Good Job, Brain! - 216: Happy Halloween! #3

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

We can have a whole debate about the most disliked Halloween candy, but Chris goes the extra mile of hate-researching his sugar nemesis: Necco Wafers. Get trapped in a mansion with Karen and the golden rules of detective murder mystery writing, and the origin behind "the butler did it." The story behind the first (and maybe only) photograph of a zombie and author Zora Neale Hurston's fascination with Haitian voodoo culture. And let's build a haunted house with science - amazing facts behind the most common spooky decor that's probably around you right now! Good Job, Brain is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. For advertising inquiries, please contact [e-mail]! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, bodacious bros, babes, and buds who bask in bizarre brilliance. This is Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. Today's show is episode 216. And of course, I'm your humble host, Karen. And we are your spunky, splatoon, sputtering, and spewing spoonfuls of spookiness. I'm Colin. And I am Dana.

And I'm Chris. Without further ado, let's jump into our first general trivia segment, pop quiz, hot shot. I here have a random Trivial Pursuit card from the 2016 genus edition of Trivial Pursuit and you guys have your barnyard buzzers. All right, let's answer some questions. Here we go. Blue Edge for Geography. Which country's flag features a cedar tree? Ooh.

Chris. Lebanon. Yeah. Correct. Only, that is literally, there is a song called Cedars of Lebanon, and that's why. Oh, wow. Yep, it says here for the Lebanese, the cedar symbolizes freedom and hope. Wow.

Good job. That is a slum dog question. That's how you get, yeah, that's how you get points. Next question, pop culture, pink wedge. What was the name of the symbol used to identify the singer, Prince? Oh, the name of the symbol. The symbol? has a new name.

I feel like this is probably like we're going to hear it and we're either going to be like, oh, yeah, or it's going to be some weird, funky prince thing. And we'll be like, okay, all right, of course. Or both. Do you guys think it's like an actual real human English word or is it some princified made up term? I don't know.

I don't know. I feel like I've read things and it was like an unpronounceable symbol. So we just call him the artist. The answer is love symbol number two. I feel like he switched back to being called Prince, so I don't feel like we should need to know this. I object. Yellow Edge for history,

which war did not take place in the 20th century? The Spanish-American War, the French-Algerian War, or World War II. Did not take place in the 20th century. I think that I believe that Spanish-American War was 19. century. Somebody guessed that. You are correct. Spanish-American War happened in 1898. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty close. All right. Purple Wedge. Which former New York Ranger Enforcer was once an intern at Vogue magazine? What a strange question. New York Ranger enforcer? Yes, is a hockey question. Okay. What's an enforcer? It may not

surprise you to hear. You sometimes have players who, among their special is being able to fight. If someone messes with your star player, you need someone who's going to go out there and kind of enforce the rules. And it's okay if they get thrown out of the game for throwing a punch or something. Oh, interesting.

And what was this? It was an enforcer who was... Intern at Vogue Magazine. This is very specific. Intern at Vogue Magazine, okay? If you can even name one New York Ranger. Any of them, any New York Ranger, you know. Go for it.

Mario Lemieux. I don't think he played for the Rangers. Well, then I guess that was a bad answer. The answer is Sean Avery. Okay. Okay. All right. Green Wedge, which living fossil is harvested by the millions each year so its blood can be used to test new medicines?

Wow. Okay, sorry. Living, you got a year, you got to start over again. Okay. Which, in quotes on the card, which living fossil? Living fossil. Is harvested by the millions each year so its blood can be used to test. Pest new medicines.

Not a plot to a sci-fi horror movie. Colin. I always hear the term living fossil used with horseshoe crab. So I'm going to say horseshoe crab, but I don't know. It is horseshoe crab. It says it's baby blue blood binds with any bacterial contamination. Oh. Wow.

I need a super power. Follow up on that. Last question on card. Orange Wedge for Sports and Leisure. Forgive my pronunciation, Pam Postima, P-O-S-T-E-M-A, Pam, last name, Postima, became the first woman to assume which role in Major League Baseball? Colin. I will guess umpire.

You are correct. And here I have a bonus question. Our Patreon listener question from our Purple Patreon Pledgers. This is from Brett Frazier from Anchorage, Alaska. Oh. He says that he's a longtime fan. listening since 2012 and so he's got a question about Alaska for us says Alaska is the only state with territory above the Arctic Circle. What is the significance of the Arctic Circle as in like

what defines the Arctic Circle? We hear about it all the time but what exactly counts as the Arctic Circle. It's related to the position of the Sun. Yes. Maybe. I don't know. Is it has something to do with bears? Oh, I wish. I'm asking because it doesn't Arctic mean bear or something like Antarctica means no bears? Am I?

I mean, is it the spot on the globe where the sun is always visible? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, you got it. Oh, is that it? The line itself denotes the southernmost point, Brett says, on the earth surface where there is at least a full 24 hours of sunlight on the summer solstice and then 24 hours of darkness on the winter solstice. So everything above the arctic circle also has that. But that's the circle denotes like the southernmost. Where the 24 hour. Yeah, where it begins. Brett says there's a big footnote when he says 24 hours of sunlight specifically means that the sun remains entirely above the horizon for

24 hours. Okay. That was my next question. Yeah. So not like it dips. Is it any part or, okay. And then there's some light. It's like it has to be completely above the horizon, which to me is nuts. Like I can't even imagine. They say it messes with you or they say it can mess with you. All right. Well, thank you, Brent, for your Alaska trivia. Yeah.

Guys, it's Halloween season. Time for spookiness. Time for sneakiness. Tricks to go with all that creepiness candy. So everybody grab your jacko lantern bucket. Let's go trick-or-treating on today's holiday. Halloween episode. Okay, so I have a story for you all.

I'm in a book club, and we read books about creativity by various famous artists. And over the summer, we read Zorro-N-Hurston's autobiography. It's called Dust Tracks on a Road. Do you guys know who Zora Nudel-Hurston is? Yeah, yeah, Harlem Renaissance. Yeah, she's an author. She's big in the Harlem Renaissance, which was a period in America between the 1920s and 30s, where there was this explosion of black creativity in New York.

It included artists like Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith. So she was part of this, and her most famous novels called Their Eyes Were Watching God. And I read that in college. I liked it a lot. So she's mostly known for fiction writing, but she's also a big deal in the anthropology world. Her mentor was Franz Boas, who's called the father of American. African anthropology. O'O'Neill-Hurston's focus was black people in the American South in the Caribbean.

She recorded folklore and music. You could hear all these things on the Library of Congress's website. Anyway, so reading her book, and there's a passage in it that really caught my attention. And it goes, of my research in the British West Indies in Haiti, my greatest thrill was coming face to face with a zombie and photographing her. This act had never happened before in the history of man. I mean, taking of the picture. I said all that I know on the subject in my book, Tell My Horse, which has also been published also in England under the title Voodoo Gods.

I've spoken over air on We the People on the subject, and the matter has been so publicized that I will not go into details here. But it was a tremendous thrill, though, utterly Bacob. And I was like, what? What are you talking about? You can't leave me hanging. You're the first person to take a picture of a real zombie, but you're tired of talking about it. So whatever. So you're just going to move on.

And I was like, I must look this up. But I did not because I needed to keep reading the rest of the book before Book Club meeting. And since I read that, I would think about it in the car while grocery shopping. Like, I really need to look that up. Like Zora and No Hurston was the first person to take a photo of a real zombie. What does this mean? So I did look it up. And I will tell you about it.

Here we go. Zora Neal Hurston, the first person to photograph a real zombie, the concept of a zombie comes from Haitian folklore. There's a dead body. Yeah, it's reanimated through voodoo or magic and becomes like a mindless slave. It was enthralled to the person who brought them back and they never get tired. And that's super spooky kind of in and of itself, like losing your free will or being a dead person coming back to life.

In 1936, Zora Nealhorsten went to Haiti to do anthropological research. search. And she spent quite a while documenting voodoo ceremonies, songs, medicines. She was really, really talented at integrating herself into local culture. She would, like, know all the facts. She'd know all the songs. A great anthropologist. That's right. She was a big nerd. And that's why, you know, she got where she was good. She's really good at anthropology. So she was able to befriend practitioners of voodoo. And she really got to know them and understand about their potions. And basically what she found out was this is how zombies are made. Somebody's given a potion and it kind of wipes their personality. It makes them easy to control. It makes them

look like they're dead. And then when they come back, their minds have kind of been wiped and their personality's gone and now they'll do whatever. So she was taken to meet this woman named Felicia Felix Mentor. And all of the people in her town knew that this was a zombie. This woman had been declared dead in 1907, so almost 30 years before she had been declared dead. There was a funeral for her, her husband, family friends. Everybody was like, she's dead. The Haitian government was like, this woman is dead. But then decades later, she reappeared on a road outside of the family farm.

Like her brother and her husband were like, yeah, this is Felicia. This is her. But she didn't have a memory anymore, and she was kind of out of it. So they put her in a hospital. and that's where she was living when Zora Nellerson came to visit her. And this is how she described meeting this zombie. The sight was dreadful, that blank face with the dead eyes, the eyelids were white all around the eyes as they had been burned with acid.

There was nothing you could say to her or get from her except by looking at her. And the site of this wreckage was too much to endure for long. So she took some pictures of her. One of them was published in Life magazine. And so basically the theory was this. In Haiti, they don't embalm people and they don't bury them in the ground. They put them in like a mausoleum. So sometimes kind of a bad foodie priest would poison someone and make it seem like they were dead.

And then they bury them or like put them in the mausoleum. Then they come get them at night and revive them and then take them to be slaves on a plantation. And apparently that happened to people. They were likeing zombies and they would have their memories all gone. That was her theory. That's, that's creepier to me than like a supernatural zombie, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, you know. Zora and Neil Hurston wanted to find out what the potions were to make a zombie, like, really documented.

But that summer, she started getting stomach issues and then she was like, I think I'll stop looking into this. So she's just in case. Yeah. So nobody knows how zombie is made or nobody has written it down to like cleanse the palate because, my God, what a dark, It's a dark, spooky story to find out. I see why she didn't talk about it, but I think she should have. Anyway, here, I have a couple questions for you guys about zombies. And these are more modern-day zombies.

So Night of the Living Dead is considered the first modern zombie movie, but it doesn't actually call the reanimated cannibals zombies. What are they called in the Night of the Living Dead? What do they call them? Ooh, that's a good one. I don't know. I thought it is a monster name you know. yeah is it like ghouls yes ghouls oh oh okay okay where did the word zombie come from then

oh so that one the etymology is probably west african like they're different and it kind of means like god fetish undead like it it all kind of circles around but the art of doing it seems to be Haitian and then it spread from there night of the living dead is based on i am legend which is about what kinds of monsters? Ooh. Karen. Based on the Will Smith movie that has a dog in it, I think there are vampires. Yes.

Yeah. We're like weird, creepy vampires, not like, you know, continental European royalty vampires. Why did the fact that there was a dog mean that it had to be vampires? Oh, no. It was just, you know, my extra tidbit. That it happened to have a dog. I got you. Yeah, yeah.

Everything is filed under dog in Karen's memory. So I was like, okay, that movie with a dog, what's about vampires. Top index, right. Yeah. In the 2009 movie, Zombie Land, which animal-based disease causes the zombie apocalypse? And this is like a very 90s, 2000-ish, seening disease, Chris. Mad cow disease. Totally 90s.

Remember when everybody was going to get mad cow disease and we were all going to die? It was fun times. All right. Last question. In the zombie book World War Z, who are the Lamos, which is an acronym spelled L-A-M-O-E? Oh. L-A-M-A-M-O-E. What a L-A-M-O-E.

Is it the slow zombies? Good guess. It's the last men on Earth. So it's the people who are like intense preppers who think that they're the last people, last of humanity. I was trying to figure out what the A could be in last minute, but it's not. It's actually LA. La.

Yeah. That's good. That's great. Good job, y'all. Well, I have a bit of, I have a pallet cleanser from all of this sort of zombie nastiness. Let's talk about, well, okay, so here's the thing. On good job, brain, we really enjoy discussing things that we love. And I feel like we're really missing negativity on this show.

And we really don't talk enough, we don't do enough segments about things that we actively dislike or hate. Yeah. We've talked a lot about Halloween candies and treats and things like that. I just kind of got thinking about like, what was like the worst part of Halloween? And, you know, the worst part about Halloween as a kid

when you're going out trick-or-treating was, you know, going up to a house, you know, you're putting in the work, you're going up to a stranger's house, you're going through the whole ring in the doorbell, you know, having to smile and everything like that and just kind of getting stunked. You know, like, again, I'm putting in a lot of effort here. I'm trying to get a pillowcase full of candy.

This stuff has to last me until, like, at least Christmas morning, you know, you know, and it's like you get like an apple. Now, I don't think you get apples anymore, you know what I mean? Because of the safety thing, but in the 80s, 90s, like, so much you get an apples. A box of raisins. The box of raisins. The box of raisins.

What are you trying to do? It's like, what, what are you trying to do for my health that I have a metric ton of candy in my pillowcase right now and you're going to put in the one box of raisins and that's that's going to that's going to slim me down and it's not happening and it's like I have plenty my parents would mean raisins whenever I want this you know did you miss the memo about what this was um everybody has their favorite candy you know honestly very few people are like they go out on Halloween if you're a five year old kid and you hold out the hold out the sack and somebody tosses in some good and plenty and you're like

Oh, yeah. I was hoping for good and plenty. It's got what kids love. It's got that bitter taste and it looks like a Tylenol. That's what I'm looking for. To me, I think the worst, I'm sorry. I know there's many people out there who love this and are very offended. Was the quintessential bad Halloween candy that was NECO wafer's.

That, to me, was the no prize. That's like, it's like anti-candy. It's just like having some tongue seriously. Why don't you just give me a piece of chalk? Why don't you just do that? It's like a sort of a little pounded flat, like round wafer of, like sugar and some sort of binder to sort of pull the sugar together. But they're not even that sweet. Like it's not even just like eating sugar.

It's like it's actually a very mild kind of sweetness. So it is, Colin said chalk. Tums. Yeah. But less flavorful than Tums, I would say. Tums is a better treat than a NECO wafer to me. Yes. Yes. And you get this and you still have to grit your teeth and say thank you. And so and by the way, I have data. If you go to candy store.com, they pull together customer surveys and other sort of data. And this is updated for 2021, you know, people's, the worst Halloween candies. Actually, actually, why don't everybody guess?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. is definitely on the list. All right. I will defend this one first, and I'll put myself out there and say, I happen to like this one, but I know that candy corn is very unpopular. So I'll say candy corn might be up there. Candy corn. Ding, number one answer.

Number one. Number one. 20-21, candy corn most hated Halloween can't. Anybody else want to guess one? Good and Plenty is on there. Neckleafers are on there. Sweet tarts are not on there. Oh, no, excuse me.

Well, actually, smarties are on there. Oh, that's... They're not the same. They're not the same, but they're similar. Yeah. I'll tell you. Black licorice, which we certainly have a history with here on Good Job Brain. Good and plenty. Tutsi rolls. Tutsi rolls not considered great Halloween candy. Mary Jane's. I love Mary Jane. I'll tell you it is molasses taffy and inside is a strip of peanut butter. Oh, I thought I called those something else. Peanut Butter Kisses. Did you call them peanut butter kisses? Because those are on there too. And that's the little chew. we molasses candies with peanut butter inside. People don't like them.

Those little wax bottles of so, quote unquote, soda. Really? I like, they're so neat looking. And circus peanuts. Circus peanuts is on there as well. Oh, yeah, Circus peanuts. I like circus peanuts. The three best for 2021 are Reese's peanut butter cups. Okay.

Oh, yeah, for sure. And then M&Ms and Skittles are the two and three. But Neko Wafers fans, they're out there. I know they're out there. They've actually had a tough time recently because actually, so it was right after we went on hiatus in the beginning of summer 2018. Neco, the company, filed for bankruptcy.

Oh, no. And was bought out and then shut down by a venture capital firm. And then people at that moment started panic buying NECO wafer. And sales of NECO wafers increased, probably for the first time in decades, temporarily. They're back now. You don't

have to panic by them anymore because they came back. Safe to buy NECO wafers again. Stop piling them. Here's the thing. So I decided well, I hate them, but let's, you know, let's really look into the history of NECO Wafers and see if there's something interesting there that can at least make me appreciate them, you know, for what they are. Hate research. Maybe I'll fall in love.

Let's find out. Let's find out. So, in 1847, 1847, Boston, Massachusetts, a recent immigrant from England named Oliver Chase, he was 26 years old, and he created a new invention, and it was called Lousinge cutting machine. Oh. Yeah, here's a little buzz in, a single question quiz for you guys. To what originally did the word

lozange refer to? Oh. It does not mean like a cough drop. Like what would be originally, where did the lozinsge come from? Colin? I know lozange as like from the world of art is like it describes like a shape of something.

Like a very kind of, you know, often, you know, sort of. Yes. A lozinge originally is a geometric shape. The diamonds that are on playing cards are lozenges. A traditional diamond kind of shape, but it's a skinny rhombus. And that was originally was a lozange. And so how did that get applied to, you know, cough drops or throat medicine? Yeah.

Well, cough drops themselves are actually extremely old. Apparently the Egyptians were making cough drops out of honey and citrus and herbs and spices and whatever they had. In 1,000 BC, by the 1520s, you had the word lozange, or its equivalent in various languages, meaning a, flat diamond-shaped tablet that you would dissolve in your mouth. The original ones were diamond-shaped, like diamonds on playing cards, and they were flat. They were sure. Yeah, stabby. They were.

And you can still go out and get candies in this traditional shape today, most notably in the Nordic countries where they eat salty licorice. Because you can go get those, like a tin of them. You open it up, and they're all diamond-shaped, like diamonds on playing cards, just little flat diamonds. So back to Oliver Chase and his laws. cutting machine, which actually made by this point, he was making circular lozenges. But he worked at a pharmacy, and he would make throat lozenges, and he was hand-cutting them. So very much in keeping with the spirit of the times, it was 1847, it was America.

He was like, let's build a machine and automate this process. So just imagine like a pasta roller with the two, you know, cylindrical sort of rollers squishing it. But there's like circular cutouts on the cylinders. So when you roll it through, it punches out circles. And so you have to stand there and crank it, but it cuts down. on a ton of the work, and it produces these perfect little machine-made circles. So he starts out by using these for medicine, but very soon he also just starts producing just

candy. You know, originally, just a mixture of sugar and cornstarts, just enough cornstarch to hold that sugar together, and release them under the name of Hub Wafers. Now, does anybody want to take a guess at why they were called Hub Wafers? That was the original trade name. H-U-B. Why do they call them that? Oh, H-U-CAP.

Yeah. So yes, but not for the reasons that you're thinking, because hub was a nickname at that time for the city of Boston, which was sort of considered the hub of the universe, the hub of the solar system. Yeah, like where everything was happening. So hub wafers were a sensation. They were cheap. They were cheap, cheap, cheap candy. They were rugged. They were portable. You know, kids could carry around a tube of them. I mean, they sold them in the same tube that you see today. It's sort of the wax paper to surround. them. But additionally, at the time they had this very elegant, fancy, almost futuristic look to them. You know what I mean? Because they were these perfectly round machined little discs. And so there were ads at that time suggesting that, like, you know, fancy ladies set out a tray of them for tea time. And because they weren't overly sweet, that it was the sort of the perfect meal finisher sort of a thing. Or a kid would carry them around. So Oliver Chase's lodgents cutter is generally considered to be the first American candy machine and the launch of the modern American candy industry. Prior to this, you know, candy was hand-pulled labor-intensive, like artisanal, like boiling a bunch of sugar in a big caldron. And this machine

industrialized candy. And it was, and it sort of was the spark of the idea of like, oh, how do we do this? And very, very quickly, a lot of other companies in Boston spring up making candies, you know, in factories with innovative, you know, machine. Jumping ahead quickly, By the time we hit in 1950, there were nearly 150 candy makers in the Boston Cambridge area. Wow. That's tons. And it was certainly, maybe it was not the hub of the solar system, but it was absolutely had become the hub of the candy world. There was a street in Cambridge that was known, you know, historically known as a confectioner's row.

Because just all up and down this street was just everything was a candy maker. There is one left today. Wow. No. That's so sad. confectioner that is still on confectioner's row is the junior mints factor where all the junior mints are made uh okay so oliver chase he's printing out these these lozenges oh what's up can i ask remember we talked about the great molasses flood yes yes is that related to this no apparently not and i did look at this

because i'm like oh there must have been the molasses flood no because the molasses flood was from a distillery they were distilling the molasses into alki hall yeah um yeah yeah yeah so apparently I mean, it may be related in some way, but I mean, you know, in the sense that Boston was a major, you know, city for manufacturing food products. But, yeah. So 1866, 1866, a couple of, a couple of decades after the invention of the lozange cutter, Oliver's brother, Daniel, invents another machine. And this machine can use vegetable dye to print words onto these big flat lozenges, which lead to the invention of conversation hearts, sweethearts. Yes, the hearts. Now, of course, and of course those taste pretty much just like Neko Wafers.

I don't get too deep into this because we're veering off of Halloween and into Valentine's Day. But I did want to mention, like, originally these sweethearts, which they were printed on these sort of big, flat, not that big that would go in your mouth, but like pretty large flat lozenges. And the messages on, like today we have these little tiny hearts that can only fit to like kiss me, you know. Yeah, love you. Short little messages, right. Our QT. Text to me. in because it's like it is shorter than that you know like send nudes or i'm not really sure

what's on these things it's short very short two-word messages well guess what they had a lot more space in the 1800s because here's some of the more popular messages that they would print on these things here here's one how long shall i have to wait pray be considerate well imagine the whole you get the the throat loss is all on there here's another very popular one literally you get this candy and it's like please send a lock of your hair by return mail these are all creepy messages exactly and they're also yeah it is no we call it the police yeah it's the steng nudes of the 1800s it's like it's neck a way for sliding into your DMs but it's printed on a a big flat candy yeah so um so that's how that got started and so finally so this

so 1866 this happens it it's not until 1901 that Chase and Company merges with two other Boston area candy concerns to become the New England Confectionary Company, N-E-C-C-C-C-C-Co or NECO. NECO. NECO. NECO. New England Confectionary Company. Now, for a while, what's interesting is that they had hub wafers, and then they rebranded them to NECO wafers, but they kept both of them on the market. And they're like, they were in slightly different packaging.

Like, literally there's ads that are like, hub wafers. They're in wax paper. Neco wafers. or in a transparent paper, but it's the same thing. They all say nickel on them. I guess the hub wafers branding must have been very strong. Yeah, they didn't want to give it up.

Yeah, and old, so here we go. So in 19, in 1912, an ad, you might be wondering, like, what do these things taste like in 1912? In 1912 listed all of the flavors, saying that they were the, quote, good old-fashioned ones that every youngster likes. So kids listening to the show,

get ready for a who's who of all your favorite flavors of candy. We have, of course, clove, cinnamon, licorice, sassafras, lime, true, lemon, peppermint, wintergreen, and chocolate. The current flavors are clove. That's the purple one is clove. Yep. Really? Yes. Yep.

Cinnamon is white as cinnamon. Yep. Licarish, the black ones. The black negligence. licorice. Sassafras has been swapped out for orange, and then lemon, lime, and winter green is in there. And then also we have chocolate. The brown ones are ostensibly chocolate flavored.

They all taste the same to me, maybe because they're covered in the powder of the other ones, so they all just taste them. So as you might imagine, the hardiness of these things definitely led them to be used sometimes in the military as well. So apparently there's stories out there. that hub wafers were informally, you know, popular with Civil War soldiers. But in around, right around the turn of the century, right around 1900, the U.S. Armed Forces began officially issuing soldiers candy, both for like morale reasons and just like, you know,

get them some more calories. Right. And they often picked NECO wafers. And in World War II, Neko Wafers were in soldier rations. You can ship them around the world. They have a lengthy shelf life. Heat doesn't do anything to them. They're not food.

Cole doesn't do anything like nothing happens. Of course, the soldiers all eat Neko Wafers for like five years and they come back home and they keep eating Neko Wafers, so keeping the popularity going. It is said that in the 1930s, Admiral Richard E. Bird, who was famous for exploring the Antarctic, took 2.5 tons of Neko Wafers on a two-year expedition to the South Pole. One pound of NECO wafers per week per man in the South Pole. A pound of one. tons one pound a week and they're still there today as far as I know so what's weird is so again

I keep referring back to the fact that there are neko wafer fans out there and in 2009 you know again after like obviously declining sales from the heights of when neko wafer is like very popular yeah you mean as civil war soldiers died out you mean they were thinking neko basically had a new Coke moment in 2009 because they were like, oh, you know what, let's, let's, let's market neck of wafers as a more health conscious candy. Let's swap out all the artificial colors and flavors and everything is going to be all natural. They had to eliminate the lime because they couldn't come up with a good natural sort of green color. And people hated, I mean, the people who still like the original, oh my God, what did you do? And I mean, they very quickly,

like within a year or two, had to switch it all back to, okay, all the artificial. official stuff is back in. We're sorry. So the sad thing here is that when it was shut down in 2018, NECO was the oldest continually run candy factory in the country. They had moved, but it would, they'd run continuously.

It was certainly the oldest continually produced, mass-produced candy in its original form. It never changed its form. It's since 1847 and they never stopped making it until 2018. And it's kind of hard to pin this down, but people have said, like neco wafers to that point where the oldest continually produced product, like mass-produced product of any kind that never changed ever in America.

The old neco factory, sort of the iconic neco factory that had their water tower was painted like a pack of neco-wafers. It's no longer the case. But they're now home to a biotech firm because the biotech firms are kind of what replaced a lot of the candy making companies involved. Austin, also in the big biotech city. And they had to spend $175 million converting the facility because they'd just scrape decades of sugar off of the way of course.

Wow. I guess they decided that was the good deal. It was worth it. It was worth it doing it. Yep. It must have gotten a good deal on the factory. So the company, NECO, is now gone. But the Spangler Candy Company owns the brand and reintroduced NECO waivers in 2020.

There's no, no need to panic by NECO waivers for now. your gross weird candies are still being made for the time being. Colin, actually, you said that you're, you like candy corn. I do. And that's number one on the most unpopular candy corn. I like candy corn too. You know what? One time I was in some shop and it was like a novelty food shop and they had big candy corn.

Have you seen this? Like it was, I mean, it was like, it looked like it probably weighed half a pound. It was probably like three inches across and the base, like the size of, small apple maybe and we bought one but i was like oh i like candy corn maybe i'll like this apple says candy corn i have to say it was like i took one bite it was like oh oh no i can't that's too much like it's the the flavor enjoyment did not scale up at all with the size i had a same thing too like i think while i was a kid they had um gummy stuff was really cool so there was like A big vanilla gummy, which is already, like, weird because vanilla is not really a good gummy flavor.

Rat for Halloween. I bought the vanilla gummy rat. No. Oh, my God. I like threw up afterwards. Too vanilla, too much gummy, too much volume, a real life-sized rat made out of the whole bad. But sorry. So to bring up candy corn, I always thought candy corn was like, oh, because it's like corn.

It's fall, orange, so it's Halloween. Turns out candy corn was just normal candy. And at that time in America, it was still an agricultural economy. And so many people worked in farms. And so in that time, the candy makers would make farm-related candies to appeal to the kids who live in the farm. Because that's where most of the kids were living. The candy corn used to be called chicken feed. It was too, you know, like a candy cigarette or whatever.

It's like fake, fake chicken feed. But like, ha-ha. That's more interesting. Yeah. That's more interesting to me. It's nothing to do with Halloween or Thanksgiving or I thought maybe like you could build up the corn to build all the girls to make a full corn. Yeah, that's what I thought. But no, it was just, it was like fake chicken, fun candy chicken feed.

You know, you feed your chickens. You can feed your kids. Yeah. You know, Colin, I know why the big, big. candy corn would not have appealed to me because what I like about candy corn is just biting it at exactly the layer, getting the perfect little nibbles. And you can't do it with a huge one. You just like, bite off a huge chunk of the yellow. I don't know, like, if there's a big candy that I would, that I would eat. It's like reminding you too much of how bad the thing you're eating is

like for you. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah. It's like, only a monster would eat all of this. and it's like, oh, no, I ate all of it. I must be a month's day. All right, right, right. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back. From the terrifying power of tornadoes to sizzling summer temperatures, Acqueweather Daily brings you the top trending weather-related story of the day every day of the week. You can learn a lot in just a few minutes.

Stories that will impact you, such as how a particular hurricane may affect your area, Or will that impending snow event bring more than just a winter wonderland? Occasionally, there are weather-related stories from the lighter side, like how a recent storm trapped tourists inside Agatha Christie's house, a setup perfect for a plot of one of her novels. And if there's a spectacular meteor shower or eclipse coming your way, we'll let you know if the sky in your area will be clear to check out the celestial display. You see, AccuWeather Daily is more than just weather.

It's AccuWeather. Listen and subscribe to Ackyweather Daily, wherever you get your podcasts. That's Ackyweather Daily, wherever you get your podcasts. You can spend less time staying in the know about all things gaming and get more time to actually play the games you love with the IGN Daily Update podcast. All you need is a few minutes to hear the latest from IGN on the world of video games, movies, and television with news, previews, and reviews. You'll hear everything from Comic-Con coverage to the huge Diablo for launch. So listen and subscribe to the IGN Daily Update, wherever you get your podcasts.

That's the IGN Daily Update, wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. It is our Halloween spooky show about mysteries and creepiness and spookiness. It makes me think of spooky manner. mystery, something tricky, something is a foot. Clue is one of my favorite movies and we talked about it on the show a lot starring Tim Curry and like that whole genre of like Agatha Christie. I want to introduce you guys to Mr. Willard Huntington Wright.

In the turn of the century, he was an art critic, a literary critic. He was the literary editor for the LA Times. He profiled Edgar Allan Poe. and in the 1920s he was kind of on down on hard times people thought he was sick but really he just had like a cocaine addiction and so he was yeah he was recovering from a drug addiction and he was confined to a bed for you know long periods of time and so he kept himself busy and that was during now what people call the golden age of detective fiction or the golden age of detective mystery he just consumed and read like hundreds of detective fiction and he was like hmm I am a writer too and it seems like I can write a good mystery as well and he did um he actually he he tried his hand at writing detective fiction um now because he was like a pretty established in serious guy in the more like elite art in literary circles writing

detective novels was kind of a downgrade, an embarrassment. And so he wrote detective stories under a pseudonym called SS Van Dine, which sounds like a Seinfeld, like a fake Seinfeld character. S.S. Van Dine. And he actually found quite a bit of success from his detective fiction career. He eventually made way more money with that than he did with his actual literary critic work. He also studied and wrote essays about crafting crime mysteries. He came up with 20 rules of detective fiction.

He drafted like, here are the 20 guidelines and rules that every good mystery detective fiction novel should abide. And I'm going to read some of them to you. There's another guy, too, in England who came up with like a 10 commandments to detective fiction kind of around the same time. But this is SS Van Dyne's 20. And someone, and I'm going to read some of them. And they're pretty good and they're pretty clever. So number one, the reader must have equal opportunity with a detective for solving the mystery, right? All the clues must be plainly stated and describe us readers have a chance to we're in it together.

We're also playing detective as well. Number two, no willful tricks or deceptions may be played on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Number three, there must be no love interest in this story. Oh, really?

Yeah, no love interest. He says, to introduce Amor is to clutter up a purely intellectual experience. Oh, okay. I see who he is. Okay. Number four, the detective himself, the main investigator, should never turn out to be the culprit. Okay. Okay.

Number seven, there's simply. must be a corpse in a detective novel and the deader the corpse the better that's what he said yep the not by deader does that mean more long dead or more gruesomely dead i'm guessing like more clearly dead like oh no he's like lying on the ground with his eyes closed he must be dead but like we're versus like oh he's he's been impaled on a yeah like like somebody in a coma maybe Maybe they're not going to wake up and tell you the answer or something like that. So he says here that no lesser crime than murder will suffice. 300 pages is far too much of a bother for a crime other than murder.

So he's kind of like, if you're invested in all this stuff, like it's got to be, the victim's got to be super dead. Got to be the big one. Yeah. All right. All right. Number 10, the culprit must turn out to be a person who has been in the story. can't be like all of a sudden it's so and so that we didn't know had to be it has to be you know part of the narrative since the beginning i'm going to skip number 11 and come back to that number 14 uh the method of murder and the means of detecting it must be rational and scientific can't be a secretive potion that doesn't exist in the real world um or some sort of machine that takes a long time to yeah hand wavy okay exactly number 17 a professional criminal must never be the culprit.

Oh, funny. It should be someone who has kind of never really been in that situation and they decide to kill. So know that I skipped number, I skipped number 11 and I will. I detected that, Karen. Yes, you're a very good detective that detects. So number 11, I will read now. Servants such as butlers, footmen, valets, gamekeepers, cooks, and the like must not be chosen by the author as

the culprit. He says it is too easy solution. It is unsatisfactory. It makes the reader feel like time has been wasted reading this. So obviously, number 11 refers to the kind of the trope that we all

know is that the Butler did it. Right, right. We hear it all the time. The Butler did it. That's, oh, that old trope turns out this mystery novel is the Butler did it. Guess how many times the Butler actually did it? Not many. Not many.

Where did it come from? Where did the butler did it come from? We hear it all the time and it's from an American, what regarded as the American Agatha Christie, her name is Mary Roberts Reinhart. She wrote a story called The Door. And this is credited as the piece of fiction that has the butler was the culprit exploded onto pop culture.

Before that, there's like one work that had the butler did it. But that's it. There are no other mysteries that had the butler do it. That was enough for it to be the trope. As a kind of a final coda wrapping this up, Mary Roberts Reinhardt, she eventually settled a city Bar Harbor, Maine, which I've been before. My parents took me there for a vacation. They ate lobsters. We were kids and we did it because we thought it was gross.

So her estate now is part of the Wonderview Inn and the Looking Glass restaurant. Mary Roberts Reinhart, you know, she wrote about the butler did it. But actually, in real life, her chef tried to kill her. That was crazy. This is from, yeah, the one-of-you website. Okay, all right. So after hiring a butler, rather than promoting her cook, her cook got upset and, you know, perhaps drinking and maybe he was upset and not in the right mindset, pulled a gun on her,

pulled the trigger, the gun jams at like, you know, point blank. and she escapes and everybody else in the household wrangled and it was just chaotic. Her almost Butler almost did it. Her almost Butler did it. Almost did it. Yeah. Yep. Always a bridesmaid.

So that is the origin of the Butler did it. I mean, she was right not to promote him. There's like some anger issue. Yeah. In retrospect, good call. Yeah. This is Jen and Jenny. from Ancient History Fan Girl, and we're here to tell you about Jenny's scorching historical romanticcy

based on Alaricothe's Enemy of My Dreams. Amanda Boucher, best-selling author of The Kingmaker Chronicle, says, quote, This book has everything, high-stakes action, grit, ferocity, and blazing passion. Julia and Alaric are colliding storms against a backdrop of the brutal dangers of ancient Rome. They'll do anything to carve their peace out of this treacherous world and not just survive, but rule. Enemy of my dreams is available wherever books are sold. Colin, you're up.

Where are you taking us to? All right, I want you to imagine with me, we're going to be creating our very own haunted house. Okay. And I've got only one rule here, all right, for you all is, I absolutely in no way want you to think outside the box or push your creativity. I want this to be the most unoriginal. a non-groundbreaking haunted house ever.

I want us to hit every trope we can. Okay. Okay. All right. And along the way here, we will get some questions in and some trivia for you all. Here we go. All right. So we're coming up on our haunted house. Now, of course, for maximum creepy fog effect, we're going to be using just a buttload

of dry ice everywhere. I've got dry ice behind some fake tombstones on the front lawn. Dry ice, of course, very popular for haunted houses, and we see it on TV movies a lot. Pretty easy to work with. You can get like a fancy dry ice machine blower, but you can also just drop some chunks of dry ice into a bucket of water and get largely the same effect. Get your buzzers ready here. I've got a question for you all.

What is dry ice? Ooh, I think you guys all buzzed in there. Karen, I think you were maybe first. What is dry ice? I believe it's frozen carbon or solidify carbon dioxide. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. Dry ice is... And it could be dangerous. Oh, yeah.

I mean, yes. I mean, if you lock yourself in a room with it. You are correct, Karen, first of all. Yes. Dry ice is frozen solid carbon dioxide. And it is super, super cold. And it's dangerous in the sense that if you touch it with your bare skin, yeah, you can create some, you know, freezing damage on your skin. And it's dangerous in the way that if, as Chris alluded to, if you're in a confined space and you get too much as it converts to gaseous carbon dioxide, like any other gas, if it replaces the oxygen in the room, you're not going to be feeling too well. So, you know, the cool thing about dry ice as far as haunted houses are concerned.

It's our most commonly seen example of something that sublimates. Right. Something that sublimates is a substance that can pass directly from a solid to a gas without being a liquid in between. And that's why dry ice is really cool. Carbon dioxide can exist in liquid form, but just not at anything approaching our normal environment and pressure and temperature. Yeah. So, you know, you can get CO2 down to, you know, liquid, but it's got to be like five times atmospheric pressure. You've got to have the temperature right.

Whoa. You know, you might see compressed CO2 in like fire extinguishers, for instance, where you can get the pressure high enough to keep it in its liquid form. But as soon as it hits the normal atmosphere, it turns immediately into gas. If you have any dry ice that you need to handle, it's actually really funny. Putting it in the freezer is really not going to do much to it because even your freezer is still warmer than the, yeah. It will still sublimate even in your freezer. because it is not liquid water. It will still keep right on supplementing.

Perhaps counterintuitively, you will actually keep your dry ice longer if you put it in just like a thick, you know, foam, styrofoam container with a lid. It'll stay preserved longer than if you just put it bare into your freezer. I've had to handle so much dry ice during the pandemic because, you know, you stopped like going out to the grocery store and just started ordering stuff. So it's like, oh, okay, well, I can order ice cream. I can order this and that. And, like, you know, that's one of the things they talk about, like, when they started talking about, like, you know, gold belly and shipping food all over the country or whatever, it was like, oh, well, it must be really tough to ship ice. And they realized, like, actually, like, shipping ice cream is, like, the easiest thing to ship. You just throw it to, like, just like a small piece of dry ice into a, into a nice styrofoam cooler with a lid on it.

And you can ship that anywhere. And it's, it's going to be, it's going to be frozen, like, a rock for, like, a week or more, yeah. Okay. So, we've set the scene with the fog. We've got the fake tombstones. are I. No haunted house worth its salt is going to be without a copious amount of cobwebs. I mean, you know, fake cobwebs. Colloquially, just be flexible with me here.

Colloquially, loosely, what is the difference between a spider web and a cobweb? Sort of just historically in English. Karen, I think. Spider web is where a spider lives and cobweb is an abandoned web. You got it just right. Yeah. Oh, wait, no, really? Yeah. Oh, because I'd always heard that referred to as like, you know, collections of dust and things like that and sort of... If you are the kind of person who makes a distinction, and I really want to stress, I really want to stress here that many people will use the term cobweb to cover active spiderwebs, inactive spider webs, clean, dirty, whatever. But historically, kind of colloquially, as I say, a spider web is a web that has a spider living in it. It's a working web. Catching insects. It's clean. And a cobwebs. web would often be an abandoned web that has started to collect dust and dirt. And so it accumulates,

looks kind of more cloudy, fuzzy. Yeah. Now, as I say, this is not a hard and fast rule. And it looks like that it comes from an older term for a spider, which is adder cop. And the cop in Adder cop, meaning head, Adder cop meant poison head. And so it was just a really kind of a very quick jump from there from the AdderCops web to a cop web or cob web. All right, I have an audio question here for you guys. So we're moving in, we're moving into our, into our trope-filled haunted house. We need some music here to set the scene and really get the mood correctly. So I have a little audio clip here. Listen to this clip. I know, I know without asking that you have all heard this sample of music before.

Yeah, it is, it's certainly, from today's vantage point, it is an iconic piece of organ music. I will give you that much. For one point, one point, I want you to please tell me, who is the composer of this piece of music? You can go big. And for three points, you can tell me not just the composer, but also the title of this piece of music. Anyone care to take a guess or confidently tell me the answer. Karen.

I think it's Beethoven. It is not Beethoven. That I don't know. It is, in fact, Johann Sebastian Bach. That's right. JSB. JSP, our man, that piece of music is the Tokata and fugue in D minor.

We need to clarify here. That is one of box Tokata and fugues in D minor. Tokata, I learned, comes from the route for touch or to touch. And the idea is sort of it's alluding to the masterful

touch on the keys of the performing this piece. Yeah. I hope I don't need to tell you, Karen. It was, of course, used in Fantasia, among many other places. That was, in fact, a lot of the scholars of this piece of music here that being used in Fantasia was in no small part really amplified its popularity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think we've covered the big three bases at least for me.

We got the fog, the cobwebs, the music. You turn off the lights. It's nice and dark. We go into the house. We're going to see some glow in the dark stuff for sure. You got to have something glowing in the dark. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to have something glowing in the dark. Now, did you know that when you see a modern glow-in-the-dark item, and I'm talking just that, you know, classic greenish, sort of fuzzy glow that we all are familiar with, you are witnessing quantum mechanics in action. You are seeing a quantum physical reaction in a very, very cool way. Most modern glow-in-the-dark toys and props and things are either chemoluminescent,

luminescence based on chemicals or phosphorescent. Originally, they did use radioluminescent things for like watch dials and things like that. That's that they learned, you know, thankfully they learned that that is not the good kind of radiation that you want to have on your skin or near your skin or on or near your children. Yeah, the ionizing radiation. You don't want that. A great example, maybe today the classic prototypical example of chemoluminescence that we all know would be a glow stick, you know, great little glow sticks, right?

You crack them and then you shake them up. And it's luminescence triggered by two chemical, two or more. When their reaction completes and it's out of juice, if you will, you can't get it to glow again. Phosphorescence is the kind of glow in the dark that we associate more commonly with chargeable glow in the dark, reusable glow in the dark. If it fades, you just hold it in front of a light or put it out in the sun for a little bit and it'll start charging it with energy, that it gives you the energy back. over time. And certain types of materials can do this over and over and over and over again.

All right. Phosphorescence is very closely related to fluorescence. Okay, we know that term. We're probably most familiar with fluorescent markers, day glow paints. The term day glow is actually a trademark term of the day glow company. Phosphorescence and fluorescence are so closely related that it really comes just down to how much time the light gives off when it is triggered. Right. So day glow markers, fluorescent markers, they really are glowing. They're not just especially bright. They're not just really intense colors. They really are chemically, fundamentally different from other types of pigments and dyes. Adams, you guys know what atoms are. Adams are surrounded by electrons. And broadly speaking, the electrons want to sit at specific energy levels, okay? You know, distances away from the center of the atom. If you have the right materials and you send the right kinds of energy photons, in this case, light at the right wavelength at certain materials, you can temporarily excite these

electrons, some of them to jump up levels. They'll jump up a level or jump up a distance and they'll hang out there as long as you're charging them. They will continuously at the same time. They want to drop back down to the lower energy level, right? When they drop back down, they, of course, have to give back some energy somehow, and they will give off that energy in the form of a photon. So as the fluorescent pigment or ink or paint or whatever you have is receiving normal daylight, it is in fact returning light to you on a slightly lower wavelength than the light coming in. It's not just reflecting.

It's glowing in the daytime. It is literally day glow. Yeah. If you turn the light off, it stops immediately. Because there's no light to... That's right. Because there is no light to charge up the very specialized picklings. That quickly.

That's right. That's right. Where the line between fluorescent and fluorescence is, very broadly speaking, is really just at the point that we can notice it holding on to that energy after we take away the light source. Oh, I see. That's the basic behavior here under fluorescence and phosphorescence. black lights you guys are probably familiar with black lights another great haunted house staple that's right the the black light is the same phenomenon but built around pigments that are responsive only to light in the UV range the discovery or I should say

the perfection of black light paints really led to yeah a whole just cottage industry of specialized posters and art I learned that the invention of black light paint is attributed to two brothers, Robert and Joseph Switzer, of Berkeley California in the 1930s. Yeah, they got really interested in naturally

fluorescent and phosphorescent chemicals and basically went out, how can we make this a thing? How can we generate our own paints and pigments and things like that? They went on to found the Dayglow Corporation. Good for them. Yeah, good for then, which really was all of the first commercially available black light paints and fluorescent paints.

All right. So here's where it gets really cool to me, the phosphorescence. Same basic principle that we just talked about. But in phosphorescence, in just the right materials, just the right pigments, when the electrons get bumped up to this higher level, they also have their spin changed. Now, it's beyond the scope of the show to explain what that means. But spin is a special additional property that electrons can exhibit, have, and be induced. And in phosphorescent materials, they get into a special state where the spin is, quote, forbidden, okay? The transition back down to give up the energy and drop back down to their desired base state is so hard to model that it can only be modeled in a quantum sense.

it can be modeled probabilistically. And all of this is a fancy way of saying that it's so hard for them to drop down to their lower energy that it takes a really long time. The harder it is for the electrons to drop back down, the longer that material will glow. And they have glow in the dark materials that can glow for hours and hours and hours and hours now, as opposed to, you know, minutes before. So this really is one of these just everyday wonders of the world around us that if you want to have the most concrete example of a quantum

mechanic interaction, just look at that glow in the dark skeleton that might be sitting in your closet. Poor electrons, man. They just want to go home. Yeah. You just keep pumping up with... We refuse to let them go where they just be where they want to be. Stop brightening me. And for what? We're stars on the ceiling. Yeah. Highlighters. I had those. I had the stars on my ceiling. a kid. Oh, man. Cool. So, yeah, there's a lot of science that went into our trope-filled, haunted house. I hope you had no original reactions or no original feelings other than, yep, I've seen that before. That's a haunted house. Well, it makes me appreciate it more.

Once we went on a camping trip and one of the little kids decided that he wanted to eat the contents of his glow sticks, so he broke it, you know, full of the staff. And I just remember him having a whole lot of green glowing stuff all over his mouth and inside his mouth and stuff like that he's fine he just glowed for a while I wasn't there for that Karen I was I don't think anybody would let me observe it I wasn't that curious I was curious but not that these are the questions we ask on good job brain and that's our show thank you guys for joining me and thank you guys listeners for listening. I hope you learn a lot of stuff about NECO wafers, about real life zombies,

about dry ice and haunted house tricks, and who done it, the butler did it. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and on all podcast apps, and on our website, good job, brain.com. This podcast is part of Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit airwavemedia.com to listen and subscribe to other shows like, I know what scares you, movie therapy,

and food with Mark Bittman. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye. Have you ever wondered how inbred the Habsburgs really were? What women in the past used for birth control? Or what Queen Victoria's nine children got up to? On the History Tea Time podcast, I profile remarkable queens and LGBTQ plus royals, explore royal family trees, and delve into women's medical history and other fascinating topics.

Join me every Tuesday for History Tea Time, wherever fine podcasts are enjoyed.