Good Job, Brain! - 208: Lock It Down!

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

It sure has been an eventful year, so here is our episode filled with quizzes surrounding lockdown life. Love a good inventions quiz? Then we invite you to play a round of "War, Plague, or Depression!" Chris misses karaoke and shares its surprising origin story. Karen dives into shopping trends and has a quiz about top selling items. Colin takes us on a virtual trip to Florence to visit the quarantine-friendly but mysterious "wine windows." And subject yourself to a very tough Cameo audio challenge! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, lucky lockdown pop and lockers, hopefully not licking lacquered surfaces. This is Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. Today's show's episode 208. And of course, I'm your humble. host Karen and we are your quaint quarantining quartet of quackas questioning quantum quandaries. I'm Colin. I'm Dana. And I'm Chris. You gave me PTSD with that alliteration because I lived in, when I was living in Japan, when I was going to school there, we did be made like traditional lacquered Japanese

boxes. And they told us like, now listen, some people may have an allergic reaction to this. So please put on these rubber gloves. And I'm like, okay. And then. then I rested my forearms on the table, not getting any lacquer on myself at all, just rested my forearms on the, on the table where we were working. And I got from the bottom of my wrist down to my elbow, like the worst poison ivy. Imagine the worst poison ivy have ever gotten your life, red, blistery, angry. It was bad. Nothing on my hands, though, because I had those gloves.

Foo! Do you know what was it? It's a natural substance that's from, I think, like, a true. tree. So I mean, it's sort of the same thing as like, I mean, I don't know if this exact same thing as poison ivy, but I had a similar reaction to it. All right, guys, well, I know something that we're not allergic to is trivia. So here, 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 have your barnyard buzzers ready. Let's answer some questions.

Here we go. Blue Edge for Geography. In which country would you dine from a smorgas board? I'm going to give that one to Dana, our resident expert. So Sweden may have it. It is Sweden. And I apologize if I mispronounced it. Does it say on the card what smorgasbord translates to literally?

Or do you know, Dana, maybe? Not to put anybody on the spot here. I've known. I, we've talked about this with my in-laws before and now I'm blankic. I give you the wrong information if I guessed right now. Oh, okay, here. So comes from, so smorgas is bread and butter, and then board is table. Okay.

So butter table. All right. Pink Wedge for pop culture. In the movie, pop fiction, all the clocks are set to 420, true or false. 20 after 4. Chris. True. False.

I've never heard of that, yeah. That's a bad trivia. The card says, although many of the clocks show the time 420, others do not. Okay, okay. Okay, all right. Yellow Wedge. Who was the first sitting U.S. president to appear on a late-night talk show?

Oh. Sitting president. That was Colin. Jimmy Carter. Incorrect. Dana. Is it Bill Clinton? Incorrect.

Oh, good guess. All right. How about, um, uh, late in Natasha? How about Richard Nixon? It is Barack Obama. Really? I would have guessed Bill Clinton, but he wasn't sitting president. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, it was before. Right. Got it. So, Card says here, his 2009 appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay No, no, made history, so sitting present. Oh, that's a good trivia question. That is a good one. Purple Wedge for literature.

Meg, Joe, Beth, and Amy March are the central characters in which novel? Dana. Little women. Little women, correct. Louisa May Alcott. Green Wedge, what was the first operating system installed in 1981 on IBM's first personal computer? Dana, again. DOS?

Can you be more specific? Chris. MS-DOS? Oh, is that it? Oh, okay. What does this stand for? Do we know? Microsoft.

It's Microsoft DOS, disk operating system. Last question, orange wedge. Brocade, calico, and crepe are all types of what? Brocade, calico. Chris. Fabric. Correct. Okay.

I thought it was going to be cat. Yeah, I was thinking like too literal. Or not literal enough, I guess. Oh, yeah, yeah. Crape cats. I like to see some crepe cats. All right, good job, brains. Ooh.

Well, I think we're about three episodes back into our new season, the resurgent season of Good Job Brain. I don't think we have mentioned once in more than maybe more than in passing. There's been a lot going on the last year plus, certainly in our lives and around the world. There's been a pandemic. There's been a lockdown. There's been, you know, various degrees of quarantine around the world, depending on where you live. I don't think there's any aspect of our lives that has not been influenced in one way or another.

So I think we couldn't avoid doing a show on the pandemic. So let's talk about the pandemic, guys. All right. So this week, let's lock it down. So keep your love lockdown. You love lockdown. Keeping your love lockdown. You love lockdown.

Now keep your love locked down. You love lockdown. Now keep your love lockdown. You lose. On the show, we rarely award real prizes to each other for. good performance or for winning things. Almost never, I would say. Well, historically, we've done some prizes.

A sucker prize, if you will. Yeah, we had the 20-year-old gum. Dana once gave us moose. No, reindeer cheese and moose cheese. And I think, Chris, once you made a Grammy Award. The posthumous Grammy, yeah. Yes, using paper plates. I did.

Today, I actually have a quiz for you that is a somewhat challenging one of you three will win a real prize, like a real good prize. Okay. So now, during lockdown, a lot of websites and services found success in our kind of newish lives, grocery deliveries, and of course video conferencing programs and services, entertainment streaming, and one other website that allows people to pay for personalized video messages from celebrity. So that's right.

I'm talking about cameo. Camio, starting in Chicago. Actually, back in 2016, but obviously it really exploded the past year. And so here I have a quiz. I went on the Cameo website. I have sound clips of five celebrities, and I'm going to play them. I need you to identify who these people are just by their voice. In any parts where they say their names or where they're from,

I've edited out. Okay. And this is a write-down quiz. So go ahead and write down one through five. Okay. So out of these five people, I'll tell you what category they're from or their backgrounds. And maybe that will help you guys. Okay.

So we have a politician. We have an entertainer. We have an internet celebrity. We have a musician. And we have an entertainer. athlete. And of course, the winner of this quiz, I will commission a cameo from a celebrity I think you will like for a personalized message. Okay, here we go. Hello, everyone. I am live at Cameo Now and looking forward to recording videos for you

and your friends. Your wish is by command. Keep it real. Keep it respectable. And then it's time for me to record videos for you. Cheers. Oh, wow. Hmm. Number two. What's up, brothers and sisters? It's off the charts, but always in your heart.

So you know what to do right here? Birthday wishes, graduations, breakups, you're fired, those things. I can do them all. The whole spectrum of emotions. Hit me up. Let's have some fun. All right. Here we go. Moving on to number three. Holy moly, Mike Newman. Is that you? Because when Macy looks into her direction, she sees the most amazing dad on the planet. In fact, if being a dad were an Olympic sport, you would win bronze, silver, and gold. You'd just be the entire podium. It's like your super Mike.

Okay, number four. Here we go. She says her name. where she's from and that got cut. Okay. Hey, I just joined Cameo. Just in time for the holidays, we can spread some Christmas cheer for your loved ones. Perhaps a lump of coal for your not so loved ones. Either way, we can have a ball with this one on Cameo.

Look me up. So here we are, number five. You can book me for birthday wishes or whatever weird stuff you want to come up with, shoutouts and whatnot. Book me on Cameo.com. And I'll see you on your phone, I guess. And my brain is like, what were the roles again?

Tell me that what were the, there was an entertainer or an athlete. What was it? Internet celebrity. Uh-huh. Okay. Entertainer, an athlete, a politician and a musician. Okay.

That's not the order, right? That's not the order. That's not the order. Okay. If I, honestly, if I get one, I'll be happy. Really? Yeah. This is hard.

It's hard for, me. It's hard, yeah. I feel like there's going to be several like, oh. All right. Answers up number one. Keep it real. Keep it respectable. And then it's time for me to record videos for you.

Colin says Hugh Jackman. Dana says... I said movie phone guy. I changed it. It was a good guess. Ed O'Neill. And I also, I like Chris's guest too, but... I said Michael Buffer. Like the Let's Get Ready to Rumble guy.

I'm like, maybe he can't say it on cameo or something. I don't know. I just couldn't think of something. Yeah. What did you? You know what? Chris gets the point. Whoa.

Bruce Buffer. Wait. For, for UFC. Oh. You're going to give me a point for that? Yeah. I think it's, I think. Okay.

All right. Wait, are those two different people or am I, is there Michael Bluffer? Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Michael Buffer is, let's get ready. Ready to rumble. Wow.

I should get the point. So it's time, this is his catchphrase. All right, number two. What's up, brothers and sisters? It's off the charts, but always in your heart. So you know what to do right here? Colin says, John Bon Jovi. Dana, you put.

It's a rock of love guy. What's his name? Brett Michaels. Because I was thinking like, yeah, like, obviously this is the, he's like, I'm off the charts, but I'm in your hearts. your hearts. And so this is the musician. I'm like, well, he did this reality show. Maybe that's it. Yeah. It is Mark McGrath from. I have no idea what that is. Sugar Ray. Oh, yeah. I knew he was on

cameo. Interesting. He has a big, a big serious show now. But that is, that is a very good guess. Okay, number three, here we go. You would win bronze, silver, and gold. You'd just be the entire podium. It's like your super mic. Colin put Tony Hawk. Dana, you put Billy D. Williams. And then Chris, you put I put Logan Paul. You might know him better as Chocolate Rain. Mr. Taze on Day. Wow. Go and throwing it back.

Throwing it back. But that makes sense, actually. Yes. He does kind of talk like George the Kai. I almost put that better. I was like, I don't think. All right. Number four. This is our politician. Perhaps a lump of coal for your not so loved ones. Either way, we can have a ball with this one on Cameo. Look me up. Four, I got this actually. I got this without the hint. Really? Okay. So Chris, Sarah Palin, Dana, you put Sarah Palin. Colin, Sarah Palin. You are correct. That is her. And number five is our athlete.

Book me on Cameo.com. And I'll see you on your phone, I guess. Colin put Logan Paul Gotta switch Dana you put Tony Hawk Chris you put Tony Hawk It is Tony Hawk

That's funny A lot of people don't recognize them by sight So I'm very happy You guys recognize them by voice You know it's because The people not recognizing Tony Hawk has kind of become a meme And then you said an athlete

And I was stuck on it for a while and then just Tony Hawk kind of floated into my head. I have no idea what Tony Hawk sounds like, but I could totally see. He sounds so humble and self-effacing. He's not selling it. Other people are like, let's do this.

Yeah, he's like, hire me if you like. All right, good job, everybody. That was very hard. Okay, all right. I think Dana and I got the same too, correct. Yeah. And then as the tiebreaker, I got the brother of the. The buffer, the more famous brother.

Yeah. Because the first one you said that, I was like, oh, my God, this name is Bruce. Yeah. I'm calling him Michael this whole time. Whenever he comes over for dinner, I'm calling him Michael. He doesn't even correct. All right. Well, I already have someone in mind.

I actually had people in mind for all of you for cameos, but Chris, stay tuned. I'm scared. I'm scared for you, Chris. You're going to play it on the episode, okay? Oh, yeah, yeah, we'll play. We'll play on when it's done. Okay. Cool.

I always think about that saying necessity is the mother of invention, like you really need something, so you make something to solve that problem. And there's some periods in humanity where there's been a lot of inventions, and those are in wars, during plagues, and during depressions. Tons of patents come out of depression. So this quiz is war, plague, or depression. You have to tell me what horrible cause this invention. Those are the horsemen of the apocalypse, right? Wow.

All right, okay, all right. Good, good upbeat. Let's do it. Let's write it down. Let's do it, make it a write down. All right. So the first invention, modern-style porcelain toilets, was this war, plague, or a depression?

Modern-style porcelain toilets. I feel like we need a catchy, like game show, like, war, plague, war depression. Wheel of fish. Okay. I'm ready. Colin, what do you say? Colin says war. Karen says plague.

Chris says war. It's the plague. It was the influenza pandemic of 1918. I don't know why I started it off with a little bit of a tricky. Like, they kind of existed. Toilets definitely already. existed but they most people had the wooden tank that was above the toilet then after that the influenza pandemic everybody got very health conscious yeah like wanted to clean everything

so they made the whole toilet porcelain and then it basically phased out wooden toilets completely it's not poor it's sterilized it yeah exactly yeah next one boxed mac and cheese not the mac and cheese you get out of cookout like the craft mac and cheese oh with the neon orange powder, the delicious cheese chemicals you put on your noodles. Hmm. Okay. Ready? Okay.

Chris says war. Colin says war. Karen says war. It was the Great Depression. No. Yes. I thought it was going to be like ration. No.

Well, it did get more popular during World War II. But during the Great Depression in 1937, you could feed a family of four for 19 cents. It sold a lot doing that. And then when food rationing in World War II happened, it sold even more. So I was just reading an article because an article was just published about somebody who tracked down Annie of Annie's mac and cheese, who has since sold the company. But it turns out that she also invented smart food and that the cheddar cheese powder, the smart food popcorn, the cheddar cheese powder, the cheddar cheese powder on smart food is what she originally used for her mac and cheese business. And after she sold smart food for $15 million, then she started developing the mac and cheese business. And so smart food lady is the Annie's mac and cheese lady is the same powder.

That's interesting. How about that? She's good at cheese powder design. Really good. She's super good. Back to back champ of your powder. She failed it. It's not a one-hit wonder.

There was one summer. I remember in the 1980s, man, I probably about 30% of my allowance went to smart food popcorn that summer. No, no, that was so big then. It was a thing, yeah. touted as as low fat, right? Yeah, because it's popcorn, because it's mostly air. And then it tastes like cheese.

And then, yeah. Okay. Next to mention super glue, was this war, a plague, or the Depression? Ooh, previously mentioned on Good Job Brain. Yeah. We better get all get this right. Okay.

Is everybody, Everyone says war. Yes. This one is from the war. World War II. I was going to ride that war horse until it paid on. You know, some of them are about war. It's true.

You'll get some points doing that. So, Sayano Acrelate was discovered accidentally by scientists who were trying to make clear plastic gun sites, but that was too sticky. Can you imagine, like, sticking your eye to the gun? Oh, I don't have to imagine. It came back around. out of the 50s and he was like, oh, I had this thing. Eastman Kodak put it out as Superglow. Eastman Kodak. They were in all sorts of businesses. Okay. The car radio, the mass-produced car radio. Okay. All right. It's just been writing war.

Chris says depression. Karen says plague. Colin says war. This was from the Great Depression. The Kelvin Manufacturing Corporation, they were a battery eliminator company, which I found out was they converted radios from battery powered to like household electricity powered. And then they were going to go out of business because of the depression. And they were like, we have to come up with something. Let's try to make a car radio that we can mass produce, like make it really efficient and really good. Cheap entertainment for everybody. Yeah. It was huge, of course. And you know, they changed their name of their company to Motorola, which is Motor and Victrola.

Well, well, well. It was a car radio company. That's interesting. Well, well. That's what I said to when I read that. I was like, wow. How about that? Okay, a few more.

Let's see. Sex comedies. What? Like a genre of literature or movies. They're called, like a genre of literature or movies. They're called sex comedies. There's comedies and there's like sex humor in it. Weird.

I know. I was like, this is crazy. I'm going to put this in. I'm ready. Could be any. It could be any. It could be any. It could be any of them. Really. I'm just curious. Okay. Chris says war. Karen says plague. Colin says depression. I like how you each choose the different one. This was this was from the plague. This was the decamaran by Giovanni Bacaccio. It was the first work of literature as entertainment in Europe. They think that this was maybe the first book for the people that was just entertainment. It was written in 1352. It has 100 stories of love and other misadventures told to ladies and gentlemen's hiding from the black death. And to make it appeal to everybody, he put a ton of sex humor in it. And people were like, you could do that in a book. That's really cool. So it came from the plague.

Okay, next one. The photocopier. Was it war, depression, or the... Photocopier. I feel like we have a half. a war one. Oh, you're trying to medigame it?

Would Dana not mix it up in order to... And does this include mimeograph? Or does she mean, I know she won't tell us, but this is what's inside Colin's head right now.

I'm deleting. Chris says war, Karen says war. Colin says depression. This was from the Great Depression. Oh, man. The Chester Carlton is cited as like the father of the photocopier. He lost his job.

engineer of sorts. He lost his job. He got a job writing or drawing people's patent applications, like redrawing photo or pictures of people that mentioned. And it was so boring. He's like, I have to come up with a way to make this better of a job than it is. So he figured out how to like take photos of work. Okay, just two more. This one is also a good job, brain classic. I'm going to see if you all remember. Duck tape. Oh, man. All I remember from timeout duct tape is it's D-U-C-K tape. Yeah. Correct.

Originally. Right. Yep. And then it was kind of an acorn where it's D-U-C-T. And then now it's just called D-U-C-T. Yep. Well, either is correct. Yeah.

But why a duck? Why was it a duck? Right. Either is correct. But the name originally came from, right, it being waterproof. All right. Chris says war. Karen says war. Colin says war. It is war. Yes, World War II, a munitions factory worker invented it. So she was working in a factory and they had this ammunition in little boxes and they'd put tape all over it. And then they'd dip it in wax and they'd have a little piece of tape sticking out. And like those wax cheeses where you pull the whack to get no wax over. It's like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But sometimes the paper would break and then it would take extra time for people to get the ammunition or the ammunition out of the box. So she, She's like, let's use a stronger tape.

And she wrote this funny letter to FDR. They were like, yeah, that's a great idea. Let's do that. I was like, did she make any money from this idea? It looks like no. But she got some words. But she like fully designed it basically. She wrote like she wrote out the plans for it, exactly how it would work.

Like what fabric to eat all of the things. Anyway. And the last one, Newton's theory of gravity was this. Newton's theory of gravity. Or was it a play? or was it an economic downturn, a depression? I was because of an apple tree. Why was he with an apple tree?

Because he was depressed. Okay. So everybody says plague, yes. The second plague of 1665, he had to self-isolate. He had just gotten out of college, or he was still kind of in college. And he took a year off and went to his country home. And outside his bedroom was an apple tree. That was the apple.

He, like, invented calculus. there he was busy yeah you know how it is when you're just i mean we've all been isolated during this pandemic and i invented a new branch of mathematics too i don't know about you guys and gravity he called it like his year of wonder or whatever like he just oh my god came up with like an optics thing yeah you don't have to commute or anything like that so i mean you just sort of invent calculus well they didn't have screens so he could just look out his window at the apple tree show And then he went back to school He's like, you guys, guess what I figured out?

Looking out the window is called Apple TV. Looking through the prism was Apple TV Plus. The dad joke double up there. That's pretty good. All right. And the creators of the popular science show with millions of YouTube subscribers comes the Minute Earth podcast. Every episode of the show dives deep into a science question

you might not even know you had, but once you hear the answer, you'll want to share it with everyone you know. Why do rivers curve? Why did the T-Rex have such tiny arms? And why do so many more kids need glasses now than they used to? Spoiler alert, it isn't screen time. Our team of scientists digs into the research and breaks it down into a short, entertaining explanation, jam-packed with science facts and terrible puns. Subscribe to Minute Earth wherever you like to listen. So one of the things that we were all kind of talking about, talking about the leading up to this episode was maybe we would also spend some time to lighten the mood talking about things that we misdoing that we can't do anymore because of the pandemic and that I immediately thought of

one thing. So way back in 2012, all quiz bonanza number four, I asked you guys what Japanese word means empty orchestra? And you all said, karaoke. Karaoke. Kara, meaning empty and okay, being short for orchestra or orchestra. A note here on some pronunciation for this. I majored in Japanese. I lived in Japan for two years, and I still say karaoke all the time. When I'm speaking in Japanese,

I will say Karaoke, but like in conversational English, if I were to just say to somebody who doesn't know Japanese, like, hey, you wanted to go do some Karaoke, they'd be like, what are you talking about? So I may pronounce it both ways during the segment. It's generally sort of calcified as karaoke. in American English.

Anyway, why am I talking about this? Well, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious. There's a lot of things we can still do with modifications during the pandemic, but something that certainly for me has been completely off the table for a year plus is especially Japanese-style karaoke. I mean, like, getting into a tiny room full of people. And also, also, not only that, but singing really loudly, which is something that you're really not supposed to do,

because that helps the coronavirus particles spread even more so than just sitting and talking. I remember around this time last year, Chris was gearing up for his big 40th birthday party. I was. And it was going to be a big karaoke party. And obviously, we had to all cancel. And now I'm going to turn 41. It's just like, it's like my 40, you think about, oh, well, my 40th birthday, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. so I did nothing and now I'm like coming up on 41 and also it's probably going to be a whole

fat lot of nothing you know what I mean so I'll see you I'll see you in 2022 when I turn 42 we're really really going to rip it up um so the funny thing is that so during lockdown I'm reading you know tons of books and things like that and I actually learned for the first time a lot about the origins of karaoke which I would like to share here so when I say karaoke I'm talking about the technology the machine that A plays in instrumental music from a source, B, takes your voice as an input through a microphone, mixes them together, and then outputs that result out of a speaker. So that was, that's the invention, not the idea of like singing along to instrumental music, but like the technology. And of course,

modern day karaoke machines, in addition to playing, you know, videos that show the lyrics on the screen, you know, they let you adjust the pitch of the music. They let you adjust the individual volumes, you know, change the mix to your specifications. I learned almost everything that I'm going to you in this segment from a new book by my friend Matt Alt. And this came out back in June 2020. And this book is called Pure Invention, How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World. I recommend this to everybody. It is a really well written for a general audience, like overview of a whole bunch of like things like anime, Hello Kitty, Nintendo, the Walkman and karaoke, like the specific things that kind of started in Japan and exploded to become popular all over the world. And a lot of like

the stories behind these things that, in many cases, haven't been told in English before. Now, the really interesting thing that he starts out by pointing out is between 1967 and 1972, the karaoke machine was invented in Japan at least five different times by five different people with no knowledge of each other's work. Oh, whoa. Five-year window, five different inventions, and nobody knew what the other people were doing. So when something like that happens, you kind of have to ask why. Right?

Clearly something was going on societally that caused multiple people to come up with the same idea. The way that Matt explains it in the book is that, I mean, well, it's all kind of intertwined with the sort of post-war rise of the salary man in Japan. That style of, I go to work at the company all day long, and then my coworkers and I leave and we all get dinner together. And then after dinner, we all go to a bar together and we're out until 2 to 3 a.m. Kind of like getting the real work done, getting some drinks into you, and then being able to say all of the things that you can't say when you're at work, or maybe you're entertaining clients and, like, that's where the actual deals are getting done. But it's like an almost an everyday kind of thing, and it means you're getting to work very early in the morning and kind of staggering home very late. And one of the major things that was kind of happening as you're going out to, like, all of these bars in the city, one of the things you'd see very often was a person, a performer who might be called a Nagashi or a drifter or a Hihi Katari, which would be like a player singer. This would be a musician that would go into the different bars and get paid to play popular songs on their guitar, and the patrons would sing along to the songs.

Oh, on demand. Or if, like, one person wanted to sing a song by themselves, like, they would accompany them. You'd pay them and they'd accompany you. And the skill sets of these players were such that, like, they knew how to accompany an amateur, maybe even an inebriated amateur in such a way as to, like, make them sound better, like they'd speed up to their playing or slow down their playing or adjust their pitch or their rhythm to help the person that was singing and really make you feel, like,

like you were, you know, star. Yeah, that sounds fun. So the person who is now, after much research, you know, looking into this, the person who is now credited as the first inventor of a Karaoke machine is a guy, his name is Shigeichi Negishi. It was, it was 1967, he was 44 years old, and he ran a factory in the Tokyo area that assembled eight-track tape players. Every morning, he would start his workday listening to a radio show that was called

pop songs without lyrics and they would broadcast instrumental songs in the radio and you could sing along to them and this was sort of a single karaoke and this was not uncommon to have like sing-along you know stuff like we had this in america often talked about is there was a show called sing along with Mitch which is a bandleader named Mitch Miller from back in the day and you would have like a male chorus on TV in the 60s and there'd be a male chorus singing popular songs and they'd print the words on it and of course they did this in the theaters too with like sing-along cartoons and stuff like that and follow the bouncing ball, right? But in Japan, they had this thing called pop songs without lyrics.

And at one point, this guy, Nikiishi, is hit with inspiration. He asked one of his engineers who made the eight-track tape players. He's like, hey, can you make me something where I can take an instrumental eight-track, pop it in, you know, and sing along into a microphone and then mix it all together and put it out the speaker so I could hear myself as if I was on the radio, you know, singing the music. So one of his guys made this to his specifications, and it was instantly like, oh, this is really cool. Because now I'm not just sort of singing along to the radio, like it sounds like I'm on the radio because it's coming out of the speaker. And Nogishi was pretty much like, oh, this is a product. Like we can, we can, we should make and sell these to bars and clubs so people can do this in the bar after work. So this is where it gets a little interesting.

We know that Karaoke means empty orchestra. But why? Why was that slightly weird phrase, like, actually chosen and applied to this technology? Well, it turns out that the term predates the machine. Because once Nogishi made this, he started asking around to his friends in, like, he had friends in the radio business. Like, hey, I have this machine, but what I need is recordings. I need instrumental recordings of songs. And a friend of his was like, oh, oh, yeah, what you want are Karaoke tapes. and he's like what are those and it turns out that when singers would like go on tour in Japan sometimes they would go to like maybe far flung areas

and not have an orchestra to back them because they'd be singing Enka songs like old folk music or you know like right easy listening kind of stuff with an orchestra and so instead they bring this tape of the orchestral recording and then they'd sing a lot to that and it was called empty orchestra

because they'd be performing in a venue with an orchestra pit in front of the stage, but the orchestra pit would be empty. Empty. It exists before the term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what that really means is they're performing to an orchestral music, but the orchestra pit is empty. It's empty.

Yep. That's, I totally had my own folk etymology in my head. That was that it was somehow an. an allusion to the fact that the vocals have been dropped out like that's the empty part and you're filling it in. I don't know. I mean I never thought too hard about it. That's

really really interesting. So now Nogishi is going off in search of these tapes which were just supposed to be used for the singers but now he has a reason to sell them to the public, right? And his machine if you just imagine like the size of like a small old tube television. And on the top of it it's got some

buttons and it has a coin slot because the idea would be you'd pop in a coin, you know, and he'll play a song. It looked very, it was very 1960s fancy. So like chrome, sparkly lights on the front, you know, really like sort of like this pre-disco sort of thing going on. And he called it, he called it the Sparko box

because it sparkled on the front. So they print lyric books and they make up the eight track tapes and they make the boxes and they kind of start getting these placed into bars in the Tokyo area. And people absolutely loved them right off the bat. They thought they were super cool.

It was cheap entertainment. They loved it. And the bartenders told him, wow, these things are incredible. Never, ever bring them here ever again. Why? Because these boxes represented a huge threat to the livelihood of the Nagashi, of the drifters. Those guys will come into the bar. And they had really close relationships with these bars.

The establishments, yeah. Yep. And so the Nagashi and those guys, they were just like, if you put one of these boxes in your bar were never coming back. And so, of course, people love them, but they also love the idea of having live accompaniment, too, right? They weren't just ready to just ditch humans for the machine immediately. And so they got rid of them. Nogishi was able to sell these things into love hotels, which are hotel rooms that you rent, not by the day, but by the hour. But it was just, it was sort of a small business.

And so when they kind of got the business started, he had some mild success in the Tokyo area, but he, he never patented the idea. And he kind of walked away from it after a while. Yeah. So just a couple of years later, there was a guy named Dyske I Nowe, and he was in Kobe. And again, working without knowledge of what Nogishi had made, he created a very similar device called the eight juke after the eight track tapes in the juke boxes. So at this point, it's all eight tracks. It's all, it's late 60s, early 70s, and so the eight track tape is the new hotness. There's no cassette.

There's certainly there's no laser discs. There's no cassettes. So Inouet, he thought about the technology even more. He added a reverb effect because he understood that most people's voices don't actually sound that good. So he's like, I'm going to put in some reverb in here and like juice your voice and I'm going to make you sound even better coming out of the speaker. You know, Inouye understood the business of the Nagashi, the live performers. And so he was like, I don't just want to take off the shelf para okay tapes and sell them. I'm going to go have new songs recorded.

I'm going to have these songs recorded and we're going to slow them down and take the pitch down so they're easier to follow for amateurs. So he was doing special, you know, karaoke machine only recordings of these songs. So he didn't patent the machine either. But he actually had a little bit better success in Kobe being able to have them exist alongside the live musicians. And in fact, what happened was very, very quickly, as his machines got popular, other companies, other major Japanese makers just sort of jumped immediately in and started making karaoke machines that were very similar. The thing is, in a way, he's considered the father of karaoke because his success actually came from, not from the hardware, but. Because he thought to start doing original instrumental music tracks, he actually started controlling all the right side of the business. So he made all of his money through creating the music that would be played on these and realizing that you had to do special karaoke tracks for these sort of things.

So Colin asked, what kind of songs are they singing? Throughout the 1970s, the content was very old school, like easy listening stuff, Enka or Japanese folk songs. And it was enjoyed by guys in their 40s, 50s, 60s on up. And for that first decade, Karaoke was considered, if you were like a 20-year-old guy working at a Japanese company and your boss was like, all right, everybody, we're going out to this bar, we're going to do some, we're going to have the karaoke machine. It was basically just like, kill me now. I now have to go with my boss, and I have to listen to these old geysers, these songs that are older than them, and, you know, while they weep into their, into their beer, you know what I mean? What ended up happening?

And again, this is in Matt's wonderful book, which you should read, that I'm cribbing liberally from, because he really did some amazing research here. Bruce Springsteen's Night Canadian Two album, Born in the USA, Springsteen did a tour in Japan. They saw all the audiences singing along to all of these songs. and they're just like, oh, this is what we're going to do. So they did, they invested the money into doing a full karaoke album of Bruce Springsteen, and they sold apparently $2 million just of the karaoke project. Yes.

And that is generally credited as being the pivot point where this technology went from being this thing for old people into the hot new thing for all. thing for all the young people wanted to go. And then it, then it exploded. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. The boss. Springsteen was the gateway. Yep. Yep. Yep. Apparently.

I wonder if he got any money for that. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. They'd get rights. It was probably just some weird thing where like one day if you even knew this. Hey, Bruce, you'll never get. Here's your check for like $20,000 because people in Japan have an instrumental version of their album and they get together in bars

and they sing it. He's like, weird. Take the money, though. Doesn't have my voice in it, you say? Okay, all caps the train. I think I've mentioned this. My mom, she makes her own karaoke, not just tracks, but videos. Like, she taught herself with an old MacBook Pro, she taught herself how to download videos from YouTube by one of these karaoke tracks that, you know, the instrumental tracks.

she then puts it together and then types words in the lyrics with the bouncing ball. Like she taught herself and she made her own because she's like, oh, I'm sick of looking at fake beaches with random people. Like she's got, she's going to make my own. She's like, I love Adele. She would splice in like live Adele footage with the music video depending on how she likes things, put it through eye movie, put it through handbrake, have it export into like, you know, many different formats and then burn it on to.

to a disc and then when she goes to a karaoke bar she would give that disc to the to the disc jockey and be like play track four and it even like has like a like a menu like a DVD menu like Tina's tracks and then like as a track listening and then she started making these for other people she had like a whole cottage industry of personalized videos I I have done I've done karaoke exactly one time. No. Yeah. Yeah. Like actually like get up there and sing one time in my life. Yeah. Wait, what did you sing? Uh, it was, this was in college. Uh, it was at Kipps bar in Berkeley, California. Yeah. Yeah. I know Karen and Dana know this, this, uh, legendary establishment.

Uh, no check IDs. Yeah, it was, there were, I would, there were, there were four or five of us up there after a pitcher of beer and we got it in our heads that we wanted to sing Man in Motion, you know, the song from St. Elmo's Fire. I will go on the record as saying that I think we performed an all-time just legendarily awful version of that song. We got the hurrying up signal from the host offstage. It was terrible. How do you hurry it up?

You was just truly terrible. Afterward, he was like, well, You go, ladies and gentlemen, it shows you don't even need to know the words to have a good time up here. So, come on now. Oh, okay. That's so funny. This is reminding me of, when I studied abroad in New Zealand, we'd go out clubbing. And it would be like a dance club playing dance music.

And then all of the sudden, they'd start playing The Gambler by Kenny Rogers. And everyone would be singing it. It was so funny. Yes. And like out of nowhere, such a random song. And it would happen almost every night. At the club. At the club, at the dance club.

My mom also likes to remind me that she is the winner of The Voice once when she was on a cruise ship, which is also something that was going on. The cruise ship. She said the elaborate the voice set with judges and the rotating chairs. Did they rotate their chairs? Yeah. And she won. After the chase, did she say, well, you know, I should remind you.

that I am also the winner of a game show. I won the voice. The voice on a cruise ship warned the game. What season? Well, it was the summer. That's in international waters, too. So, you know, that can really, yeah. From the terrifying power of tornadoes to sizzling summer temperatures,

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Accuweather Daily, wherever you get your podcasts. That's Accuweather Daily, wherever you get your podcasts. So, guys, it has now been a year or so since lockdown first started. I want to ask you guys, what's something that you bought that helped your lockdown life easier or better? Shorts. Shorts. I don't wear shorts. That's not that that's not a fashion choice that I make. So I did not own any.

I've never seen me wearing shorts. Never seen you in Superman in the same room at the same time. So no. But eventually once it hits. summer. We don't have air conditioning in our house just really uncomfortable. I bought two pair of very heavy fancy sweatpants and I regret nothing about it. I got AstroTurf for back patio and now it's really nice to go out there. So he made it a little more parkish. So here I have some interesting shopping data surrounding last year's lockdown. I have compiled some of the top

selling items, some you'd expect. Some may be a surprise. And I will share some very exciting stats along with some trivia questions. Let's bring it back to May 2020. The ring light. The ring light. A lot of work from home people. Zoom life is happening. So a lot of people invested in a ring light. Have you guys gotten a ring light? I have. Yes, I have. I literally just got one recently. It's a little tiny one. It goes on a phone, but I just needed to illuminate myself. Yeah, you put it around a camera.

It's a light that is an LED light. Most of the time that is in shape of a ring, goes around your camera, and it helps make you look better. Ringlight was the number one bestseller in the cell phone and accessories category on Amazon for weeks and weeks. This is a big deal because before that category was charger plugs. and the glass protector for phones. And so it was kind of insane that for a couple weeks, this was the number one spot. Do you guys know originally what was the ring light invented for to photograph?

What specific thing was it trying to photograph well? Colin. Product photography, like the phone or a watch or something like that. Oh, like with a white background. Yeah, exactly. Like in a little, yeah, where you want. no shadows, I don't know. Nope, nope. Chris, you...

Dana? Is it food? It's not food, but that's a good guess. Chris? It's not human faces? You're warm. The predecessor of the what we know as the ring light is actually a ring flash. So ring flash existed in photography for a long time. That was invented in 1952 and it was invented for dental photography. photography. It was so people could take good, bright pictures of teeth. And that's the thing

with the ring light is because the ring shape and it's so close to the lens, it really eliminates shadows. Right. And it makes people's mouths look better. Great. Just gorgeous. Fabulous. Fabulous mouth shots. All right. Baking supplies. Yeast sales, yeast jumped 245% during a week in April. 400% during the month of April. Actually, yeast was sold out at a lot of stores. And of course, things that are related to baking or to yeast baking, especially bread baking, food scales were top sellers, Dutch ovens, because that's how artisanal breads are baked. I like that's a lot of pot. Yep, yep, yep.

Because East was sold out in a lot of places, people then started to make sourdough. bread because instead of buying package yeast, we'll just use wild yeast that's in the air. So a lot of people started sourdough baking because of the yeast shortage. So my question here, buzz in. What company is trademarked as the original San Francisco sourdough? Oh, that was Colin. I never know how to pronounce it. Is it Budan or Bowdoin?

I'll be ignorant both ways, I guess. I say Budin, but I don't know. I believe it's boudama. Correct. April 2020, appliances, the top appliance, actually the top couple of them, the different brands, were freezers, were additional freezers. And then the second appliance that's not a freezer is the Instant Pot. My question for you guys, what country did Instant Pot originate from?

Oh, interesting. Chris. Taiwan? Incorrect. What country is instant pot from or invention? Okay. I'll throw out another one if I can. India?

Incorrect. It is Canada. Oh, Canada. Canadian company, Canadian invention. We own one, and I would never have guessed that. Yeah. Yep, yep. Let's move on to the arts and crafts category.

Let's bring it back. In April 2020, think about it. What craft item or material topped entirely the arts and crafts category on Amazon and was sold out in most physical stores? Colin. Knitting supplies, like yarn or crocheting, like that family of stuff. Oh, I know. Incorrect. So, Dana.

I think elastic or fabric because everybody's making masks, homemade masks. Yes. The top contenders for that category were all white elastic straps. People were making masks like crazy. And for a while, there was a shortage. You couldn't even buy elastic. All right. We're moving on to shoes.

Comfort is a big deal. So it's not a surprise. that Crocs did very, very well in the past year for the lockdown, the Crocs classic clog. Originally a boat shoe. Crocs were boat shoes. When they were unveiled in 2001, they only sold 200 pairs. My question for you. So part of the Crocs design, as we all know, there is like on the front top of the shoe, there's these holes, right, for ventilation. And the Crocs company sells decorations that you can plug into the little holes. What do you call these decorations? Oh, man, I've seen these, like, they have so many celebrity, so many now, celebrity promo crossover ones. Are they rocks? No. No. Chris. Crack holes.

They are called gibbets. Jibb. Okay. Okay. J-I-B-B-B. ITZ moving on in addition to yeast in April 2020 the meat category was a pretty high up there a lot of people buying up meat. Nielsen reported that there was a jump, 379% jump for spiral hams. Spiral hams topped the number one category for in store week over week. almost 400% close to Easter. And so maybe it had a big tick and Easter ham. Like everybody's celebrating by themselves. So everybody gets a one instead of one for your whole family.

My trivia question for you is, before the spiral cut patent expired in 1981, you could only buy spiral hams from what company store? Colin. That has got to be the honey bake. ham company. Yes, the honey baked ham had stores. So wait, no one else could sell spiral cut hams until 1981? No one else could sell it before 1980. That makes so much sense at all, why they could support their own honey bake ham store. As a kid, I swear, as a kid, I never understood

like, I'm like, mom, they just sell hams? I don't understand. How do they say business? Wow. Yep. The person who started the honey baked company, he actually invented the spiral cut machine. And so after 1981, the patent expired. So then any company, they can sell it at a grocery store or other places. And so the machine came first, then came

the honey-baked company who had exclusive ham rights. Yeah. Then came a ham portion, right. Ham rights. In the first couple weeks of March, when lockdown happened in 2020,

webcams had a hundred seventy-nine percent a year-over-year jump. Here's my trivia question to you guys. The first ever documented webcam was used to show what? This is a family show, right? Yes.

Hint, it is not a living thing. Oh, okay. It's got to be what? Like 80s, 90s, you guys think? I mean, it can't be, early 90s, maybe? 1991. Okay, all right. I'll guess like a bird feeding or like bears eating salmon or something like that.

Those are life things, right? Right. Those are living things. You know what, Colin, you're on the right track. 1991, this happened, I believe, in Cambridge. It's a bunch of people working at a, oh, Chris. Is it the pitch drop? It's not the pitch drop.

You're also close. The first webcam broadcasted the coffee machine. Oh, I have a very good story. Oh, that's right. That's right. Students and programmers to help keep an eye on the coffee levels to check the status so that they don't have to walk all the way through a hallway to get to the coffee machine to find out that it's out of coffee.

All right. What about fitness equipment? So in September 2020, Peloton, the exercise bike company, finally announced its first ever quarterly profit. Before then, they made no money. has been losing money, but first time September 2020, they finally announced their first ever quarterly profit, 172% surge in sales and more than 1 million people subscribing to its classes.

And this was September 2020. What does the word Peloton mean? It is not a made-up name, which I thought it was. Colin. It comes from, I know the term anyway, from like bike racing, like, Torda, from. and things like that. It's the pack of the main pack of bikers. You are correct.

Peloton is the group of bikers. As you watch Tour de France or other cycling, it's the pack, which is kind of actually a really good name. It's a community of bikers all moving together. All right, good job, everybody. Yay. For spending money. Get it, everybody.

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And we got one last segment, Cullen. Yeah. So I feel like when we were a few months into the pandemic, you know, you started to see sort of like on the news, this weird hybrid of like sober commentary on our times, but also kind of upbeat general interest story. And I saw a story of Italy's wine windows have returned. And I was like, oh, okay, wine.

I like windows. I'll take a look at that. I need a way like that. It's a wine window. I'll quote one here. Here's an article I read. History is repeating itself in Italy. Wine windows once used to help prevent contagion during the bubonic plague being reopened

by the region's bars and restaurants for coronavirus-friendly delivery. And it's like, oh, okay, so, you know, I kind of looked. And what the wine windows are is, it's a window in a wall of an establishment, has a tiny little door. I mean, small. I mean, you know, not much bigger than like an eight and a half by 11. to paper. Tenor of the articles was basically this was an invention that during the Italian plague, wine merchants and restaurants came up with as a way to continue serving wine to their patrons without actually having to contact them. And that it had, you know, fallen out of

use for hundreds of years now. And now that the pandemic is back, we found this use again for the wine windows. And it was sort of a feel-good story about how these Italian venues, and you know, Italy, of course, was hit particularly hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, and very rigid lockdown. The wine windows or in Italian, and I apologize for butchering the Italian, the bouquette del vino, literally just, you know, a window for a wine, basically, was this was sort of a resurgence being seen. And, you know, there's a lot of press around, maybe this can be, maybe they can come back

even after pandemic is gone. And as places were sort of slowly opening up again, you could go and, you know, plunk down your money and you get the glass of wine. through the little cute little door window in the side of the thing and you drink it outside and everybody's happy. So I thought this was really cool. And if you go online and they're beautiful, like you can find photos of them. There is in fact an association devoted to the, they're called the Wine Windows Association.

And they're very ornate, you know, little brickwork, the ones. A lot of them have been renovated in recent years, in the last few years especially. So, but then I got thinking to myself, it's like, well, okay, I mean, look, I'm not Mr. World Traveler, but I've been around. I've been to Europe before. I mean, it was like, why have I never heard or seen of these, seen these things before? I've never heard of a wine window, like anywhere in France, I've been, or, you know, Germany or even other parts of Italy. So I read a little bit more, and the articles all talked about this was something in Florence.

Every article was like, the Florentian region, we had to go down. And so it's like, okay, there's something more to it, something specific to Florence. It's like, okay. Now, thanks to a couple really good articles here that I found, one was, on the great, great, great site. Can't recommend it enough, Atlas Obscura. Yes. Yeah, awesome, awesome site.

There's an article by Lisa Harvey from 2019. Okay, so to give you some sense of, oh, maybe this was before pandemic started. And then I also found some great writing by a writer named Robin Gisling, and I hope I'm pronouncing her last name correctly. She seems to be the expert on Bucete del Vino. So, okay, why just Florence?

So apparently the history of the wine window, the Bucete de Lino in Florence is really tied into the local history and to the Medici family in particular. So you guys have probably heard that name before, right? If you've never heard that name, the Medici or Medici, if you prefer, family, arguably maybe the most powerful family in history. Over hundreds of years in medieval times in Italy dominated the banking scene, the political scene.

They generated popes, dukes, you know, So, Queens, you know, Catherine de Medici, I mean, she was part of this family. Yeah, exactly. They were, you know, the premier patrons of so much Renaissance art that we know today. One of the Medici, Cosimo de Medici, was the Duke, okay, of the Florentine region in the 1500s. It seems that back then, you know, there were many, many wealthy families in Florence and that part of Italy. I mean, you know, really the, you know, the cradle of the Renaissance, right? Right. If you had this giant family plot of land, you might have a vineyard. And you might produce your own grapes. And you might produce your own wine from those grapes. So a lot of these families would produce, you know, copious amounts of wine. And they would sell it to local taverns and merchants and things like that. And they would sell, you know, wine from whatever estate or whatever family. This will not surprise you. Like anything else involving powerful, wealthy families, they were trying to find ways around paying taxes. So when you're-

Yes. Even, you know, maybe even, maybe even especially back then. Yeah. A lot of the wealthy families in the region were basically tired of paying the taxes they would have to pay on selling the wine, on the profits they would make from selling the wines to the taverns and the merchants to then resell them. And they essentially lobbied Cosmo de Medici. He was the Grand Duke of Tuscany region, not just Florence, the entire region, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Can you, we'll make it worth your while. You know, we'll give you some money here on the side. you make it worth our while to basically exempt us from taxes if we can sell directly. So he basically passed the law allowing the wealthy, you know, manor homes to sell wine directly to the public and not have to pay any the taxes on it. That's just free profit, right? With no bar middleman. Exactly, with no bar middleman. So what you would see is in the region, they are the, you know, these, you know, giant,

I mean, giant manor houses and they would build out in the wine hut, you know, they would build a little hole in the side of the hut, they would staff somebody to stay in there, collect the money from people who would come by and want to fill up with some wine from the local vineyard, and they would take the money, the person would get the wine, they would pass it back and forth through this little window.

So like the riffraff doesn't actually come on to the wealthy manor estate, right? It was really a way of just, it had nothing to do with the plague. It was like limiting the interaction with the public to just give me your money, here's your wine. Because it's house. Yes, that's right.

And it might be, you know, like on the edge of the property, but still, that went on for a good while, you know, over the next 100, 200 years, sort of this process became sort of accepted among the wealthier families. Eventually, they passed an edict in the region in the 1700s that anyone who had the means to sell wine on their home or their venue could punch a little hole in the wall and sell it. You only get wine from the good holes. Yeah. So at that point, into the end of the 70, I know, hey, you guys want some wine? I know a good hole. Yeah. So like I say, there is a wine window association in Florence.

They list and track, they're like a historical presentation. I track at least, it sounds like 150. They estimate there may be as many 300 wine windows in the Florentine region still. Now, here's the really interesting thing that I learned in doing a little bit more deep dive on this. Because it was so fascinating to me. you see a couple pictures of them, they're so charming. So they fell out of use even, even after this, even after the 1700s, they fell out of use. And a lot of them were forgotten about. Buildings change hands over decades, over hundreds of years. You don't remember.

Everybody wants a bar out of the side of their house. You might turn it into a hotel instead of a restaurant. Right. So a lot of them got just bricked over. There was major flooding in Florence in the 1960s. And during the flooding, some of these Buccate del Vino basically were revealed when the wet walls came down and Stucco fell off. And some people were like, oh, I didn't even know we had a Buccetta del Vino here. Oh, fine. Yeah. Just before quarantine hit, 2016, 17, 18, 19,

this historical association was trying to really get the merchants who had them. if they either operate them or yeah just because like they want to put up little plaques by all the historical ones oh cute yeah and so it really sounds like this might be a feel good ending for the wine windows of the florence region that after pandemic and lockdown all goes away maybe we can kind of keep this awesome little magical way of getting wine i like it i love it now that is absolutely on my on my bucket list is i want to go get a glass of wine from a wine window in Florence, Italy.

Nice. 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 war, pandemic, depression inventions, karaoke, wine windows, and things that you bought during the pandemic. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, Audible, and on all podcast apps. And on our website, good jobbrain.com.

And we'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye. Hello, this is Matt from the Explorers podcast. I want to invite you to join me on the voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers in the history of the world. These are the thrilling and captivating stories of Magellan, Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark, and so many other famous and not so famous adventures from throughout history. Go to Exploryspodcast.com or just look us up on your podcast app. That's the Explorers

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