Good Job, Brain! - 236: It's Hip to Be Square

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

Wombat poop, CD cases, and lunch boxes - join in on our revelatory revelry respectfully recognizing rectangles! Get your angles right with facts about squares and cubes. Take Chris' double question set challenge inspired by the Nintendo GameCube. Karen's got the scoop on historic ice cream square containers, and dishes out a food packaging quiz. Colin goes true crime on us, Ancient Greek style, and shares a tale about intrigue, secret societies, murder on the high seas....and the square root of two...? 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. Aloha, Allegiant Alleycats allowing alluring alloys about alliterations and Allison. Allison is the chemical compound that makes garlic, garlic, the sulfuric smelly compound. This is Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. Today's show is episode 236, and of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your trixie triad of trivia triathletes trying for trinkets, trillobites, and trifles. I'm Colin. And I'm Chris.

So if you listen to the last episode, yes, it is sad news. Dana has retired from the Good Job Brain podcast crew, so we wish her the best. best don't forget, like last time I mentioned, leave her happy messages and share us your favorite data moments. But for now, it is the three of us. Me, Chris, Colin, we're alliterative. Oh, that's true. Wow. When I was writing my intro for this episode, I realized, so I do two sets of alliterative sentences for each intro, right? We've done 236 shows. That means I've written probably more than 400 alliteration intros. Wow.

All right, without further ado, the three of us, the two of you, let's jump into our first general trivia segment, pop quiz, hot shot. Here, I have a random Trivial Pursuit card, and you guys have your Barnyard Buzzers, listeners, buzz in, honk your horn, shout,

flap your arms. Right, right, right, right. Rev your engine. Here we go, Blue Wedge for Geography. what is the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca called? Chris. I want to call that the Hajj. It is Hajj.

Okay. J-J. J-J. Double J's Haj. Next question, Pink Wedge for pop culture. The creators of which iconic HBO mob drama added a gun to its logo so people wouldn't think it was about opera singers.

Oh, yes. Together. The Sopranos. The Baritones. The Sopranos. Yellow Wedge. Which stadium in Flushing Meadows, New York, home of the U.S. Open, is named for the first male African-American to win Wimbledon in 1975. Yeah, that's Ash Stadium named after Arthur Ash.

Arthur Ash. Asch. All right, Purple Wedge. Which type of poem has 14 lines and follows a formal rhyming scheme? Chris. I believe this to be a sonnet. Yes, it is a sonnet. Listeners at home cannot see our facial expressions, but we can see each other's facial expressions.

And Chris just shot me a look. No, no, no, no. It was more like, I mean, you know, for William Fakespeare, you know, I've even written recently a sonnet for a good job brain. I got my sonnets down. All right, next question. Science and Nature, Green Wedge. In which vehicle was David Wolfe when he made history in 1997 by casting his vote in a Houston mayoral race? In which?

In which vehicle? Hold on. Let me reread. Okay, okay, okay. In which vehicle was David Wolfe when he made history in 1997 by casting his vote in a Houston mayoral race? race. Colin, there's on a spaceship. Can you be more specific? The space shuttle, the international space station. It is the mirror space station. Oh, wow. Okay. This is a little bit less climatic. Astronaut Wolf emailed his pick, becoming the first voter in space. They should

have had, like, for promotional purposes, a big, you know, oversized, like a booth, cartoon ballot box. Yeah, right. All right. Last question. Orange Wedge. Which racing event involves horses jumping fences and ditches. Chris. Steeplechase. Yes! Wow, you guys know your horse activities. Steeple chase. So they're actually not really chasing anything.

Yeah, I don't know where the origin of the word. Yeah, it's kind of, it's just like a horsey obstacle. Oh, no, you know, I, I, okay, please, please forgive me. This might be wrong. I'm going to say this. I believe that the word comes. from literally cross-city sort of races where people would run from church to church,

like using the church as landmarks. You're going after the steeples on the churches. I think that might be it. Yeah, yeah. I'll fact-check that later. We'll just fact-check that before we run that. Yeah, fix it in post. All right, good job, brains, this episode.

Earlier this year, we had a special episode that was about things that are round, about circles, bulbous things, and I thought, well, let's go the other direction. We should have, just to be fair, let's have an episode about things that are square and cubed. So this week, it's hip to be square. Well, Karen, speaking of square, you know, there is something very. central to our lives, which is a square, which is the good job brain book, uh, which we almost never plug. We're like, like many creative types. We are extraordinarily poor at self-promotion, but we made

a book. And it's a square book. And it is a square book, big orange square. Not one of your spherical books. Yeah. Yeah. The most annoying shape of all. Look for it wherever books are sold and you won't find it. And then go on to Amazon and buy it there. you saw it recently yes i did half-priced books oh yes oh yeah california i've seen the book maybe five times in the wild like at an actual store honolulu barns and noble and then uh tyson's corner in northern virginia barns and noble uh half-priced books in berkeley and then one at the san francisco downtown one of the many san francisco downtown fedex office previously known as Kinko's.

Yes, a lot of people say they've seen it in FedEx office for some reason. I don't know. It's like a git. Hey, just throw one of our books on in there with that last minute gift that you're assembling in the FedEx Kikos office to your loved ones. If you're fans of the show, you can get our book. But also, if your fans of show, you should join our very, very active and very interesting and very fun Facebook fan group that we didn't start.

Like fans started this group on Facebook. Facebook.com slash group slash GJB fans, lots of trivia facts being shared, animal facts, blunders of the English language, eggorns, people have found pictures of places or things that we've talked about on the show related to this episode. One of the facts that was shared recently was about wombat poop. Oh, wombat poop. The wombat, a very cute, cuddly creature from Australia. One of the very famous facts shared about wombat's is their poop is a cube.

Yeah. It's cubic. Does it have a square butthole? Like how? Yeah. Yeah. For a while, people didn't really know exactly what makes the square poop. And recently, this was shared in listener group that they found out why. Scientifically, what makes. I am dying to know. This is one of those square. This is one of those like, I feel like in the early days of the web, you would see. see this fact like the did you know and like you know it was like the first time i saw a picture of it i was like holy it really does it looks like a little little dye it's yeah okay you know i'm reading these papers and the interviews with with the scientists and there's no diagram of it so so i have to come up with a good way to explain it to to everybody and i apologize for this analogy but it's the best analogy I've got. All right.

So the wombat, their intestines, if you think about a cross-section, a tube. Lots of tubes in biology. Yes, yes. They're all tubes. You were not a lot of right angles. Exactly. So which makes this very weird. I think the only other like square rectangular living animal facts is like that the goat

pupils are rectangular. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you guys know what a pizza roll looks like? Yeah, a pizza roll, right? It's like a, it's like a, it's like a pillow. pillow shaped. Sure. So it's like, so it's like pinched at the ends. Yes, yes. So imagine a long tube of pizza rolls. If you line up pizza rolls and it's one continuous tube of pizza rolls. Okay. If you think about a cross section, two of the ends are pressed down. It's a tube,

but on the opposite ends, they're kind of clamped and, and they're stiff. So when the poop is traveling through the intestines, the more stiffer parts of the intestine is moving a little bit differently than the rest of the intestines. It takes a really, really long time for the poop to travel throughout the entire intestinal system of wombats, 30 feet long. The poop that comes out is already square. It's already a cube. Because the corners have been pinched and pinched and pinched and just, yeah.

The wombat butt hole is normal round, but the poop is already hard and compact into a square shape. So it comes out as a square. How does this help select you, evolution? There is a theory. Okay. Wombats use their poop to mark their territories. They put it on rocks.

Square poops don't roll. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. So they're able to put the poop where they want to. And it stays right there. Yeah. It's a square peg out of a round hole, if you will.

Yeah. Wow. Bravo. Okay. Well, I will get us kicked off here. Karen suggested that we do stuff about squares or cubes. And I, like, finally, finally the opportunity that I've been looking for to do a quiz about the Nintendo GameCube. Oh, the sadly, you know, much maligned while it was on the market, but fondly remembered today.

It seems to happen to so many Nintendo products. I had one. I had one. I love my GameCube. Me too. I got the black one. Matching black controllers. I had the lavender one.

You had the lavender game cube? The purple one. Oh, the purple one. Oh, yeah. It's like a bluish purple. Yeah. It's indigo. Oh, that's the official color name.

Well, there was the whole thing because, yeah, when it first launched in 2001, actually, when it launched in Japan, the only color available was indigo. But when it launched in the U.S., there was purple and black, because for all the people who were way too cool. Gamers. Yeah. And then they followed it up, actually, in Japan. And a couple of months later, they launched the black one,

but then they also launched the spice orange color, which was the bear, oh, yeah. The spice orange GameCube is the ultimate GameCube. It's amazing. So I have a quiz about the Nintendo GameCube. Now, to make sure that everybody is involved here, I mean, in case you're like, oh, geez, video games, I'm going to alternate between questions that are sort of specifically about the

Nintendo GameCube, and then after that, following that will be a question that is a more generalized trivia question that is inspired by the previous question. That's good. That's a good quiz master. We're going to ping pong back and forth a little bit, but a GameCube themed round of trivia, here we go.

Get your barnyard buzzers ready. It's Karen versus Colin in a one-on-one showdown of GameCube and other knowledge. So question number one. This tech company established in 1911 in Endicott, New York as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company

provided the central processing unit for the GameCube. Computer tabulating recording 1911 CTR. CTR. Established 1911 as CTR. They provided the central processing unit

for the GameCube. Yeah. Colin, take a shot at it. Motorola? It's not Motorola. No, yeah, it's not, that's not the road. Karen? IBM?

It is IBM. Yes. Yes. That's right. They are New York based. New York, of course. Right. You're right, right, right.

Yep. Yes, originally makers of time clocks at work, like the punch card time clocks thing. Oh, no way. Oh, man. Wow. How far they've come. Exactly. From that to think pads.

They've come so far, in fact, that in 2011, I'd be. showed off a computer called Watson on the TV show Jeopardy. It was a computer that was built specifically to play Jeopardy. When it appeared as a contestant on Jeopardy, what were the two human players that it competed against? Karen? All right. Let our listeners maybe think about it, because Karen probably knows this.

One is Ken Jennings. Yeah. One is Ken Jennings. And in fact, Ken Jennings is wrong. on Jeopardy was what caught the attention of IBM's engineers in the first place back in 2004, back during the, back during the lifespan of the GameCube. And they put on Ken Jennings and also... That's all I got to. I can't remember who the other contestant was.

Karen has personal experience with this Jeopardy contestant. It's Brad Rudder. Oh, okay, okay. Whom Karen competed against and defeated on the chase. his soul. No, no, no, no. He's so nice. He still has his soul. He's fine. He's fine. Yeah, yeah. Question number three, GameCube was the first Nintendo home console to launch in the United States without a Super Mario game. What game starring a Mario series character launched with the console instead? What game starring a Mario? I heard a dog. Karen? I want to guess it was Luigi's Mansion.

That's my guess. It's Luigi's Mansion. Yes, it's Luigi's Mansion. It is Luigi's Mansion. Good job, good job, Karen. Yes, Luigi's Mansion, starring Luigi, who was a Ghostbusters-style game in which Luigi was looking for Mario.

We were all looking for Mario. We were like, Mario, where are you? Yeah, and he found him. And then, of course, a few months later came Super Mario Sunshine on the Nintendo Game Q. But let's stick with Mansions. Question number four. at 178,926 square feet of floor space,

the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina is the largest privately owned house in the United States. It was built by what famous, fabulously wealthy family? Colin? The Carnegie's. It's not the Carnegie's. Karen. The Vanderbilt?

It is the Vanderbilt. And it's exactly what you think. So the Vanderbilt family, which came from DeBilt in Netherlands, and they were Vanderbilt, as in from the built. They built Moore mansion. And that was the Biltmore. Makes sense. Makes sense. Built more.

And the Moore is not like, we want more house space. It's like the Moors, like the M-O-O-R. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fun fact. Anderson Cooper and Timothy Oliphant are both Vanderbilts. I knew Anderson Cooper because his mother is Gloria of Vanderbilt, but I did not know Timothy Oliphant is saying. Wow.

Vanderbilt, yeah, yeah. Okay, question number five. What sci-fi game series was resurrected on the GameCube by a developer based not in Japan, but in Austin, Texas? Karen was first. Metroid Metroid Yes, after a long

absence, the Metroid series came back on the GameCube with Metroid Prime developed famously by retro studios in Austin, Texas. Question number six, the University of Texas at Austin was where these co-writers

of the films Rushmore and the Royal Tenenbaum's were college roommates. Co-writers. Colin? That is Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, I believe. Yes, correct.

Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, roommates at the University of Texas at Austin, and then co-wrote various films together, Rushmore and the Royal Tenenbaum's being just two of those. Question number seven. After a long absence from the Nintendo platforms, video game developer Squarespaceoft made its return to Nintendo hardware on the GameCube

with what entry in the Final Fantasy series. Oh, man. This is a Chris Kohler question. We cannot reach out to our lifeline. Hold on, hold on. All right. So what was the name of the Final Fantasy that Square made on the GameCube as their big return to Nintendo platforms?

I'm deferring to you on this one, Karen. Okay. Oh, so I'm not guessing which number. It was, no, no, no. It's not a number. It has a subtitle. It's not a number. It has a subtitle.

Karen. Final Fantasy Tactics. It's not Final Fantasy. tactics. They did do that on Game Boy Advance. And this was the one where you took your Game Advance and you plugged it into the GameCube. Yeah. Play it that way. It was multiplayer. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Oh, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. That was the one. That was the one. Um, question number eight, what musical artist had a huge hit in 1991 with the single

Gypsy Woman parentheses, She's Homeless? Well, it has to do something with Crystal. Remember that this is vaguely connected, yes. Yeah, right, right. Karen? Crystal Waters? It is Crystal Waters. Wow.

La-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Yeah, that's Crystal Water, yes, Gypsy Woman. She's homeless. Well done. I did not know it had a parentheses title. I love songs with parentheses in the title. Yeah. There's a whole story just in the parentheses.

Yeah, yeah. And one day we should do a quiz with parenthetical songs. I can't believe we haven't already. Okay, all right. Well, who wants to do it? You want me to do it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so nobody, nobody research anything about correctices,

listeners at home. Okay. Just kind of blank your mind and we'll do parenthetical songs. Oh, gosh. Okay. Question number nine. This mobile game made by Niantic is based on a game series that debuted on the GameCube.

Colin? It's the, the Pokemon game, right? What was it, Pokemon Go? That was the Joe Bloggs answer. Niantic. You fell into the hole. I did. Well, because that was a Game Boy game first.

I'm setting up Karen to look good. Niantic followed up, yes, Pokemon Go, which they did, in fact, make it as a mobile game based on the game series that debuted on the Game Boy, because Pokemon was much older than GameCube. Oh, oh, oh, oh, yes, yes. Oh, what are those little dudes? Pickman. Yes, Pickman, what? The title of, oh, you're so close.

The title of the game is Picman, Plossop. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, you got there, you got there. Wow. Yes, Pickman Bloom, Picman Bloom. I walked right into your trap, Kohler. I know, I was thinking of it. You did, yes, it's not Pokemon, God.

It's Pokemon, Bloom. Question number 10, Picman Bloom's distant cousin, Orlando Bloom, is well known for playing is well known for playing Legalus in films based on the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien. And Will Turner in films based on the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Two long-running series. In which series has his character appeared in more films? This is the first person to buzz in and guess you can either get it right or get it wrong. But try to get it right.

But try to explain your reasoning. Colin? I'm going to say more of the Lord of the Rings movies. Okay. Either because, and again, I'm not super familiar with the Pirates movies, just to admit this up front, but either because he got too expensive or there was a filming conflict and he chose the Lord of the Rings series or something like that.

But on the flip side, I mean, just argue against myself here, I think there may have been more movies in the Pirates series so he had more opportunities. But I'm going to put my opinion in Lord of the Ring. Are we talking screen time? No, no, no, no. We're simply talking the character... Number of films.

Was he in it or not? Yeah. It's pirates. Is it pirates? Okay, hold on. Hold on. He's in pirates. One, two...

Uh-huh. What was three? At World's End, that was three. So he's in at least those three. Yeah. Four, but don't think he's in that. He comes back... Uh-oh.

At five. Are they in it, like, as a cameo? Did they get them for, like, a 10-second memory. Because he was cursed. Sorry, this long went away of saying, I think it's here. This is good. I think this is a good encapsulation of like what happens at pub trivia when we're

trying to answer a question like this. I'm running through all these things. So are you, so Karen, you're landing on the side of you're saying the Pirates of the Caribbean series and whereas Colin you were saying the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien. Yeah. And then I guess, of course, there's also, yeah, I mean, the Hobbit movies as well, which I have not seen. Okay.

I'm talking Tolkien. all right will turner has indeed appeared in four uh films from the pirates of the caribbean series carrieing you are right he is he is not in on stranger tides um he has appeared uh of the novels jr old token he has appeared in all three lord of the rings movies and two hobbit movies they put legalus into whether or not he was in the books i do not know but i don't think he was but they put him into the last Hobbit movies. Hobbit films, which means the answer is

he has played Legolas in five films based on the novels, J.R. Coked. And as of yet, only four Pirates of the Caribbean films, but who knows what the future may hold for both. What a good quiz question. Man, that is a good quiz question.

Yeah. Well, at first it was like, oh, I got to do something on Orlando Bloom. Well, I can't just ask about like what character did he play. everybody knows the answer. And I'm like, oh, there's so many of these movies. And then it's kind of how it came up. Okay, two more.

One more set of questions for you. Question number 11. The electronics maker Panasonic produced a machine called the Q, which was a GameCube that also did what? Colin. I'm just taking a guess here. Could surf the web. No.

It was like, it's. No. Good. That's a good guess because it's the right around the right time for something to add awful, like, web surfing capability. Yeah, truly terrible. Yeah. It's too, it's something to do with like another disc, but I don't know if it's like it could play other formatted games or it could like play CDs or something. I think about this a little bit more.

Talk it out a little bit. Like there was something that the GameCube did not do that, for example, its rivals on the market at the time. famously did. And it was a feature that people really want in the year 2001. It was a feature that people were really looking for out of a game console. DVDs? Yeah, like or just music or just full-sized discs, like either CDs or DVDs. Yeah. The Panasonic Q is a game cube that also plays DVD movies. That's what that was. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That makes, what happened to it? That makes a lot of sense. It was only in Japan and, you know, people didn't really need a GameCube slash DVD player

so they didn't really sell that many of them but yeah they're very very expensive today but yeah most you know a lot of people bought a PlayStation 2 when it came out in the year 2000 a lot of people bought a PlayStation 2 because they didn't have a DVD player that's what I I remember that was many many people's

first DVD player was the PS2 yeah and that is and that is what Question 12 is about so the PlayStation 2 famously many people's first DVD player and in fact it was such a popular purchase is a DVD player that when PlayStation 2 launched in Japan on March 4th, 2000, okay? The most popular piece of software that people bought for it was not a video game, but it was

this movie on DVD. Wow. Colin. Is it The Matrix? It is The Matrix. That makes so much sense. Which is, which was the first, I don't know about Japan, but it was in the U.S., that was the first movie to sell over one million copies on the DVD form.

I wonder if it's in the Library of Congress. let's see an important an important American work of art absolutely what if the matrix DVDs in Library of Congress they keep like everything matrix added to the national film registry there we go yeah yeah that's true it's it's not it's not like it's that hard yeah they add a lot of things I was going to bring this up in my segment later I'm going to bring it up here because we're we're kind of talking about it do you guys know why did CDs and DVDs and DVD come in different size cases when the discs themselves are the same dimension.

Oh, do you guys know why? I do know why. Or at least, like, originally it was so that they could double stock them in the same bins that were made for 12-inch records. So then DVDs were meant to approximate the size of like a VHS tape so that they could stock them sort of without having to buy new shelving or new storage system. Right.

Speaking of video games and things that come in boxes, this seems like a really great time for me to jump in. and talk about the two video games that I worked very hard on that are actually coming out this year. What we do at my company, Digital Eclipse, is collections of classic video games. They're like Criterion Collection style collections in the sense that there's like tons of bonus content. I mean, I shouldn't even say bonus content because like there's so much supplemental material all around them and we tweak the games and we fix the games up. The one that just came out that maybe you've even heard of is called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,

the Kawabunga Collection, which has all of the old, the turtles, the two turtles arcade games that Konami did back in the 80s and 90s that you probably remember from the arcades, the four player ones, and then everything that was on the original Nintendo, the Super Nintendo, the Game Boy, and the Sega Genesis. So it's 13 games. And then additionally, later this year in November, we have Atari 50, the anniversary celebration. Yeah. Rather than just like sort of a list of games and being like, here go play them, it is all built into this one seamless historical. It's like going through a virtual museum. Because you go through all these timelines and the games and the artifacts and like maybe scans of the original flyers for the arcade games and photographs.

And we did video interviews with a lot of that we got the Al Alcorn who was the designer of Hong. We got an interview with him. So yes, those are two things that I really wanted to talk about because we've been working really hard on these over the last couple of years. And they're both out like this holiday season. Michaelangelo was my first childhood crush. He's fictional. And not human. it's very telling

I was just reading something interesting here this might be interesting trivia tidbit for the show so I have been diving back into my comic book collection from my very early years and I was reading about comic book counterfeiting in the context of grading

and selling and buying vintage comics and it said that among the most frequently counterfeited comics was the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics. Can you guys tell me why that is among the most counterfeited? Because it's in black and white.

Because it's in black and white. That's right. That's right. And just people figure it out it's easier to counterfeit something of black and white than in color, yeah. That first issue of Ninja Turtles was done pretty cheaply and it was a very, very indie production. And so, yeah, it wasn't really done on like super high quality paper or anything. It was just sort of

run off in black and white. It was professionally Brink did, wasn't done like a copy machine, but you could very easily counterfeit that if the person doesn't know what it is they're looking for. Yep, yeah, yep, yep. All right, time for a break, and we'll be right back. Get to Toronto's main venues like Budweiser Stage and the new Roger Stadium with Go Transit.

Thanks to Go Transit's special online e-ticket fairs, a $10 one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel on any weekend day or holiday anywhere along the Go network. And the weekday group passes offer the same weekday travel flexibility across the network, starting at $30 for two people and up to $60 for a group of five. Buy your online go pass ahead of the show at go-transit.com slash tickets. Steve Cubine and Nan McNamara's podcast from Beneath the Hollywood Sign. Mary Astor has been keeping a diary. Mary writes everything down.

And so this torrid affair with George S. Kaufman is chronicled on a daily basis. in great detail. And Iif pulls out a box and gives McAllister a ring saying, here's something to remember me by. This article caused Daryl Zanick to hit the roof. Actress Ruth Roman followed that up with playing a foil to Betty Davis in Beyond the Forest. I mean, if you can stand toe to toe with her, boy. And she does because she plays the daughter of the man that Betty Davis kills out in the hunting trip.

And it's directed by King Vidor, so he's no slouch. How do you go wrong with that? Yeah. Speaking of the Oscars, talking about what I call beginner's luck, it's all about the actors and actresses who won an Oscar on their very first film. Get your fix of old Hollywood from Stephen Nann on the podcast from Beneath the Hollywood Sign. Hi, my name's affluent. Did you know the pandas people hundred times today?

You're listening. Good job. brain. Bye. So speaking of packaging, kind of ties into my segment, and I'm going to first tell you a little bit of story. If you live in New York, you probably have come across the ice cream brand Ample Hills Creamery. I don't know if you guys have heard of it. Ample Hills Creamery. Based in Brooklyn, it's like a hip and quirky ice cream shop with comfort, retro flavors. Their number one flavor is a ooey gooey butter cake. So, you know, I'm kind of setting the scene.

right it's like that type of ice cream store that sort of thing yes if you're a disney fan like me you probably have come across it at Disney World in Orlando for several years people could get a taste of Ample Hills at the ice cream shop at the boardwalk area in Disney World in 2015 Ample Hills was on the rise they're gearing towards expansion they're going to show up in supermarkets and they scored this $19 million dollar partnership with Disney to have Disney themed ice cream and an actual

Ample Hills stores at Disney properties. That is a coup. So not bad for like a small shop in Brooklyn. So back in early 2021, just last year, I went to Disney World to run a marathon there and I decided, hey, I'm going to go get some ice cream at the Ample

Hills creamery ice cream store. But when I got there, it was like Twilight Zone. It was just a generic standard ice cream shop. There's no, no Ample Hills branding, no sign. I went inside and even, even, you know, the, the freezer display case generic ice cream flavors, non-descript brand generic ice cream shop. And I was like, whoa, this is kind of weird. So I asked the staff behind the counter, I'll go, hey, wasn't this Ample Hills creamery shop? He said, oh, Ample Hills is gone. And I'm like, Oh, okay. So they moved. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. Ample Hills is gone, gone.

This is where the dramatic organ music plays. So, of course, this prompted me to look it up right then and there at the store. In line. Yeah, yeah, in line. I was a good patron. I still bought an ice cream there. So while I was eating this generic ice cream, I was looking it up on my phone. And he was completely right. Ample Hills filed for bankruptcy in March 2020. right in the beginning of lockdown. Yeah.

Writer Courtney Rubin documented the rise and fall of Ample Hills in an article titled, and this is where I got my information from, The Shocking Meltdown of Ample Hills, Brooklyn's hottest ice cream company. I'm rubbing my hands together. Now, we all love a good shot in Freud's story about company failures. Well, not when you're telling me I can't get wee gooey buttercake ice cream anymore. I'm actually kind of sad. So, I mean, go on, but, you know, understand that, yeah.

Well, I'm not going to go into the details, but it is, but it is pretty juicy. Ambition, misspending, crippling dead, friction with founders, you know, like, this could be a Netflix documentary. But out of the whole article, there was a small anecdote that really stood out to me. It really, like, captured me. And it was that the founders of Ample Hills were dead set on half. having their ice cream pints be in square containers. Huh.

Okay. All right. Okay. So square ice cream boxes, not like molded or shape like a, like a square, but like actual a paper box that's folded from a flat sheet. Like a, like a carton of milk, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

So you don't mean, oh, okay, I see. So you don't mean like a, you know, get like a gallon of ice cream sometimes. One of the big things of ice cream is kind of like a rounded. Rounded square-ish. It's like rectangular with kind of rounded corners. You are literally talking about like carton of milk like a square box. Like a Kleenex box. Okay.

All right. All right. All right. I didn't know that in the 30s, 40s and 50s, ice cream was sold like this. Ice cream was sold in like a Kleenex box or, you know, in like a paper box container, you know, with the flap and stuff. And it's something I've never seen in my lifetime. I don't know if you. I mean, maybe back of the day when I was a kid there might have been.

some like legacy brands on the shelves that still use like probably i mean it just it just seems um it does seem old timey so old timey the decision to go for ice cream square boxes is to kind of stand down the market now it's to evoke that like vintage feeling however there are several several reasons why when you go to the freezer aisle now every ice cream pie is round or like Chris said, scound, the tub, the kind of rectangular, rounded corner tub. That's the industry term. I love it. It's scrown.

It's like the squircle. It's like the squircle. Squiggles. Yeah, yeah. So why don't ice cream pints come in square or rectangular boxes anymore? Because the ice cream scoop is round. It's clearly round on the end. You just frustrate yourself trying to get out of those corners.

Yes, well, let's talk it out. Okay. So you have the ice cream scoop is round and you want to be able to, you know, get the ice cream. A scoop of ice cream is also round. So you want to take a round scoop of ice cream out of a round container. Also, I'm guessing maybe the shape of the pint, the cylindrical shape of the pint helps it freeze more evenly and retain its quality more in a more even way versus like the ice cream at the corners of the box, maybe melting first or something. I don't know. I'm guessing. There are so many reasons why square ice cream containers don't exist anymore. Things that you've touched upon. Yes, ice cream melts faster. There's more surface area in a box form. Square boxes could potentially open on both ends the way they're folded, right? So there could be leaks, yep, flaps, freezer burn.

And then also, I think Chris, you mentioned corners. How do you get, you know, it's pretty hard to get ice cream out of a corner. But as you're shipping and transporting square boxes, the corners might get nicked or they might get fudge. Oh, sure. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Because sometimes you get a pint of ice cream and it's clearly taken a hit on the bottom of the round part of the ice cream. Even the pints of ice cream have a little stands on them, right? Like it doesn't have to come all right on the bottom. So it's got a little bit of protection there from taking a hit.

Structurally sound. Then you have to fill them to the corners with ice cream versus like a pint of Ben and Jerry's or whatever. I just imagine there's like a pint of Ben and Jerry's or whatever. I just imagine there's like a injection thing. Yeah. Sylindrical containers can nest. When the containers come, they're already nesting and they're ready to go. So square boxes, they come in flat.

Then you have to fill them up. And then like you said, Chris, making the container and filling the container, the two processes and machines that do that need to work together. Round pints are now pretty much standardized with the machines that fill them. So the same machine that fills a Ben and Jerry's can fill a hog. versus we have to build an entirely new machine, new factory, whatever, to fill our weird cartons, sure. Most importantly, the way of ice cream is made now is completely different than how it was made

in the 30s, 40s, 50s, even 60s. Nowadays, machines pump and inject, like, viscous, but not solid ice cream, like the mixture into containers and they freeze. Back then, it was pre-cut blocks. a frozen ice cream so they would just take the the brick and drop it into a box into a box now have they considered running the ice cream through a long tube like imagine some tautino's rolls karen you know if you know yeah like sure yeah the the wombatification of ice cream right you do that for 30 feet yeah it comes out in the cube yeah it's just so simple

that a child could think it's like the coffee that's pooped out by the city. Yeah, yeah. It's the kind of

thing that, that like, you could probably get people to try once for sure. Just, just, just, yeah,

I'm cute to go. Right, right, right. So here, I prepared a couple of questions about food

packaging. All right. Food packaging, trivia questions. All right. So, what licensed character was the

first to appear on the lunchbox in 1935? Oh, jeezed character. I know I've heard this before. I feel like I've read this.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like Felix the cat, close. Okay. Chris. Oh, that's close? I was, oh, I was going to say, howdy duty.

It is Mickey Mouse. Was it Mickey Mouse? Oh, see, you're both. Yeah. Nobody wanted to get Mickey Mouse because it was too easy. That's early. That's so early. In the 1950s, Hopalong Cassidy was the first TV show character to appear on the lunchbox.

So we talked about the first. What action movie character was the last, probably the last, to appear on metal lunchboxes. Oh. Because metal boxes were banned in schools. Ironically, due to kids using them as weapons. Wow. Okay, the last action character.

This is a really good one. So it's an action movie character. It appeared in a metal lunchbox. I have a guess, but I want to hear a year. Well, yeah, what are your guesses? What are your guesses? Rambo. I was going to say Rambo.

I was going to guess Rambo. It is Rambo. Wow. We did it. Amazing. How funny. That's, yeah, I could just like picture kind of like, without too much effort, like just sweaty, Sylvester Stallone, like on the box.

Yeah. And then kids were hitting each other with these metal boxes. It's the American way. It's the American way. All right. Next question. What tech company has a package? for a round

pizza box. What tech company has a patent for a round pizza box? Colin. I'm going to guess Apple and only because I have heard that the Apple commissary serves good pizza. Oh.

It is Apple. No. It is Apple. And it's only for the staff cafeteria. Wow. I'm not talking about like XL super big family style pizza. This is like personal pizzas from their cafeteria, right? A round container for a round

personal pizza. Amazing. So that employees can take it with them and go back to their desk and work and eat at their desk. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let me, let me be perfectly clear and perfectly shameless. If you work at Apple and can get me in there to try some of your pizza in a round container, I will, I will happily report back on the show. Wow. Yeah. All right. Next question. What non-European wine-producing country pioneered the invention of boxed wine?

Oh. Oh, Chris, confidently. Oh, I was going to, I mean, I think it's Australia. It is Australia. Oh. It's not a completely new design. It was actually based on the design of mechanics transporting battery acid.

The first boxed wine, the wine is in like a bag, like a bladder. that bladder is in a cardboard box. And what you have to do is you take the bladder out and you cut a corner. The first design had like a stopper that you had to put in after cutting a hole. The next evolution is they just put a tap into the bladder. Right. And the next evolution is they simply hook it up to your bloodstream.

It's just a giant bendy's straw. All right. Next question. We're on rectangular square food packaging. The bento box. yes meal that comes in a box with compartments for your sides and your little dishes what does bento literally translate to i mean doesn't it literally translate to like box or something like that or square no okay i don't know well press over to you please sure oh geez really putting me on the spot well the ben i'm guessing is like

the ben of of convenience it is convenience is that what it is that which is convenience okay okay It comes from the Chinese character, Biendang, yeah. Man, I fell down a YouTube hole of Eki Ben, which is like specialized bento box they sell in Japan train stations. A lot of people commute through trains. So fascinating. Oh, my God. Every region has their own special bento based on the ingredients of that region. It becomes kind of like a, almost like a souvenir experience, right?

You travel to different places. You eat their special bento on the train. and like sometimes like the container is really special and you collect them probably spent like five hours watching just videos of people on the train eating food uh what a world all right okay this is a weird question what food item used to be stored in a cardboard box then wrapped and sealed with wax paper now we're familiar with it packaged the other way around whereas when you open you open the box first then you get the wax paper paper package oh Chris Philadelphia cream cheese no Colin butter no what currently you open up a box and there's wax paper protecting it but how about oh um oh okay crackers you're close it is cereal cereal so now when you open a box of cereal you open the cardboard box that inside there's a wax bad yeah usually right yeah To keep it from gold stale.

Oh, so it used to be in the cardboard box and take the wax paper and, like, take the wax paper and, like, take the wax paper and, like, take the wax paper. Yeah. And they used to print the brand name and the logo on the wax paper part. And the box is just a plain paper box. All right. Well, good job with my quiz. So, well, you might ask, what happened to Ample Hills Creamery? Yeah. Well, Chris, you can still get their ooey-gooey butter cake.

They're still in business after the bankruptcy. an Oregon company bought Ample Hills. Okay. They didn't change much of the branding or flavors. They actually opened back up the stores and rehired employees, but the original founders are no longer there. Yes, they sell pints now, but Ample Hill pints are in cylinder round containers.

Yeah, well, yeah. Yep. They're hexagons. They're, uh, rouleau. A rouleau. They're Rulot. triangles. Each pint cost $39

to subsidize the specialized machinery they had to buy. A fan. So this just happened to me recently. The Mickey Mouse Lunchbox question reminded me that this happened. We talk a lot on the show about the 19 years, about the old time. Tell me about the old days,

Grandpa. And something happened recently that made me want to crumble to dust and just sort of blow away on the breeze. But one of my Kids was watching a YouTube video that was about the Cuphead show on Netflix. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, of course, the Cuphead show. And, of course, you know, that really throws back to those old, like, Max Fleischer

cartoons of the 30s and 40s and stuff like that. And the host on the YouTube was talking about all of the cool things about the Cuphead show. And they're like, and the Cuphead show even purposefully has static on the screen to make it look like an old 90s TV show. And they're showing it. And it's, it's showing the fact the Cuphead show has a film brain effect to make it look like an old 1930s film strip, which someone of today reads as TV static. That's what they think TV look like in the 90s show.

Yep. Yep. It's, I mean, it's just, it's just all downhill from here, too. I mean, like, when our kids try and imagine, like, to even explain, like, imagine to even explain, like, imagine to my daughter one day that. When I was a kid, I would watch some reruns that were in black and white. But yeah, she's going to be like, oh, on purpose, you did that? You know what they're doing? You know what I've just heard about?

You know what they're doing with some shows that were originally broadcasts like in PAL TV territory? So like in the UK, right? They're doing color recovery on these shows, not colorization. When they broadcast black and white stuff in PAL, it actually still had like color information. included in the broadcast in it and so they're able to go in so they're doing this with like episodes of doctor who and stuff like that they're able to go in and actually recover not re not colorized right right the color information is already there um to get the color essentially signal and the color so it was lost it was lost in the playback it wasn't lost in the creation or the transmission

yeah you wouldn't see it or the transmission yeah it's like they transmitted it but it's like I guess they transmitted it in monochrome, but like this, whatever the signal was, like, still had remnants of what the colors were. And they can get that back. That's really great. Wow. Yeah, isn't that cool? When Johann Rawl received the letter on Christmas Day 1776, he put it away to read later.

Maybe he thought it was a season's greeting and wanted to save it for the fireside. But what it actually was was a warning, delivered to the Hessian colonel, letting him know that General George Washington was crossing the. Delaware and would soon attack his forces. The next day, when Rawl lost the Battle of Trenton and died from two colonial Boxing Day musket balls, the letter

was found, unopened in his vest pocket. As someone with 15,000 unread emails in his inbox, I feel like there's a lesson there. Oh well, this is the constant, a history of getting things wrong. I'm Mark Chrysler. Every episode we look at the bad ideas, mistakes, and

accidents that misshaped our world. Find us at Constant Podcast. com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, yo, you're listening to Good Job, Brain. And this week we're talking about things that are squares, things that are cubes. So, Colin, what do you have for us? I have a story for you guys about one of the most secretive, most dangerous topics in all of history, which is square roots.

but in in all seriousness in all seriousness we are going to travel back in time just a little bit here to a period when when you know knowledge of math and geometry really were considered realms of you know secret or forbidden knowledge and potentially possibly something that might even cost you your life no all right just to recap very quickly of course when we talk about squares and square roots we're talking about if you take a number like three, multiply it by itself. Three times three, you get nine. And we can say that three is the square root of nine. Four is the square root of 16, five, square root of 25, and on and on and on. So let's do a little experiment here. Name an ancient Greek mathematician. Don't think too hard. Just name whoever comes to mind here. Pythagoras. All right. That's a good one. I was hoping, I was hoping one of you, or both of you were going to say, Pythagoras. And I mean, to be fair, the guy has a very famous theorem with his name attached to it, the Pythagorean theorem. Let's give it up for that.

That's a good one. That works most of the time I use it. Yeah, yeah. That's a good theorem. Does one of you guys want to maybe give our listeners maybe a quick rundown here? You want to explain, what is the Pythagorean theorem? What does it say? Why do we still talk about it even to this day?

The theorem itself is A squared plus B squared equal C squared. And this is describing a right angle triangle. So on the right angle, the sides, A and B, so A squared plus B squared, should equal to the hypotenuse, which is the slanty side. You got it. The longest slanty side squared. That's right. That's right. In a right angle triangle, the square of the length of the long side, the hypotenuse, if you will, is equal to the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides.

That's right, A squared plus B squared equals C squared, one of the easiest formulas to remember from our math days. You know, and there are some very classic kind of clean examples of this, as you will. The really famous ones they teach us in school are Pythagorean triples, where the sides are all integers, which makes it very easy to do the math. Three, four, five. The classic, classic example. So three, four, five, let's take that for an example. So one side of three, that squared is nine. one side of four that squared is 16 the long side of five that squared is 25 which is nine plus 16 now even though it bears his name there's definitely a lot of evidence that this relationship was known to other cultures other peoples at other times but there's no question that pythagoras came out on top in the branding he put his name on the card certainly his name is attached to it there's there's no question about it

But I want to talk to you about another famous, but perhaps less famous, ancient Greek mathematician and thinker named Hippasus, Hippasus of metapantum. I should say that, you know, in their day, most of these famous names would describe themselves as philosophers. Oh. Pythagoras, for sure, was a, among many things, was a philosopher, first and foremost. So, hippocis, you know, a lot of the details of his life are uncertain, maybe contentious, over hundreds of years. years, you know, fact will blend with legend. Sometimes tales of multiple people get combined into one person, you know, the composite character of history, right? I mean, this happens a lot, even with some of the most famous people in the history books. Here's what we know about Hippasus. Hippesus was a philosopher.

He was one of the early followers of Pythagoras. Now, Pythagoras, yeah, so Pythagoras was a very driven, charismatic person, he founded his own school. There was the school of Pythagoras, and they were the Pythagoreans. In his day, it was effectively a secret society. This was a very serious deal. If you wanted to become a Pythagorean, it was, you had to be initiated in. There was a probationary period. You had to spend a long time just sort of listening and attending and silence.

There were strict dietary codes. There were strict conduct and morality. Well, it wasn't all for math, Karen. That's the thing. I mean, this really was a school of philosophy. They were up to some serious thinking, and you were bound by secrecy. Not unlike a cult in many ways. They were focused on a theory of the universe as it relates to numbers, all right?

They were really trying to establish the idea that whole numbers were integral to every aspect of the universe. If you could discover these relationships of the numbers that you would discover deep secrets into the universe itself. It's kind of true. And it is true. It is true. You know, I mean, we do see some of the relationships coming up again and again and again. And so let's go back, all right, to our example of the Pythagorean theorem, right? A squared plus B squared equals C squared.

So let's construct, if you will, with me here, a right triangle that is an isosceles. Okay. Let's say you just take a square, all right? take a square and you cut it in half diagonally, all right? Oh, like bread. So you now have a right triangle where two of the sides are the same. So let's say they measure one. Okay, just to make our math easier.

So one side is one. The other short side is one. The long side, we're going to figure this out here. Okay, so A squared plus B squared equals C squared. So if the two short sides are one each, right, one squared is one, one times one, makes the math really easy. So one plus one equals two. whatever the long side is squared equals two square root of two exactly now do you guys from your

math class is there is there any particular property about the square root of two that is famous or noted or stands out to you in learning math karen what what is that i went to geek camp for all those years for this moment this is your slumdog millionaire moment karen it is irrational it is it is it is right. It is very famously irrational. Perhaps, perhaps behind. What does that mean? So what it means? Yeah, it doesn't mean that it doesn't mean that, you know, it won't let you win an argument. Maybe it won't. What it, what it means is that the square root of two cannot be expressed exactly as the ratio of two integers, one over four, which would be, you know, 0.25, right? If you could write it out in decimal

notation, never terminates, and it never repeats. I think, safe to say, the most famous irrational number is probably pi, we've talked about on the show before, which is very, very roughly 3, 1, 4, et cetera, pie for sure, number one, square root of 2 right there. So yeah, square root of 2 is an irrational number. To say that this was unsettling to the Pythagoreans was an understatement, all right? Because their whole worldview is the neatness. Is the neatness. And right.

So if you showed them this relationship of, you know, one, one, square two, you know, their first reaction naturally was like, okay, well, we just need to find the right ratio. But we'll keep digging and we'll find the right ratio. And it is, in fact, provable that it is irrational number. It doesn't matter how long you look. You're not going to find a ratio that can express square or two. This freaked them out.

This was really, really a bad deal for them because they had invested so much into establishing these neat, orderly relationships of integers among the world. You've got just this basic example. If you're inside the Pythagorean school, all right, one, anything that you learn is essentially a secret, all right? So this is a secret. And it's an embarrassing secret as well. Yeah, it's a scandal.

Yeah, that's right. So now someone had to be the person to basically like, oh, guys, I got some bad news, right? So according to the most colorful versions of this legend, the poor, brilliant, doomed soul who raised the alarm, if you will, on this issue to his fellow Pythagoreums was our good buddy, Hippasus. And the exact manner in which he is supposedly said to have stumbled across this dangerous. secret is a little unclear. It's possible he was working on something as complex as how to construct a dodecahedron inside of a sphere. You know, they were really big on, as you might do just any day. Sure. Yep, yep. Fitting things and things. The ancient Greeks, oh, they were really big on fitting things and things. And this might have led him to the discovery that they were

provably irrational numbers. This is what happens when you're like, when you're like basic needs, you know, as a human being or are taken care of. And you don't have to worry. about where your next meal is going to come from. But then it's ancient Greece, so there's like no video games. So it's like, what do you, what do you do all day, you know, your wife of leisure? It's like, I'm going to try to fit squares into dodeck anagrams. See how many I can just shove in there and see if that gets me to like dinner time. Right, until sundown.

Look, I mean, it's no coincidence that many of the most famous Greek philosophers were from very wealthy families or noble families, where they did indeed have a lot of ample time, didn't need to worry about the basic needs, right? Now, so depending on the versions of the story that I have read, Hippocis was either thrown off a boat into the ocean. He was murdered on the spot. He might have drowned at sea by the gods themselves as punishment for discovering the secret.

Probably. One version has him so racked with shame and guilt that he killed himself. The least dramatic outcome of all these legends that I read was that he was simply, exiled, all because they couldn't reconcile the square root of just a very simple number. All right. And that's our show. Thank you guys for joining me. And thank you guys, listeners, for listening in.

Hope you learned stuff about a square root of two, about GameCube, about ice cream packaging. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, and on all podcast apps. And on our website, good jobbrain.com. This podcast is part of Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit airwavemedia.com to listen and subscribe to other shows like the All Creatures Podcast, Who Arted, and Everything Everywhere Daily. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye.

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