Good Job, Brain! - 21: Plants Are Messed Up

Episode Date: July 23, 2012

Ironic to describe our plants show as "meaty" but boy oh boy, we cover LOTS of fantastic topics in this episode: poisonous plants, stinky plants, drug plants, and yes, we even named a plant our A-Hole of the Week! Also: plant character quiz, "Whose Ride is it Anyways?," LSD baseball, and a special Encyclopedia Brown tribute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, audacious and awesome audio audience of Autobots. Good job, Brian, your weekly question show and Offie Trivia podcast. This is episode 21, and of course I'm your humble host, Karen. And we are your slightly but slamming sleepy heads. sleuths. I'm Colin. I'm Dana. I'm Chris. Woo. And I'm going to start off the show with another one of our listener questions for us.

And Robert Hamilton from Facebook asks, do you guys record in a specific place like a studio? Or are you sitting around a table in one of your houses? Yes. Yes. Yes and yes. Both. Well, originally, we started off thinking that we were going to need to rent a space to do the podcast in because acoustics and everything. and we actually were in the Berkeley Jazz School

I always liked the environment there because even though it didn't pick up on the recordings there was music tinkling in through the walls from students practicing It was a very cool venue Very highbrow with the jazz We'd go in with our equipment So we'd be sitting in these rooms

These rooms would be full of musical instruments Like their classrooms So like pianos and string instruments And all kinds of drum sets and things like that And we're just four losers sitting on chairs Yeah yeah talking about Well no that's the funny thing Because they would come in and just be like

Oh well okay guys have a good session You know I think we're going to change Am I, you know. They must have thought we were some vocal jazz group or something. That would be awesome. Dane tones. But then we couldn't get it and we ended up at Collins House.

Yeah, and I think we've recorded by far the majority of the shows, yeah, around my living room. Although today, coincidentally, or not coincidentally, but we are not there today. We are at Chris's House. Collins House comes with some cats. Yeah, and Chris's House comes with some dogs. So we get little animal accompaniment sometimes. It is very nice. All right.

So let's start off. our show with our general trivia segment pop quiz hot shot and get your barnyard buzzers ready i am actually going to mash two trivia pursue cards up together because i was unsatisfied with some of the questions so here we go blue wedge for geography and i don't know why it's in geography what classic dog name comes from the latin word for faithful oh phido yeah correct yeah phido fidelity i like how you guys say that like oh yeah of course i was like what it's in geography for those people who like get stuck on the geography

wedge and just circle it over and over and over and finally they throw them a bowl if you will this is always death all right pop culture pink wedge in the film super bad what name does

Fogel go by on his fake ID everybody McLaughlin yes Wedge, which has never been an American political party, grain, reform, socialist, voters, or wig? Voters, I'll say voters. Very, very correct. Actually correct.

That's extremely correct. Purple Wedge, what is the name of both a psychological test and a superhero in a 2009 movie? Roarshock. Oh, oh. Of course. Yeah. Which we probably associate with a... Rojochak being the inkblot test

and people don't know by name and then also from the watchman. Green wedge. What does HTML stand for? Chris. Hypertext markup language. Correct. Right.

Last question. A very interesting sports tidbit here. What substance did Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher, Doc Ellis, claim he was under the influence of when he threw a no-hitter in 1970? deep, huh? It's a very, very famously, he claimed to be under the influence of LSD. And is it true or false? It is true. I, you know, it's funny. Well, he, I, so I just read actually a pretty, it was the anniversary of it, some big milestone anniversary. I just read an article about it. And there

are conflicting reports that, I mean, the way he told it originally, I guess, was, it sounded like he dosed acid and went straight to the park. It sounds like it may have been several hours after he had taken it, but regardless, he had taken it. Okay. Yeah, he had definitely taken LSD and went to the park and I mean he tells stories about one time you know he was like talking to the ball between you know innings and yeah yeah great story just in terms of weird story value why haven't they made that a movie they are actually it's funny to say that yeah someone I think someone has just optioned yeah to make a story about Doc Ellis that is an amazing movie I see it like the ball's talking to him it's like you're gonna go into the glove okay yeah yeah and did he get into

trouble no I mean he I mean I don't think this was something that came out until afterward, and not to make light of it or that it wasn't a big deal, but it was a different time in baseball. Today, if that happened, you'd probably get in a fair amount of trouble, yeah. So I actually wanted to mention something that we just did, me and my fiance, Regina, and Tyler Hinman, former five-time crossword puzzle champion and former Good Job Brain guest host. So we actually all just went out with Tyler's girlfriend, Amy, was along for the ride as well, and went to play. It's called Real Escape Game, and it is a puzzle game that you actually you go to this venue that they've rented out

and they time you and they give you a packet of puzzles and you try to solve this whole packet of puzzles in the time limit and there's a story wrapped around it and this was the second one that they had done here in America they're doing them in San Francisco. It's very popular in Japan and it's a Japanese company called Scrap that does it. And so I wanted to say, first of all, it was a great time

we were the only team there to actually solve the puzzle. It was called the crazy last will of Dr. Mad. It was great. It actually, everybody on our team got certain aspects that, you know, they got to have the insights like, oh, I get this. This is what this is, you know. But anyway, I bring this all up to say their next game, for those of you listeners who are in the Bay Area, is real escape game, Evangelion, which is based on the Japanese animation. So it's a series of puzzles that are themed around that animation. And it's going to be August 25th and 26. This is Saturday and a Sunday at the J-pop Summit Festival in Japan Town. So if you guys are interested in doing this, good job, Brain seal of approval.

It's a lot of fun. Not receiving an endorsement. Chris just had a good time. I'm telling you, I mean, it is hard as hell. Like, we were the only team to do it, and we had a ringer. So, yeah. My understanding is they do kill the last place team, right? They're murdered.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, consider you so born. That's match. It's like hunger games. Yeah. Mental games. And let's get on with our show. So in a previous episode, we had one that was titled,

animals are weird and since we focused more on the fauna I thought maybe this episode we would focus on the flora so this is a weird plants show plants are messed up animals are weird and plants are messed up Can you dare? What a shrimp? Just watch him as a world goes straight. Dresses and grasses and gas, baby, can you dance? All right, well, I'll start it off here.

I like going for the weird kind of crazy things. I think our listeners expect that as well. I think we all do. We all do. We all do. I'm going to ask you guys here about two categories of plants here, and just let me know if you've heard of these. You guys are familiar with century plants.

You guys know what those are? Dana, I think you're telling us that you had one at your... We had a whole row of them in front of my parents' house. What is it? I'm unfamiliar. Basically, they're like aloe plants, right? They look, yeah, they look like really huge aloe plants, and they're spiky.

And if you're a little kid, it's not fun to fall into them. That's my tip for you. But one of the third, they're called a century plant because it was believed that they bloom once every hundred years. Okay. And so we got onto this topic talking about how it's such an unusual occurrence. Sometimes people don't even know

that they bloom, and it kind of catches them by surprise. They're like, what the heck is that? This plant that I've had for 30 years and has never changed. Like a unicorn. And it's a, it's a, very giant protrusion. Huge stock coming out of the plant. It's like, uh-oh, somebody's entering puberty.

Right, right. Got to have a little talk with the plant. That is a type of century plant. And basically, it's the family of plants that are believed to bloom very, very infrequently. And most of them, it actually turns out, bloom two or three times per hundred years. But very, very, very... But people's lifespans were so short that they really didn't... That's a great point.

That's a great point. Yeah. And, of course, you know, I mean, they vary in nature. like a stock. The stock comes out of it. It looks like an aloe plant and it's, you know, a 20-foot stock. And it's been described as either like a giant asparagus stock or a tongue or a very phallic kind of looking protuberance. It's kind of embarrassing. I know you're wondering what's happening to your body. We have a special film for you to watch in school. The boy plants watch one movie,

the girl plants watch a different movie. So that's one category. There's so there's another category plant. Do you guys familiar with what a carrion flower is? Does it smell like a dead body? It does. There is a category of plants and flowers called carrion. The way that these plants, part of their reproductive cycle, is they smell like death. They smell like rotting flesh. So they attract insects and things that feed on decaying flesh, and then they're pollinated that way, as opposed to their bees. So they're tricking them. They are tricking them. That's right.

And again, they have these giant kind of, they look sort of fleshy, like meat. and they smell, they smell like rotting flesh and they're supposed to be just horrible, horrible, awful smell. And they attract animals like carry on beetles and sweat bees. I mean, even, like, sweat bees. I don't want to, I don't want to be around sweat bees. It sounds cool.

It sounds like a bee in like a witch's garden, isn't it? Yeah. Oh, and if you... It sounds like the gang that wasn't as good as the T-birds. Oh, man, sweat bees for life. Yeah. So, I want to talk very quickly about a plant that is at the intersection of,

carry-on flower in century plant. Nice. I want to talk about the Titan Aram, which is the giant corpse flower. Ooh, I've seen pictures of those. Yeah, and they are freaky looking. Probably the prettiest thing about it is Titan Aram, its name. It looks like something out of a dinosaur movie. So they're the largest flower head in the world. They can get up to 10 feet tall regularly, regularly up to 10 feet tall. In the wild, they've been reported up to 20 feet. talls. Only blooms up to maybe every 50, 60 years sometimes like that. There are only known to be about 140 of these giant corpse flowers worldwide. Yeah. And I mean, partly because they live so long and they're so giant, it takes a lot to establish. So. And no one wants to be near them.

Right. Well, there actually is one in Berkeley where we normally record at the Berkeley Botanical Gardens. So if you're anywhere in the Bay Area, you can go visit it. And they have a schedule. They'll tell you when it's blooming. It just bloomed a few years ago. So it may be a while. 40 years. So my calendar. So here's a thing. In 50 years. Well, so here's the thing. It blooms, you know, two or three times every hundred years. It's only open for a day or two. And then it closes again.

So it's funny. It's like, come sniff the rotting flesh dead flower now for one day. And so they'll have huge crowds coming to change things out. Just the final little tidbit about this, just to creep it. Again, I encourage you to go online and look at photos of giant corpse flour. It does not look real. They can heat up. They have a mechanism to heat up the inflorescence is what the central.

part of the plant is called. So I want you to imagine this thing blooms and starts heating up this giant fleshy stock that smells like rotting meat. It increases the spread of the odor is why it does that. So just a fantastically awful plant. But because it is so hideous and awful, it now receives all kind of love from botanists around the world. So it's super cool. It's just the rarity. It's the rarity of the plant, the rarity of how frequently it opens. Yeah, crazy. I have never seen one myself, so perhaps somebody I have to have seen one. So I wonder why those sentry plants bloom so rarely. Because usually flowers are, you know, to pollinate and to kind of carry out the genetic material.

But that just seems like it's so against nature. Well, you know, you actually bring up a good point, which is, you know, in reading it, they made the point that the century plants, most of them, a lot of flowers bloom and then die. And then it creates the cycle that way. Most of the century plants, they don't die. So it's one reason they can afford to not bloom that often. Conserving energy. Right, they bloom, and then they keep on living, and they'll bloom again decades later, yeah.

Well, speaking of odor and stinky things, I do want to share some things from my childhood, from my upbringing. We all know the durian fruit, right? It is a weird head-shaped and head-sized thorny. It looks like a pineapple. It is. Like a big green pineapple. It's very polarizing. It's very common, too.

You see it in a lot of Asian supermarkets. And they're common supermarkets. I mean, I had never seen it until I was traveling in Asia. Oh. Yeah. I'm sure you can get it now. Yeah. Yeah.

And it smells like rotting flesh slash gasoline slash sulfur slash a whole bunch of feet. Yeah. Feet, wet socks. This is one of the things that Andrew Zimmeron on Bizarre Foods is just like this is the one thing that I just won't put in my mouth. I think it's disgusting gross. I don't understand. the pleasures of it at all. I grew up with it, and I agree.

It is not a very pleasant smell. It's very pungent. But the fruit itself, after you crack open, the thorny shell, the fruit itself tastes kind of like ice cream with a taste of gasoline. Sure. But it's very creamy, very sweet, high sugar content. Does the smell fade after it's been cut open, or is it just... Nope.

No, you pretty much have to put up with the smell and get the food into your mouth, physically. And it's been in dead bodies. Yes. Yes. But there is a very close cousin of Deerian called the Jackfruit. And this is a story of Jackfruit versus my mom. So the Jackfruit, a little bit of background, it's kind of like a Deerian, but it's a lot larger and it's a little bit flatter. It's about two to three feet long. It's oblong. And it does have the same kind of porcupiney, thorny rind. And it is very, very heavy. It's like, I remember it was probably like 60 pounds, 60 to 80 pounds, really. tense. So I don't know why, but my, you know, growing up, I was a kid, my mom came home, she was like, hey, I saw this at the market and I bought it. And I was like, what is it?

She goes, I don't know. She's like, I just know what's called a jackfruit. And I was like, oh no. And the rind smells like gasoline. It's not stinky, but it is unpleasant. Like Deering, I would say, is odorous and stinky. Jackfruit just smells like bad chemicals. And the thing is, so we were sitting there staring at it. We're like, okay, so what do we do? do? How do we open it? The rind was too tough for like a knife. And so we're like thinking, I was like, there's got to be a better way. It's got to be a better way. And this is, you know, this is back in the days when we had dial up internet. And today, of course, I can just go on Google and be like, how do I?

Your phone out. Yeah, my phone. Download the Jackfruit mobile app. Scan the QR code and the Jackfruit won't open myself. So it was back in the day, it was in Asia. So I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to dial up the modem and I'm going to find out. I searched and search and search and through different languages. And I finally found one website that documents how you're supposed to open it. And this took me like hours to find this information. It's totally different now. And it was really elaborate.

First you have to take like an old style cleaver and you have to cover and bathe yourself in cooking oil. What? You have to cover yourself in cooking oil? Your hands, your arms. No. It sounds like a prank. Did you find this on a fetish side of some kind? You're cleaver, everything.

Was it by a man named Jack Fruit? Mr. Jack Fruit. Okay, some alien baby is going to pop out. This is this weird pot. It's a brink sack. Yeah. And so I told my mom, I was like, okay, this is what the internet says. And my mom's like, oh, I don't know.

Okay, well, let's do it. And so the reason why you have to oil it is because once you cleave open the rind and you bust it open, there is this disgusting super white nets of like a latex sticky material. It's almost as if you imagine deep sea creatures like spit out when they're in fear. Okay. They spit out like this glue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like really white Elmer's glue and it's slippery but it's so sticky.

And then anything it touches, it's just... It's so sticky. And this is why you have to oil everything. Finally, we get to the fruit. And the fruit is like large kernels. And I would say the texture is kind of like a pineapple, but a little bit dried. And it's stringy, and it's fleshy, and you eat it. And the taste of it was phenomenal because it tastes exactly like juicy fruit gum.

Wow. The flavor of juicy fruit gum. And this, you know, I was up all night trying to find documentation to support my theory. This is my theory that juicy fruit gum got its flavor inspired by the jack fruit. Okay. But I couldn't find anything concrete. because they, Wrigley is still keeping it secret. It's their trade secret.

Oh, of course. Yeah, and after all of that crazy latex, the payoff was, the payoff was good. This definitely sounds like something I would love to try as long as someone else prepared to it. Yeah, if someone just put the fruit on a little plate and gave it to me and I just ate it with a fork, sounds good. I will pay the premium. You don't want to cover yourself in cooking oil? I mean, not, well, I mean, I already do once a day for other purposes, so I don't want to, I just, the cooking oil bills are already so high. Yeah, it's such a tight budget.

I would describe, I think, in terms of fruit flavors that we know, it's kind of a cross between tasting like a banana and a pineapple. Like a tart banana, but like juicy fruit. Well, I'm glad you warned me about, because, like, I've definitely heard of the jackfruit, and I might have been inclined to try it without knowing what I was getting into. They just blop and eat it. Yeah, just biting into it like to eat it. Call it no. Imagine no internet. Yeah.

What if I didn't get this information? and the house would have been covered with it's like Spider-Man webs everywhere because you would have gotten it open be some sort of a defense mechanism right for the animals to come and yeah if you bite into it once you're probably not going to bite into it a second time like oh this is too much trouble and very very strange so so good job me and my mom and dial up internet yeah good job jack freak's website we successfully defeated the jackfruit I, plants are not my forte. I know basically nothing about them. And one of the things that I was thinking about, so I made a joke about, we were at the local produce market, and there were tomatios, and I said, I said, whoa, some of these tomatios are threatening to grow up

into, like, real tomatoes someday. Because, like, there were these tomatios that were so huge, they burst through the sort of outer papery part, you know, and it was just this tiny little vestigial paper hanging there. And that's, you know, we were in the cheap. We were in the cheapo produce market. Well, that's the thing. So I said this, and then my fiancée regina,

says, well, actually, they're not as closely related to tomatoes as they are related to Cape Gooseberry, which actually does look a lot like a Tomatio. As it turns out, they're all part of the Nightshade family, she said. Oh, so, you know, potatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, the tobacco plant, things like that. Bell peppers, right? Bell peppers. They're all part of the larger family of Nightshade. And when I heard that, I'm like, oh, yeah, nightshade, like, you know, the poison that they'd use in, you know, in history times, right? So I started thinking about what is this family of plants? What is the actual? actual poison. Remember how people used to think potatoes were poisonous? Or tomatoes, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well,

they work. Well, the leaves are. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the active, like, chemicals that are working here are things like solanine, atropine, things of that nature that are actually used. They do actually have uses, right? Solanine is the chemical that actually makes potatoes poisonous. So when a potato gets all green and, you know, bitter, that is poisonous. People don't really get poisoned by potatoes because when you eat a potato that has too much poison in it, you spit it out because it tastes really gross. So, I mean, you have that natural defense mechanism. You might die.

So the actual plant that we're dealing with here when people talk about, you know, nightshade, the poison is, first of all, it's known as deadly nightshade. Oh, good. And it's Latin name is a tropa belladana. Oh, beautiful. Yeah. This is, so this is the plant with little purple berries, and this is the joke from the Simpsons of Ralph Lick, I'm going, I eat it the purple berries.

They taste like burning. Yeah, so don't go out and pick those purple berries that you can't identify. They look like little blueberries, but they're not blue. They're purple. Don't need any berries you can't identify. Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, people just didn't know. So, I mean, like, people would go out and pick all these berries and, like, make a pie out of them.

And then they all die, you know. Don't eat the berries. And so, of course, they were used, people would use them as poison. Sure. If there was somebody they wanted to die. And they have like a, you know, Swedish sort of taste to them. You know, they don't, it's not like a bitter green potato that nobody would eat. It's a gateway point.

You would eat. Yeah. So the name, Atropa Belladonna, fantastic name. A tropa comes from Atropos, who is one of the three Greek fates. And Atropos is the one that would cut the strings of your life. You know, so, like, you would cut the string of your life and, you know, when it was time for you to die. Belladonna, of course, means... Beautiful lady.

So named because night shade was actually used for cosmetic reasons. Oh. One of the effects of night shade poisoning was dilation of the pupils, which was considered to be attractive during some days. No. So Parisian or Italian women would actually use a little bit of nights. Just a little bit. Just enough to make their pupils dilate.

Just a little poison. To make them more attractive. And, of course, they were probably walking around not able to see straight. They probably had a headache. Palladonna goggles, maybe hope. Like, make other people attractive to you too. Nice. You know, beauty is pain.

And actually, one of the compounds is scopolamine. This is one of the other chemical compounds that in two high doses in nightshade will poison you. Scopolamine is actually the compound that they use in seasickness patches. Oh. I use those all the time. Yeah, the patches that you put on to deal with seasickness. And you might say, so doesn't this thing have some ill effects? In fact, it does have ill effects.

And again, more pronounced in children. So Karen, one of our friends from video game journalism is, of course, Andy Eddy, one of the elder statesman of video game journalism. He was editing, he was writing reviews of 8-bit Nintendo games back in the day, you know. And so he's been around for quite a while. And he actually appeared on, back when his children who were about our age were younger, they appeared on the people's court. because they had purchased sea sickness patches for a trip at sea, and the instructions that said, do not put these on children, got lost. The pharmacist had forgotten to include them, and they sued the pharmacist.

And so they used these on all of their kids, then eight-year-old daughter, who had 24 hours of crazy hallucinations. And at first it was just like, Daddy, your hand is, why does your hand come off? You know, stuff like that. By about 3 a.m., it became. the walls are made of spiders like real like people used to use scopolamine as a hallucinogenic drug for fun

but they kind of stopped doing it because the hallucinations weren't fun they were bad hallucinations because she put a seasickness patch on and they didn't know that you couldn't use it on children this dosage was so high that adults were fine but children suffered these side effects of this of nightshade poisoning

it was nightshade poisoning luckily she did pitch a perfect game that was like that's... Another thing that I found out was that scopolamine was used as one of the early pain relievers for childbirth and it was called...

They called it Twilight Sleep and Twilight Sleep was the name of this combination of morphine and scopolamine. And so it would... The morphine would basically knock you out and the scopolamine

would just sort of send you off on a trip. And they... What's up? I'm just laughing because it's like oh, you thought this was painful? Well, take away the pain. But you're going to have crazy hallucination.

No, actually, well, that's the thing. The combination of morphine and scopol. I mean, you know, using them both together was the innovation here because what actually happened is they would take them, pass out, wake up, baby. The thing is, women were not really happy with this because it disconnected them completely from the childbirth. It's like I gave birth to a spider. I remember that.

There was a, so there was a New York. Times article about Twilight Sleep. This is turn of the century. The controversy over Twilight Sleep, is it a good idea or bad idea? And one of the women was just like, you know, they gave me the drugs. And then the next thing I remember, I was thinking, huh, what am I going to have this baby? And the doctor comes in and like, here's your baby. And I'm like, oh, she's quoted in the New York Times as saying something to the effect of like,

I guess I had it. I mean, I couldn't prove to you that I had it, but I guess it's my baby, you know? And so. That is pretty scandalous and weird. Yeah, yeah. But yes, there are still. the nightshade compounds that are isolated from, you know, the nightshade bears

are still being in use. Super useful. Oh, you know, amazing uses, yeah. So, still on topic, but a little bit off topic. I'm going to give you a quiz about characters that have plant names. Oh. Okay.

Okay. So the first question. So not as intense or dark as. I'm not going to say it's not, there's no gruesomeness. We'll see. We'll let it unfold. She is the alter ego. of Pamela Lillian Isley,

a D.C. comic super villainous who made her first appearance in 1966. Poison Ivy. Must be, yeah, Poison Ivy. And so which Batman movie does Poison Ivy appear in? Oh. It was, I think it's Batman forever. No.

Is it? Batman and Robin. Yeah. Fourth one. It was one of the bad ones, basically. So bad. Batman and Robin, colon, too many villains. Batman and Robin colon nipples in the suit. That was Uma Thurman. It was the 1997 version.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was a princess of Agrabah in the 1992 Disney film. Jasmine. Yes. Okay, so for a bonus point, in 1993, the pop single for the soundtrack, A Whole New World, replaced Whitney Houston's, I Will Always Love You, in the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Who sang it? Who sang a whole new world?

Celine Dionne and Peebo Bryson. No. Peebo Bryson is right. Linda Rodstan. No. Oh. Wait, Peebo Bryson and... Regina Bell.

Really? Yes. Huh. Though, Beauty and the Beast was Peebo Bryson and Celine Dion. Ah. Her real name is Elizabeth Short, but reporters named her this when she was murdered in L.A. in 1947. Collins. Is it that Black Dahlia?

Yes. And one American crime fiction writer published the Neo-Nor novel, The Black Dahlia, in 1987. Oh. It wasn't Elmore. I'm sorry. Was it Dachshall Hammett? No. Was it Elmore Leonard?

No. It was James Elroy. Along with Blanche Devereaux, Dorothy Spornack, and Sophia Hachala. You telegraph these answers so much. Like, as soon as you start talking, we already know what the answer is. I know. I want you to fight. I have, like, a bonus question.

And this is also for our listeners. I want them to fill out of winners, too, where I'll do a good. Good job. Anyway, so, and Sophia Petrello. This character appeared on a hit NBC show that aired between 1985 and 1992. Oh, I don't know who lasted. Who is Rose Nyland? Yes.

Oh. And what city was she from? What town? St. Olaf. Do you know what state? Minnesota. Yes. Look at you.

Golden Girls expert, Colin Felton. I'm proud? I know. It was just in my brain. And I was like, wow. And of course, of course, the fantastic Betty White. Okay, this is the titular character played by Warwick Davis in the 1988 Ron Howard film. Willow.

For a bonus point, this movie was directed by Ron Howard, but what sci-fi fantasy creator co-wrote and produced it. Oh. Oh, it was Lucas, wasn't it? Yeah, George Lucas. He is the star of the Great Mouse Detective. Karen. Basil. Yes.

Oh, nice. So he, and he was named after an actor who was famous for playing Sherlock Holmes. Basil Rathbone? Rathbone. Okay, last question. This flower was named after a Greek mythological character who fell in love with his own reflection. Narcissus. Yes.

But what was the name of the talkative Mountain Niff who also fell in love with him? Ariadne? No, no. Mountain, yes, it fell in love with him. Calliope. I'll give you a hint. Yeah. She could only repeat the love with him.

last words out of mini oh echo yes it's a good story there you go yeah that's going all right well i want to go back to some poison talk this is the the plants are weird episode yeah this is the plants will kill you episode but i do want to talk about a particular mushroom and when you think of the the kind of quintessential wild mushroom from storybooks and stuff how would you describe it What do you picture? Like white stock, the red cap, with a little white dots all over it. Exactly. So that mushroom has a lot of names.

There's Fly Amanita and Fly Agaric, basically. Same family, but that is what we believe as kind of the most mushroom out of all mushrooms, the toadstool. The original kind of Super Mario mushroom. These are poisonous. And they can be deadly. And there are some biological active agents, a lot. of them and some of them are psychoactive and some of them are neurotoxins. And I think scientists have

stated that a fatal dose is about 15 caps. Oh, okay. It's going to get a lot of them. You can get a whole salad before you back. Yeah, yeah. What's interesting about this mushroom is it is very popular among reindeer's. Okay. Rainiers go nuts for these mushrooms. And let me, let me kind of a backtrack a little bit. They're the Sammy people. S-A-M-I and they're indigenous people from the very, very northern parts of, Lapland, right? Yep, Laplands, Sweden, Norway, Finland, very, very cold. The Sami traditions or the lap traditions and beliefs are based on a lot of kind of a shamanistic spirituality. And they also have a great working relationship with Rangers that are also indigenous to those parts of the land.

Very, very hardy animals and very cute. And they're used for dragging carriages, for writing, for everything. delivering presents. Delivering presents, yes, having lit up noses. Way, way, way, way, way back. There was a tradition where a lot of people noticed that the native reindeer's go bonkers over these mushrooms. Oh.

These bright red, white spotted mushrooms. And these are the fly agaric mushrooms. And the dears even go hunting for them through the snow. Like they can spot and they can snow. Yeah, kind of like pigs and truffles. It's like reindeer's and. like reindeer's in these red, bright red mushrooms. So the reindeer are drug addicts?

Yes. They, okay. Do they think they can fly? Is that where it all comes from? That's where the red nose comes from. Oh, yeah. These are the reindeer games we've heard so much. Oh, that Rudolph was not cool enough to join.

Right, right, right, yeah, yeah. Well, and because of the active and the drug compounds in these mushrooms, the reindeer's are believed to basically get high when they eat them. Now, there isn't concrete evidence supporting if the chemical compounds and the mushroom actually affect them. But, you know, there have been reports that they prance a lot more. Right. They really like Doritos. Or it's like catnip.

I mean, it's like they're attracted to it for some reason. There's something pleasurable. Could be the odor. Could be. We don't know. What can be scientifically proven is that the reindeer urine has drug-like chemical properties. So back in the day. I think I see where this is going on.

People drank reindeer pee to get high. And they do. They go into a trans. They have a trip. Wow. And perhaps even a vision. And it kind of coincides with their shaman beliefs, too. And so they would have tripping parties and would have people and reindeer's trip together.

Drinking reindeer pee. Yeah. Drinking reindeer pee. And there are also reports that, you know, after humans, who ingest a reindeer urine or affected reindeer urine their urine still has drug compounds too and the reindeer's would then

sniff that out and eat the snow where people pee It's a beautiful It's a circle sun The reindeer eat the mushrooms And then we drink their pee And then we pee on the ground And the reindeer eat our pee

The circle of life It's beautiful In its own way So now, if you were to eat the mushrooms, they would kill you. But so if you want to eat the mushrooms, just filter it through a reindeer first. Yes, it's the reindeer from Britta. That's my takeaway. The reindeer is a drug britta.

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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. Well, we've talked a lot about plants that are injurious to animals or people or other living things. I want to talk a little bit about plants that are kind of devious toward other plants. Sneaky plants. Yeah, sneaky plants. So you guys, whether you've heard this term or not, you've definitely seen this.

Have you guys heard of Kogan grass, C-O-G-O-N? No. So I didn't know it by this name either, but it's a very tall, super hardy grass. reedy type grass. And it's native to Southeast Asia all over there. It's also known as Japanese blood grass. That is not a pretty name. That hints a little bit at some of its properties that it has. So these are extremely tough blades of grass on the Kogan grass, and they are lined with tiny, tiny little super sharp silica crystals along the edge, like a saw blade almost. And it is a defense mechanism. And if it can cut you,

It can draw blood. It can draw blood. As I say, I'll catch you, man. I'll do it. These blades, they can, you know, routinely two, three, four feet tall, the grass, up to 10 feet tall. And the roots go super, super, super deep. So one of the things that it does is crowd out other plants. Basically, suck all the real estate away from them.

But here's the devious thing that it does is this grass loves fire. And one of the ways that it spreads is through fire. So it's highly flammable. but it is very hardy. So a blaze can come through and sweep out a field of cogan grass because it's so far below the ground and so hardy, it'll regrow

even stronger than before, but now it has no more competition because the fire has wiped out all of the other flowers and grasses in the area and weeds and it's particularly, you know, I mean, you can't really ascribe intentionality to a plant,

but the behavior sure seems... I don't know. Like it's an arsonist or something? Some of the plants that we've heard about in this episode, I think they're thinking about ways to. So it spreads seeds by wind primarily. It can also attach to animals. And so when it has a fire, dude, this plant is our A-Hole of the Wee. It is our Thomas Edison. So there are some varieties of this. Right. So it'll spread through wind and then the fire obviously will spread the

seeds even further and it can take over. And so botanists and they'll talk about it as if it's luring fire, as if it's almost grows into a field expecting fire to come and kind of clear out its path and make its way easier for other plants. It's going to take over the world. So now surely, you would think we would be crazy to plant this grass on purpose, right? I mean, it just sounds like an awful, awful thing. But that's precisely what the U.S. government did in the 40s and 50s. So, you know, after you guys remember after the dust bowl, one of the major causes of the

dust bowl was poor irrigation and poor planting, so there was nothing to hold the soil in. So if winds would come along, they'd blow all the soil away. So the government and farmers well, you know, really trying to fight soil. erosion in the southwestern United States and also really provide a lot of land that livestock could graze on. So they got the great idea of like, well, this is a really fast growing hardy grass. The roots are so deep, it won't erode. But the problem is, is that, so a lot of planted along freeways or in government, you know, sort of administered areas for farming, it would take over and it comes in. And here's the other thing. So it was, it was planted to be

something that livestock could graze on. But it actually will cut up capital. tongues and noses. Like they, it's so. Oh, so it's like Captain Crunch. It's, yes. Crunch mouth. Crunch face. And it has almost, you know,

no nutritional value compared to a lot of other tall grasses that cattle do actually like to graze on and it doesn't cut up their mouths. So it's, again, like a lot of government decisions in hindsight, it seems really short-sighted. But it is extremely well embedded now in the U.S. It's everywhere. It's everywhere. Even though it's not indigenous here, it's not uncommon to

see huge fields of it on fire even when it's green and it'll just come back even stronger after that like a boss fight in a video game well it's like oh fire and it comes out stronger exactly are people trying to are scientists trying to get rid of it they're definitely they're not planting it anymore oh good cogan grass or razor grass and it's related it's related to a lot of other grasses i mean like kentucky bluegrass is actually related to this type of very tough rigid grass, yeah. Kogan grass, a whole of, it was also blood grass, he said.

Japanese blood grass. It's like a witch's garden. Man, corpse flowered blood grass. Yeah, I'm a little macabre today with my plants. A little bit. All right. Okay, well, that's enough crazy plants talk. It's time for our final quiz segment.

And I came up with this segment, and I have a couple lead-in questions first. Tim Westwood, very famous U.K. DJ, was the host of this show for the UK version, and rappers Fat Joe and Lil John were hosts of this show for the European version. In America, the host of this show is Exhibit. What show is this? It is, of course, Pimp My Ride. Pimp My Ride. Very ridiculous and over the top show, Pimp My Ride. And, you know, the premise for people who've missed this popular phenomenon, it is.

It is a great guilty pleasure. Young people with their own beat-up cars would get the VIP treatment and exhibit or Tim Westwood or Fat Joe would show up at their house, be like, we're going to pimp your ride. We're going to trick it up and be all crazy. And the thing is, it's not just like, oh, I'll replace your windshield or I'll replace your fender or whatever it is, right? Basically, a lot of these are customized to the extreme. They're just ridiculous.

It is ridiculous. Like, someone would, a teenager would be really into surfing. So they're like, we're going to build you like a washer and dryer unit in the back for all your wet suits or whatever. And these are some, I just made that up. But these are. I sounded familiar. I was reading through the episode list. So there's a RAV-4 that got rear-ended so badly.

It blew out the window and crushed the rear door. The owner of the car was like, oh, man, I'm never going to get chicks with this ride. And so, like, we're going to trick it out to be a giant chick magnet. And they painted the whole car like this sexy silver chrome color and has red leather interior. But the crazy thing is, other than a built-in drive-in movie theater that he can pop open in his trunk, they also built him a chocolate fondue fountain. in his car nice

don't most people end up just selling these cars like as soon as the show is over I would yeah exactly it's like just sell it to somebody you get some money it's funny because how long is that fondue fountain in your car going to really last I've been driving forever trying to find a place there's diesel and fondue

I was trying to find post-mortem stories of these cars and I couldn't find a lot of verified ones but there was a report from a German car magazine who went to West Coast Customs at that time they did most of the customs for Pimp My Ride.

They found out, and this is from word of mouth, so we don't know if it's true or not, that all of this stuff is fake. What? So all of the custom stuff is really just for TV and all the functional units are only for TV. So we don't know if this chocolate found you, he actually drove away with it, and it still works.

That is not confirmed, but that is a report that they published in this German magazine. I feel kind of sad now. to say. Oh, I see. So basically, they fake the car and then they say, we're going to do all these things, and they just sort of film it, you know, and then they do give them a car with all those things, but it's not necessarily what you see on TV. Exactly. Okay, that makes sense to me. That makes sense. Just the rigors of television production and just how hard it is to... I'll give them a pass on that one. I'm sure maybe driving around with a hot chocolate fondue might not be,

you know, the safest thing to do. So, that is kind of the lead-in to my quiz, and I'm going to call this quiz. Whose ride is it anyways? Ah. Okay. So in throughout history, through literature, movies, TV, songs, or whatnot, there are a lot of famous modes of transportation, so famous that they even have their own proper names. I like it. So I'm going to read out the famous writer or character or a person, and you have to name me their famous ride. The name of their famous ride. So for example, if I said Han Solo, you would say, Millennium Falcon. The Batmobile. I thought everybody was going to chime in.

I was like, give me a moment. Is it a Pop-Mobile? It's the Enterprise, right? That's the right one. And here we go. Doctor Who? Dana. The Tardis.

Tardis. And what does Tartis stand for? Time and relative dimension in space. Very good. Yes. Bo and Luke Duke. Chris. Oh, the generally.

The general league. Oh, man. I was like, blanked out for a second there, I know, generally. Captain Ahab. Oh, I'm just going to say the Nautilus, that's not right. Is that a Piquad? Correct. There we go.

Who was Captain of the Nautilus? It was Captain Nemo. Captain Nemo, correct. Gandalf the White. At first I was like, he wrote a broom, right? Well, he didn't ride Bill the Pony, right? That wasn't... Gandalf the white.

Beautiful white horse to go with... Pagosus. Shadow facts. Shadow facts. That's in there somewhere. Who was the, I guess, the horse god of all horses. Commander William Adama. The Battlestar Galactica.

Correct. In both incarnations. Oh, yeah. Teenage mutant Ninja Turtles. the pizza van It's Oh yeah It's the

Splinter It is a van Four turtles riding a rack It is a van They had a van The party wagon The party wagon

Yeah there was a period There were every team Was driving a van Yeah It was a mystery machine It was a more innocent time Before vans were construed It's just creepy

Actually one of the other Pimp My Ride episode that really stood out was a van, a very beat-up van that this kid had, and I think it belonged to his grandmother, and she bought it in Vegas. So somehow that was the theme of the customization for this van. It's like spray-painted silver, and it had a baby grand piano in the back, in the van, along with a, like, a fold-out roulette wheel. so it's like you can relive your

rat pack days and I was like this is so weird and a chandelier I'm sure that's a finely calibrated roulette wheel as well in the back of a band and a piano in the back of the head it's like what are you going to do drive around he has a casino all right

Michael Knight Colin Kit yes stands for what Knight Industries 2000 very good whoa huh that's a terrible not to be confused with the evil

one which was car K-A-R-R which was the Knight Automated Roving Robot which was the evil kit I loved Knight Rider I loved that show You can tell So that's one point for answering and minus one point

For being a no-it-all No we encouraged that I did know I didn't know Kit was with two T's and what kind of car was Kit He was he Look at me He was a loving, sensitive Pontiac Transam

Yes heavily modified heavily modified Ponnier Trans Am and lastly Paul Revere Oh What was his horse

Justice Is it in the rhyme Is it in the Paul Revere rhyme Like Is it in the Beastie Boars about No that was the horse's name And I don't know I don't remember

What was his So actually Technically it wasn't his horse And there was crazy Historical documents Note that it never said he rode on a horse not he didn't

write on his own horse I think there were even documentation say that he even didn't have a horse he was just on a horse so the horse's name is believed to be Brown Beauty

Brown Beauty was the name of the horse he was on his was in the shop for pimp my horse I know they were putting on some disco balls

remember he was a silver smith so he probably could have pimped his horse better than anybody else actually he also I read his little bio, Paul Revere

was also worked as a dentist Oh, you know, in those In those days You didn't have to get board certified For any of this stuff Yeah, you could be five different jobs I love though it was It was like surveyor slash surgeon

You know yeah Silversmith slash dentist Right You know quite frankly those two jobs Probably had a lot to do with each other I guess you're right with the billings and whatnot He prescribes a lot of silver flores It's like, no, two, it's going to need to come out.

You're a silver one. Let me just call in my silversmith specialist, walks in the door, walks back out of the door. So there we go. Can put he-man battle cat in this? Throw me one. That was good. I like that. I like the famous rides.

Famous rides. Who's right is it anyway? Nice. And we have some recent sad news, sad, sad, sad news. Our, I guess, childhood hero, Donald J. Sobel, creator and writer of Encyclopedia Brown passed away recently July 11th. Those were such good books. I know.

That was my first foray into mysteries, like mystery literature. I mean, granted, they're for little kids, but still. But it was, I mean... They stand up. They're still pretty good. For so many of us, it was our first exposure to, like, lateral thinking, logic puzzles and, you know, just how intriguing a mystery story could be. And the pleasures of solving one, the pleasures of having that aha moment.

when you outsmart the story and look to see and you were correct, and I mean, yeah. And they didn't, they didn't pander to kids. I mean, they were written for children, but they, I always felt like, oh, I felt such a grown-up reading these things. I felt so sophisticated. Sometimes I just flipped to the back and read the solution. Cheater. Of course.

They also, of course, introduced me as a kid, even though I didn't know the name for it, to the concept of the Chekhov's gun, where something prominent that shows up in the first couple paragraphs of an encyclopedia Brown story. You learn pretty quickly. Yeah. All right. He mentioned that for a. reason. I better pay attention.

It's a little while to notice that about it. Oh, it was so great. Of course, when we learned that Donald J. Selwell had passed away at the ripe old age of 87. 87. We were all sad to hear about that. And in tribute, to Donald J. Sobel, in good job, brain fashion, we are sending him off with this, which a little something we like to call, the case of encyclopedia chew and the scrumped castorios.

One bright morning in the pleasant all-American town of Berkeley, California, podcast host and girl detective Karen Shue awoke, ready for breakfast. Gee whiz, I can't wait to eat a delicious bowl of my favorite cereal, castorios. They're made with only the finest secretions from the anal glands of beavers right here in good-all U.S. of A. But then, Karen made a terrible discovery. Jumping Jehoshaphat! My castorios are all gone! The crime of grand theft cereal has been committed in my pleasant all-American town. Karen soon spied three likely suspects and brought them in for questioning.

Oh, golly, Karen. I didn't take your castoreos. I never eat perfectly round food. I only have Montreal bagels. I didn't shanghai your cereal. I only eat cereal that's in the shape of little pieces of fruit, so I was having tricks. It wasn't me, Karen, I swore off of cereal ever since that incident where Captain Crunch gave me a terrible case of Crunchmouth. Willikers! I think you've given me enough to crack this case wide open. Who stole Karen's Castorios? Do you know? Hmm, at first, I thought it was that creepy narrator dude who follows me around.

But then I realized something. Tricks used to be in shapes of tiny fruits, but the ones on the market today are round. Dana, you stole my castorios. Oh, sucks. You got me, girl detective. And now you're going to anal beaver jail. Oh, no. Yay.

And scene. The good job brain players present. All right. And that is our show. Thank you guys for joining me and thank you guys the listeners for listening in hopefully you guys learned

all the plants that you need to avoid now as it turns out pretty much all of them don't go out and eat plants when and out have a reindeer sample it first yes and then drink it's beans invest in that reindeer filtration

and write in and tell us how it was yeah you can find our show on the Zoom Marketplace on iTunes on Stitcher and also on our website which is good jobbrain.com join us on Twitter in Facebook as well

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