magnets, magnets, correct. It's really smart to have a thing like that because then people know what to get you all the time. So you probably always get a present whenever people travel. What does a periodologist collect? Periodontologist.

Twitter user Jennifer Chu, complete relation to me. Is that legal? Collects this. periodologist Greek roots Greek roots Time's up

I was sorry I was drawing a little emoji Colin says teeth Dana says magazines and Chris says calendars very good magazines is what I'm looking for I like as soon as I saw Dana's I was like oh

Periodicals yeah Periodicals Jennifer says she collects back issues of very specific magazines like sassy lucky peach and budget living All right, if you are an ostophile, ostto-o-file, you collect what? Ostophile. This is something Alia Rose 9 collects.

All right, answers up. Colin says bones. Dana says bones. Chris says ostriches. It is bones. It makes a lot more sense now that I think about it. Yeah. skulls now to be fair half a point for me because if you collect ostriches yes collect they also

collect ostrich bones as part of the full set so one one hundredth of a point yeah let it be known partial credit one one penny put that down what does a stilophile collect stilophile shty l-o file collectors usually end with file like francofile or ologist stilophile and this is our Twitter friend Sikelsky collects this all right answers up Colin says pens Dana says I like that I said fashion or styles oh styles and fashion Chris says pen and sills yeah yeah yeah it is fountain pens or pens and pencils also okay That makes sense. Stylus. You know what? I would think that this hobby would have an official term because I feel like a lot of people collect. Fountain pens, old pens.

Yeah. My mom had a very, very small collection of some old pens. They're just called pen collectors. Now we're getting into some real specific, tortured made up words, very specific. Take a guess. At Cheesechimp is a dendro cartologist. dendro cartologist

Greek terms dendro is one word carto is another word and this is my best attempt at coming up with the term This is about as much effort goes into the official ones Karen so you're on solid ground You're absolutely in this is very specific

but you know I'll go with whatever answers up Colin says hand drawn maps Dana says maps Oh, Chris says maps of fictional places. Very good because of the carto. I'll read what Cheese Chim says. He says, I collect magic cards, not just general magic cards, but I collect specifically

every printing of the card named Forest. It's hard printed. Basically, every set, there's like some sort of forest card and forest is my first name. And so Dendro, tree, card, card, cartologist, tree card collector. Wow. Oh, one of those. I would not have been able to guess that. All right.

Okay. This is pretty specific. Don't overthink it. Okay. What is a Colorado Olympiologist? Colorado Olympiologist. And this came from Ian Morrison, C.O. who wrote in and said that he collects memorabilia surrounding this.

Colorado Olympiologist All right Colin says Canceled Denver Olympics paraphernalia Dana says Olympics memorabilia and then

Chris says bronze medals Colin only bronze medals nailed it memorabilia from the Denver 1976 Olympics that never happened it was and this is a crazy story

I'm going to end my quiz with this. Denver Olympics 1976, a little bit context. In 1972, Sapporo had the Olympic Winter Games and it costs, it says here, 1.3 billion. So they were spending so much money on Winter Olympics. And so when it came for the 1976 Olympics bid, Denver was like,

hey, we'll host the games on the cheap. We'll only spend $14 million as compared to the $1.3 billion that. that Japan spent. Obviously, this didn't happen. And I'm setting here from Sports Illustrated. In 1970, Denver was awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics. And also, it was like the U.S. Bicentennial. So it was kind of like, oh, okay, it's in America. It's a big deal. And then there were some red flags as time progressed. They didn't have enough hotel rooms for visitors. The proposed mountain for downhill skiing didn't really have much snow.

and when they were proposing it to the IOC, they actually had an artist to like airbrush snow onto pictures of the mountain. The biathlon, which is the people shooting on skis, the biathlon route had to go through people's backyards. And the committee was like, oh, yeah, you know, people are totally cool with having some gaps in their fences so that biathletes. So that people with guns can just casually come skiing.

Shoot towards their house. And another big red flag was, you know, as the costs were building up, Denver, the committee was like, oh, man, we can't build a bobsled track. So let's propose this. We'll hold the bobsled events in Lake Placid in New York State, but everything else is still in Colorado. You're super interesting. So Ian Morrison, he says he collects. He's trying to collect all the memorabilia that was made for trying to get the bid for the Olympics. And then also, you know, made in preparation for the Olympics.

And it just never happened. Denver had to give it back. Well, it's like there's the whole, there's the whole category. I mean, I know there are people who collect the losing team paraphernalia from like the Super Bowl. and if there's like a game seven for the NBA or World Series because they have to have the hats and the T-shirts and all that stuff ready to go. I have to come clean.

I have to come clean. I got this question because I happen to see this on our Twitter feed for the good job, Ray. You know, you could be rewarded with- cheating, corruption. I didn't know it was going to be on the quiz. I was just trying to put with our fans. This is one of the coolest collections I've heard of.

No, absolutely. I was telling my wife. I'm like, oh, look at this. This is great. He collects cancer. Old Olympic memorabilia. That's great. I love it. You guys remember from that previous episode I was mentioning we talked about hobbies and

vapo ludology. We joke about vapeo ludology. Remember what the joke was? What was that? It was a person who collects steam games. Oh, Ludo as games. Right, and Vapo, yeah. That's good.

Was it a community head of Dick Wolf? That's right. right. Lupine urology. Yeah. Great, great TV and joke. And we got our last segment, Colin. I have a question for you guys. If you can remember, I want you to think back and tell me,

what was the very first album, music album, that you bought for yourself with your own money? It doesn't matter of format. CD, cassette. My memory is that the first CD that I bought with my own money was actually the soundtrack to the Lion King. Oh, I think I remember that. But it's like I had tons of CDs and cassettes and stuff like that.

But I think that's where I went to a store, had money and bought it. Dana, what do you think? My first CD that I ever bought was by The Real McCoy. I'm looking at their Wikipedia right now. It's a multi-platinum selling crossover hit. Or another night. The German Euro dance. Yes.

Wow. German hero dance and pop music project. Yeah, I talk to you. In the night in your time. Like, do you remember any of the other songs on that? No. You know what? I liked their album, but that was the song that I played a lot.

I really liked that song. That was my first, my first CD. Karen. I don't deal with my parents. It's for every A I got, I think, in high school, then I would get a CD. I think with money I earned, probably would be weird out. Bad Hair Day.

I think that was the homage paradise one. First thing that I bought for myself with my own money was the cassette version of the official movie soundtrack to the movie Ghostbusters. Yeah. That's a great song. They're good songs. Great Jones in there. Yeah.

I believe. Did you buy it for the Ghostbuster song? Well, naturally, I did. Okay. And, you know, I mean, so this was, you know, 84, you know, and I, I would have been 10 dating myself here. And I remember I was in the Tower Records in Hollywood. I was there with my dad, of course, and I was, like, looking at it. The song, the song was a hit at the time.

And I was like, I could afford this. Like, this case. It was like, you know, I don't even remember. It cost back then, $7.99 or whatever the price was, I was like, I could buy this. And my dad, if I, can I buy this with my allowance money? He's like, you know, if you want to buy it, of course. And the dad being a big, big music collector and record collector, I think he was a little bit, you know, kind of just tickled to see, like, this is, you know, the first thing. This is what he chose.

I listened to the hell out of that cassette. Oh, I don't remember. I really don't remember aside from the Ray Parker Jr. song, I don't remember what else was on that cassette. I should go on eBay and find a copy just for nostalgia's sake. So cassettes and music have been on my mind this week. I don't know if you all saw, but it was in the news this past week. On March 6th, Lou Ottens died at his home in the Netherlands. Yeah.

Very ripe age of 94. Good, good for him. Lou Ottens was the head of the product development team at the Phillips Corporation in the 1960s. And he and his team developed the cassette tape. what we know as the just the cassette tape, which... That was like a Phillips company thing. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That was their thing.

And Phillips, man, I mean, his same team, by the way, you know, a couple decades later went on to pioneer and develop the compact disc. That's right. Yeah. At the forefront of a lot of musical technology there. Yeah, I didn't know the man's name until just this last week, but tributes pouring in around the world from, you know, DJs and record collectors and just DIY musicologists and just everybody.

I mean, is like, without this man, we wouldn't have this awesome, awesome format that really, even though it was technically piracy, it really opened up a huge avenue for music sharing. I mean, like, mixed tapes. Generations. Yeah, and that it was recordable. Yeah, recordable. Generations of us. I mean, I don't know if kids today, except maybe as like a funky retro thing, you know,

have any experience, you know, playing around with them. But there was a real long period there where, I mean, just the hours we would all devote to making those mixtapes and getting the timing right and copying off the TV and all that. It was great. Radio. Oh, man. Some songs from me, I hear the DJ talking. Yes.

Like before it happens, like in my mind when the song plays, I'm like, and we're back. You know, and then the song because I listened to it a million times, just that thing. I recorded off the radio. I put together a quiz for you all about music collecting. This, in terms of dollars spent, this has definitely been. my hobby that I have put the most interest in over this pandemic. I've spent a lot of time on discogs.com, discogs, short for discographies.

It's in the world of music collecting, I mean, you don't go to eBay, you go to discogs to find the albums you want to sell. Yeah, I'll buy. So with that in mind, I have a quiz for you about physical media, you know, as crazy as it sounds in 2020. Wow. So about collecting and maybe we'll, maybe we'll all learn a little something along the way. October 1st, 1982 is a special day in music history.

That was the day the first consumer CD player went on sale. October 1st, 1982. Now, of course, you have to have something to play on the CD player when you buy it. So tell me, I want you to tell me an album by what singer-songwriter is often credited as the first CD released. I think I know, but I know Chris knows for sure. Chris. I feel 100% of this. Billy Joel.

Yeah. Chris has it. That is, is it Billy Joel's 42nd Street? Oh, Chris, you're so close. Oh, no. 40th street. It is a 52nd street. Yeah.

Oh, no. Okay. Ten streets. This is a good lesson in pub quiz answering, right? We talk a lot about our meta strategies, okay? So now, the real answer to this is it's a little more complicated than that. So that's why I was very careful in how I worded it as often credited. So now, you know, I mean, much like launching a video game system, it would be kind of

frustrating to launch a system with only one thing that you can play on it, right? So there were, in fact, about 50 CDs released on launch day, if you will, along with the first commercially available CD player in Tokyo, in Japan. 52nd Street was among them. It was one of Bill of Joel's biggest hits. I mean, had won Grammy for album of the year in 1980. It wasn't a new release. It had been out on, you know, vinyl.

It, though, has the distinction of having the first catalog number in the sequence of discs released. So that's why it sort of gets bestowed with the honor being considered the first CD released. Is it because it has a number? It starts with the number. That's a great question. Right.

Is it because it's a number? Right. I don't have, he's B. I don't have the full list of 50 discs. I can't answer that definitively. But yeah, so if you got a question in public quiz, they're looking for Billy Joel, 52nd Street. 10th Street.

Not Broadway sensation 40 Second Street. Yes, that's what it is. That's the confusion. In 2009, in June 2018, a copy of the 1987 record, The Black Album, not Spinal Tap for you Spinal Tap fans. The Black Album recorded what was at the time the highest sale price ever in the Discog's marketplace fetching $27,500.

What Midwestern artist released this album? Midwestern artist. Karen. Jay-Z. He's from New York, though. A black album. I mean, it's... Chris.

Johnny Cash? Johnny Cash, no, no. No, no. Ninety-seven. Maybe I'll give you another hint here. Oh, 1987. The pre-release title of this album was called The Funk Bible. Huh.

The Funk Bible. Chris. George Clinton? I'm looking for Prince. Prince! Prince! Karen was about to reach for the buzzer, Prince. Midwest.

About this album. Okay, well, why is it so expensive? You know, there's Prince has a lot of albums out. so this one was actually it was scheduled for release in 1987 it was very much like the the spinal tap joke it was a black album all black it was in the pipeline copies were printed it was ready to go and prince himself said nope i don't want to release this album he depending on the report he had a religious vision he had an insight he decided he did not want to release this album that it was that it was evil so a week before it was to come out. He said, nope, it's withdrawn. I don't want it. So some copies, of course, because they'd already gone to press in the factories. The record label did release the album sort of officially, officially. So there are legitimate copies. But that was the, at the time, the highest copy. All right, we'll stay in the Discog's Marketplace here. On February 22nd of this year,

total collector sales for this musical act surged more than 3,700 percent. Who and why? What, we say it again? Say it again? On February 22nd of this year. Oh, okay. Two over a month ago. Total collector sales for this act surged more than 3,700 percent.

Who and why? Karen, decide. I'm not letting Chris have this. Oh. Is it a Fleetwood Mac. Oh, no, it is not Fleetwood Mac. That's a good guess. You were 20 second of this year

is only a few days ago because we're recording this. Like a couple weeks ago. What just happened? I'll give you a hint. It's a duo. Dana. Oh, no, no, no.

Captain and Teneal? They are a friend. Nelson? They're a French duo. Karen. Daff punk. It is Daph. Because they're breaking up.

Because they announced their retirement. Not even overnight. Just within a few hours. in addition to the bump of sales and physical copies of their stuff. Yeah, Billboard reported over six and a half million streams of daft punk songs just on that day alone, which was like more than a 200% increase over the day before. All right. We'll close out with this one.

And I'm going to apologize in advance for this one. Okay. How many grooves are there on one side of an average LP? I don't even know what the baseline. is Chris. One. That's right. There is one it goes around of an African LP. I've played enough

Professor Layton games to know a trick math question when I hear one. That's right. Yeah. I will try and give you guys something really, a real question to bite into here. So, okay, yes, there is one groove on a record, Wompwompwom. I'd like to guess how

long. I'll give you something to guess here. Under a mile. You know, don't go crazy here. A mile. Under a mile. Well, you know, I'm giving you a vast upper bound here. So you don't guess 10,000 feet. 200 meters.

200 meters, Karen says. I don't know. I thought he said in feet, Karen. You got to do your own conversion. I'll convert it. Is this a 33 or a 45? We'll say a 12-inch LP 33. It's 656 feet.

That seems long. 56 feet. That seems really long. Chris says 1,000 feet. Let's say 330 feet. The best estimate I was able to find was about 1,500 feet. So, uh, yeah, closest, but still off by, yeah, 50. That's like a loop around the track.

Yeah, I like thinking about that. Yeah, it's like if you run the 1500, you know, or, you know, in the 15. If you run the 100 meter, you got to do that several times. All right. Well, that was just a little sampling of some good, uh, CD LP. cassette collecting trivia for you all there. All right. And that's our show.

Thank you guys for joining me and thank you guys. Listeners for listening in. Hope you learned a lot of stuff about video game collecting, craft terms, music, media, and also fake Greek words. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Spotify, Audible, and on all podcast apps. And on our website, good job, brain.com. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye.

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