Good Job, Brain! - 238: [REDACTED]

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Trivia and facts about things that have been wiped out and erased. Karen has removed one letter from famous book titles! Can you recognize these literary works by their bonkers updated plot summaries? Enjoy the debut of Colin's segment, "Hey, It's Not Written in Stone... Oh Wait, Actually It Is Written in Stone?" about how people remedied typo goofs on very, very, very famous monuments. Chris sparks our interest in mysterious movies that have been wiped out of existence all because old film had a nasty habit of burning down buildings. Find out how dry erase markers work, and the very tantalizing love triangle that takes place in erasable pens. 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, warm-hearted warlocks, worry warts, and wordsmiths worthy of wordplay. Welcome to Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode 238, and of course, I'm here. You're a humble host, Karen, and we are your stubbled, stud-studious stud muffins stunned by stupendous stuff. I'm Colin. And I'm Chris.

I would say two-thirds of us are currently stabbled, I would say. Little hairs, like face hairs, right? Oh, I guess, I guess. True. But unless you're hitting them with a, you know, a Mach 3, you know, it's... I think it's up to Mach 9 now. Oh, yeah. We're reaching the...

The limits. Stop. The Gillette decimator. It's just an eight and a half by 11 inch just rectangle of blades that you just, yeah. You just have to move it once. You just put it in everything, it's gone. I have a dumb question. The Mach 3, Mach 4 razor.

But what actually is a mock? It's an airplane measurement, right? A unit of the speed of sound. So Mach 2 is like twice the speed of sound. Twice the speed of sound. That's right. Yep, yeah, yeah, yeah. named after, I believe, Ernst Mock, I believe, was

going to have to look that up here. Yeah, go for it. Yes, yes, Ernst Mok. I just had to introduce my son to the concept of, I came out of the bathroom and he's like, oh, my God, what happened to you? I'm like, oh, I had a little, tiny little Japanese flag on my face, and I'm like, oh, I get my shelf shaving, you know? And he's like, what?

And I'm like, no, it's okay, it's all right. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to be fine. Yeah, I remember the first time seeing my dad, yeah, with the little, just that classic, just the little toilet paper tab, you know, just do it. Just, yep, right. And Japan flag. Without further ado, let's jump into our first general trivia segment, pop quiz, hot shot. Here I have a random trivial pursuit card. You guys have your barnyard buzzers.

Chris is the rooster. Colin is the horse. Here we go. Blue Wedge for Geography. The landmark known as La Pouce in Paris is a 40-foot-high bronze sculpture of what body part? Wow. Okay. That is spelled La, L-E, the P-O-U-C-E.

P-O-U-C-E. Body part. Colin. The ear. No. Basically, it's asking, do you know what this French word means? Yes. A thumb.

It is a thumb. Great, great, great. Figured it had to be an extremity on the body. You know what I mean? Like, some you can make a sculpture out of. Oh, but not that. So there we go. That's good.

All right, next question, Pink Wedge. Who called Hamilton? Brilliant. And the only thing that Dick Cheney and I have agreed on during my entire political career. Oh. Hamilton, the musical, Chris? Former President Barack Hussein Obama.

President Obama. Next question, Yellow Edge. In 1981, which historic Republican appointee joined the United States Supreme Court? 1981. Republican, oh. Colin. Is that Sandra Day O'Connor? Yes, correct.

Says here, the first of several women to sit on the nation's high. Court. Purple Wedge. This Side of Paradise was the debut novel for which Jazz Age author. Jazz Age has quotes on it. I'm doing air quotes. So again, this side of paradise was the debut novel for which Jazz Age author. Chris. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Correct. Green Wedge. Edison's electric pen became the inspiration for which modern day two Cool. Oh, Colin. Is it a tattoo, tattooing device? Yes, it's a tattoo gun.

Yeah. I'm just picturing like the most just steampunky, beefy-looking device, like coming out of Edison's lab here. Last question, Orange Wedge. Which NCAA football team won the first championship under the college football playoff system. Oh, man. So, you know, they, they tinker with these, these playoff systems a lot over the years.

It's very complicated. But basically it was a way of kind of formalizing the process to make it supposedly, you know, more definitive. Yeah. Oh, Chris. Harvard. Incorrect. It's a big football school.

I don't know, yeah, I don't know how far back it goes. A little more, there's a little more recent. Yeah. I'll guess. Colin Huggis Alabama It is Ohio State Okay

Ohio State Does it give a year on the card Doesn't so it's That's frustrating Yeah I can see where Chris is going for Because it's like how long ago was it If it's really early

Yeah if it's like 1899 Yeah oh yeah Princeton Yeah right Like was it before they invented Forward Pass or like after yeah Go sports Good job brains Hey good work

So Colin you were the one who suggested the our topic of inquiry. I did. I did. I was inspired by a couple things is I feel like maybe I'm watching and reading too much news but redacted documents have been in the news a lot recently. I feel like just I'm seeing redacted documents and then I went by something I saw an ad for tattoo removal as well, somewhere just out in the city. And something in my brain just kind of connected.

I was like, oh, there's something here. So I started making a list of things that are about removal and erasure and redaction and changes. And I kind of just let it flow from there. All right. So this week we're going to talk about things that are rejected. Here I have a silly quiz where I have redacted. I've taken out one letter out of famous book titles. One letter out of famous book titles.

I'm going to give you the new plot summary. Oh, gosh. Yeah, okay. All right. And you tell me what this book title is or what this new book title. title is. So it's like one letter off, right? It's one letter removed. I've erased it. One letter removed. Okay. One letter removed. Very good. I'll also tell you the author as well. So, okay. Even if the plasmary is a little bit too crazy, like at least you have the author to go by.

So, okay, okay. Buzz in with your answers. Number one, Louisa May Alcott's story about the small prophecies of the March family. Little omen. Little omen. Little omen. Little women, little omen. All right. Number two. Barack Obama explores the American tradition of beer. Chris. Oh, gosh.

Why am I blanking? Sorry, sorry. Oh, a false alarm. Barack Obama explores the American tradition of beer. Beer. American tradition of beer ingredients, maybe. Yeah, he had more than one book, too. The audacity of hop

Yes Yes Audacity of hop Audacity of hope His book about whiskey Drams from my father That's great Number three

Marjorie Williams's Classic Children's Tale About a Jewish spiritual leader dressed in plush fabric Oh Colin The Velveteen rabbi

Yes Velvetine Rabbit All right Next one Aldous Huxley's masterpiece About a dystopian world Set to Electronic Music Colin

Would that be Rave New World Rave New World Brave New World Correct All right Kurt Vonnegut's Seminole anti-war novel

About War Prisoners Using Humor to Survive Oh, that's great. That's good. That's good. Laughter House 5. Yes. For these, I try to pick where, like, when you take one letter off, it's pronounced differently.

Laughter House, Slaughter House. That's great. That's really good. Next one. Lewis Carroll's adventure about gnarly insects that live in the Red Queen's hair. Oh Oh Colin

Is that Lice in Wonderland? Yes Charles Dickens' story about an orphan digestive organ thieving in London An orphan

digestive organ steving Oh okay, okay, okay Chris Liver twist Oliver twist Oliver twist Liver twist. All right, two more.

Anna Sewell's Children's Classic about a Dark Horse that's Kind of Ugly. Oh. Chris. Lack Beauty. Lack Beauty. Black Beauty. Black Beauty, the beautiful horse. Black Beauty.

Last one. Here we go. Dan Brown's Fischy Puzzle Quest Thriller. Fischy Puzzle Quest Thriller. That's a thrilling food. Oh. Colin. The Da Vinci Cod.

Yes. Gosh. I know, too, because I know them all. So I'm like, angles and demons. Angle, yeah, that's what I was thinking like, is it angle fishing? Because I got caught up on like angler fishing.

And I'm like, if you only know one book, it's a lot easier to why. I mean, maybe you know one. I succeed. I succeed because of my ignorance there on that way. Yep. So Da Vinci Kod. What a thriller.

All right. Well, thank you, everybody. That was my quiz. You know, I should make a part two at some point. You should? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I don't know if you guys have a favorite feature of Gmail. Getting a little nerdy here, but we're all friends. For me, for me, there's no question. My favorite feature of Gmail is the delayed send feature. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Well, I've never used that before. It's one of the little toggles.

Yeah, it's, you know, at first you hear it, sounds pretty gimmicky, but I come to rely on this. I love it. So if you're not familiar with what it is, it's basically I have on my email a 30 second timer. And you can adjust this time that you want. So I have a little 30 second timer on all my outbound emails. So I type my email or I hit reply and I hit send. And Gmail, you know, it looks and acts and behaves like, oh, I just set your email. You got it. But it's kind of like wink, wink, because there's a little tab down at the bottom that says undo and that sits there for my predetermined time of 30 seconds you can set it a minute if you wanted and I can hit that undo button and then it just sort of magically brings the email back to

the edit screen it's like just kidding I didn't really send it I got you covered boss it's great because as any writer can tell you professional or amateur you always spot that typo immediately after you hit submit I'll send the email and I'll immediately spot some dumb typo that I made or, you know, I'll use the person's name twice or something just, you know, just silly. And I'll just like, ah, let me just clean that up and fix it. And then I'll go ahead and send it again. It's nice to have that backup. Working with words and ideas and in kind of creative field, especially in digital media these days, you know, you hear the phrase, hey, it's not written in stone. Yeah, we can always change it, you know, just put down the words. We'll tinker with it.

We'll play with it. Make a mistake. It's easy to fix. You make a goof. You just revise it. That's try it, fix it in post, move on. When you push out a new version, we'll patch it, we'll update it. But I got to thinking, what about those poor souls who do in fact commit their writing to stone? That for their job, it is written in stone. And if you realize you make a goof or someone tells you, you make a goof, you got a much bigger hill to climb there than just hitting undo in your little Gmail tab. So I have three little tales for you guys of sculpture and engraving gone wrong. Oh, nice.

In a segment I've called, hey, it's not written in stone. Oh, wait, actually, it is written in stone. I'm sorry, what? I'm being told it is written in stone. This just did. So I have a few misadventures in stone and bronze. You know, we'll expand it a little bit to sculpture more generally. involving statues and memorials for three very famous men,

two probably the most famous Americans of all time, without a doubt, one of the most famous Canadians of all time as well. Alanis. Michael J. Fox. Oh. But let's start there in Canada from the Bay Area here to Brantford, Ontario. And...

Well, that's weird because Chris is from Brantford, Connecticut. North Brantford. North Bramford. I'm sorry. We don't associate with that. Is there a Bradford? There is, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, in 2013, a new statue. In fact, actually, a set of statues, we'll talk about this in a minute, went up and was unveiled to a throng of locals and fans. This statue unveiling was part of a grand reopening and marking the renovation of the Wayne Gretzky Sports Center in Brantford, Ontario. Wayne Gretzky, born in Brantford, grew up there, you know, learned to play hockey there. This was a big deal for them to just really rededicate the center. It was a 12-foot bronze statue of Gretzky hoisting the, you know, the Stanley Cup up over his head. And, you know, the Stanley Cup is big.

It's big. It's huge. And one of the reasons that it's huge, as you probably know, this comes up in trivia, is There's additional bands added on to the bottom of the cup over generations of players that record the names and teams of who won the Stanley Cup in previous years. Across from him are three other statues figures that are Gretzky as a young, as a young boy, and his parents. So it's a little weird. It's a little maybe on the nose. I don't know.

But it's a picture that's him's parents looking at himself as, you know, the future, the great one. Yeah, so, you know, it was great. Everybody loved it, had a great time. A lot of people showed up. Everything was pretty good. Nobody there, certainly not Wayne Gratzky, none of the officials seemed to notice something that a 12-year-old named Joel England noticed. He was looking really closely at the statue, looking at the Stanley Cup in particular. These are Joel's words here. He said, I looked up and I saw 89-90 Stanley Cup champions for the LA Kings. Wait a minute. That's not right. didn't win the Stanley Cup until 2012. Then he noticed that were also some other interesting names on the statue of the Stanley Cup. Bill Clinton, apparently playing for the Blackhawks in 2003. Brad Pitt listed as playing for the Dallas Stars in the 90s. Kanye West's name was on there. In one spot, Gretzky's name was misspelled.

On his own statue honoring the man in front of the center. Yeah, it was spelled as. G-R-E-T-Z-S-K-Y. Brits-S-K-E. Really, really unfortunate. Things that were probably meant to be jokes that shouldn't have made it all the way through on the statue. So, turns out, a sculptor of the statue said, basically, he was very honest. He was like, oh, my gosh, that was never meant to be read individually.

So this sounds like he had a studio in a factory kind of, not a factory, like, you know, an artist's studio, whereas a team of people producing the final work. And I guess in his original vision, it was just supposed to be kind of like, you know, what they call it, Greek-dout characters, right? Just sort of just gibberish, like just to look like writing, but not actual real letters. They fixed it. So he did. He committed to pretty quickly once he was found out, he's like, I will fix this,

I'll make it right, re-engraved the letters so that it was no longer legible as real text with bad names and misspellings and incorrect dates. All right. Let's drop back down below the border here. Back to the good old US of A. We are certainly no strangers here to mistakes in stone. We're going to go visit one of our, probably safe to say,

one of our most famous monuments, statues in the U.S., which is the Lincoln Memorial. Okay. Have you guys ever been to Lincoln Memorial? Yes. It's cool out there. It's pretty cool. In the Lincoln Memorial,

Lincoln, he's seated, and then there's inscriptions on the walls of the memorial all around him. The memorial's been there since, you know, 1922 was when it was dedicated. And it says Wayne Gretzky. It says Wayne Gretzky. And it's on the walls around Lincoln seated there in the chamber are his speeches and, you know, saying some things like that. On the north wall in particular, it has part of his. his second inaugural speech, okay, just carved big, giant letters. In this chunk of text, the sentences, with high hope for the future, no prediction in

regard to it is ventured, all right? When it was carved, the engraver accidentally carved a initial E instead of an F in the word future in the phrase, high hope for the future. So it's a, I hope for the yutcher. Again, you know, they get it up there, they finish it. And then someone's like, oh, wait a minute. What do you do? What do you think they did?

How do you think they solved this problem? You know, the F and E are pretty similar. It's just the line at the bottom. So I would think they like probably carved a chunk of marble or something and then like filled it up. That's pretty much what they did. They basically, yeah, they basically just filled it in with like, you know, like more. or grout or like additional yeah they didn't like carve a plug to fit you can still if you go today you can see like it is plainly visible if you know if you see like you go up there and like oh yep

that used to be an e and they just kind of just filled it and turned it into it into an f you know it's like again you just you kind of do your best you can't take down this entire chunk of limestone man how lucky are they that's an e and f yeah you know what I mean it's not like a oh an oh and an e he probably started doing an f because it was like for the future but then And he had just done the E and the, he was just thinking about E's, because you get up there, you're tapping it out, you're not really thinking about the word, you're just sort of mechanically kind of doing it. And so then you do an E didn't even notice, yeah, oops. All right, all right. So we've had a couple kind of, I mean, I think all things considered relatively light fixes so far.

Yeah, all right. So we're going to stay in D.C. here because if one goof is good, two are even better. In fact, we're going to journey over a little ways from the Lincoln Memorial to the memorial for another famous American that is, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., dedicated in 2011. And, in fact, the inspiration for the memorial was a line from the I Have a Dream speech. And in particular, it was the line, out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. And I don't know if you guys, I have not been there in person.

It opened after the last time I was in D.C., but it's pretty cool, you know, Dr. King kind of emerging from this big chunk of stone. But the way it's set up, it's set up to look like this big chunk of stone has sort of slid forward out of and created a gap out of a big sort of the mountain of despair. This stone of hope has slid forward. In the memorial, sort of there are a bunch of inscriptions on the walls kind of surrounding the main piece. And they were chosen by a council of very esteemed, you know, historians. And that part, by all accounts, went pretty well.

The inscriptions on the actual centerpiece, the stone of hope, however, ended up being a fiasco. On the side of the stone of hope, here's what they carved. Okay. So when it opened, it was carved in there, the words that said, I was a drum major for justice, peace, and righteousness. Now, this is paraphrased. It was not a direct quote. It was, you know, kind of munched together out of a much longer passage. In paraphrasing this quote, inverted the meaning.

They basically took away what Dr. King was trying to say. So the fuller quote, the longer quote, was, if you want to say that I was a drum major, okay, and I'll pause here now, he's addressing his critics. He's addressing critics who are saying, you're just showboating, you're just about your personal glory, you're a drum major calling attention to yourself. And this is him turning it around saying, all right, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice, say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major

for righteousness. Almost immediately, people were criticizing this. I mean, like, you know, no less than Maya Angelou herself said that basically, like, as written, the quote made him sound like, I believe it is an arrogant twit were her words. There was a lot of talk about what to do.

Like, it's way too long. You can't just get in there and fill in a couple letters. You can't also. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they talked a lot with the planning committee, the backers who helped fund it, Dr. King's family,

and the sculptor as well, of course. And so ultimately, what they ended up deciding to do was about a year later, they agreed. It took them a while to kind of come around to this. They agreed, we're just going to obliterate the entire quote. We're just going to shave it, blast it. They basically absorbed and ate the cost of doing that. And, you know, again, the sculptor was apologetic, but...

That's not his fault or her fault. That's right. Ultimately, it's like, we all agreed, right? It's like, we all signed off on this. It was reportedly, I read something like $800,000, yeah, to basically, you know... What? Yeah, to basically scrape it off and redo the finish so the colors look right and it doesn't look like someone just came in there with a giant belt sander. That's like a house.

Well, you have to pay, like, extremely skilled people to do it, and they're going to and they're going to charge, like, you know. Wow. If you feel bad about sending out a typo in your Gmail account, don't feel bad because at much greater expense, people can top you. I'm trying to remember if I shared this story before. My sister in high school, she, like, wrote to the newspaper, like the Taipei English newspaper, like letters to the editor. It was really exciting because it's like she got published, but they spelled her name instead of Jennifer Choo. they spelled it Jennifer Chubb.

Oh, no. We get the paper, it's printed, and then you're reading what she wrote, and then at the end, you know, dashed Jennifer Chubb. It's just like a high schooler, you know what I mean? Like, it's a very delicate time. Well, at least we can count on high schoolers to be mature and, yeah, understanding. Understanding. And certainly not inclined to tease.

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Yes. Okay. So we've been talking about things that have been intentionally erased, intentionally covered up, removed, et cetera. I would like to talk about some things that were not intended to be lost, that were not intended to be removed from existence. And in particular, I want to talk about the phenomenon of lost films, lost films, films, movies, whether shorts or feature-length movies, silent movies, talking movies, whatever, that we know existed. At some point, we have evidence, you know, that they absolutely were made and existed. But that now no copies are currently known to exist. The film foundation, that is the nonprofit that was founded by Martin Scorsese, director Martin Scorsese, it is devoted to the preservation and the restoration of films and film

history. The Film Foundation estimates that of the films released prior to the year 1929, 90% of them have been lost. Part of this is because at the time, you know, few people considered film to be this important cultural heritage, you know, that was worth saving. It was like a novelty. It was cheap entertainment. It wasn't like classic literature or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But even, even if you did think that, and then there were absolutely people who did, the thing with old films is that they just had a habit of spontaneously combusting. Like, I really mean that at one point you would just have a film reel sitting there, and the next moment it would just be on literal fire.

Why? Because early film, they used a compound known as nitrocellulose, a.k.a. Celluloid or nitrate film. I heard of celluloid. Nitrocellulose is what that is. You might say nitro, nitrate? Nitrate film? Like, that sounds kind of explodey, right? Yeah. And it totally was. I mean, they used it, you know, in, you know, explosive substances.

But not only was nitrocellulose super flammable and super explodey, but like, you know how like flames require oxygen, right? Yeah. So, like, you might, like, pour water on a fire to put it out or like put a blanket over a fire to to you know take away the oxygen yeah so in the molecular like structure of nitrocellulose there's a bunch of oxygen so it just feeds itself it makes its own gravy it just yeah exactly so it just keeps going in if it's you have like film that's on fire and you put it in water it just it becomes like more on fire like it's like there's it just

produces more smoke and you can't put a blanket over it because there's just enough oxygen so it's like you have one film reel sitting around. It's probably like, I don't know, in a closet with a bunch of other film. Right next to another one. And also get on fire. Oh, man. You have many, many, many recorded incidents in which movie theaters burn down. People die.

A studio's entire, you know, archive of films just is gone because it just burns up. The old movie theater's projection room where they would show the film, they used to line it with asbestos. in case the film caught fire but it's like if the film's all caught fire it's like there was like nothing they could do but just leave close the door and just let it all burn what are you going to do? At least

if you have asbestos around the room that's the only thing that goes up in flames not the entire theater and all the people in it so in the late 1940s they introduced film that had the fortunate property of not simply bursting into it.

Yeah but even if the films didn't explode, these films, they still used, you know, silver in the process of creating them. And film studios would often just, again, they'd look at this and be like, why do I need this? Let's recycle this old film. Nobody's going to watch this anymore. Let's take the silver back to use it again. You also had World War II, in which a lot of films were scrapped for their precious silver for the war effort, you know? So by then, by that point, the 40s, the 50s, a lot of film had been lost. So let's talk about some of the most famous lost films.

So the whole point about like cataloging a lot of these lost films is not only to preserve the history that's there, but because it is totally possible that someday somebody might find somewhere a print of one of these that has survived. And it's important to know what's out there and start looking for what's out there because somebody finds a print of a film. They're like, what is this? And they go online, they search it. They might end up on the web page.

of people saying, here are lost films. If you have this, please contact the American Film Institute or the British Film Institute, the BFI actually maintains a Most Wanted list, like for this purpose. And they have found films. They found a lot of the more recent ones where it's like a film from the 1970s, like nobody can find it. And then they'll find it in a private collection or something like that. So the Most Wanted of the Most Wanted, the Number One movie that's on the BFI's,

you know, most wanted list is a 1926 film. It is called the Mountain Eagle. It is the second film ever directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Whoa. A Hitchcock movie is lost. I'm going to just quote Wikipedia here. The plot of this movie is basically, it is a romantic melodrama set in Kentucky about a widower who jealously competes with his crippled son and a man he loads over the affections of a school teacher.

So obviously this sounds like this movie. like absolutely rules um yeah alfred hitchcock said it was bad and he was happy it was gone they're still trying to find that's the big one uh there was a 1914 movie called a study in scarlet this is the first british film depicting sherlock holmes that's right yep wow um so that's lost that's early that is early a lot of these are very early in 1919 this movie called the first men in the moon this is the first movie to be based on an hg wells novel also maybe considered the first full science fiction movie. That's lost.

I mean, for all of these, there's like stills, because they'd shoot photographs and things like that for promotional stills and like the lobby cards or maybe even posters for some of these movies survive. It's just the film that was so volatile. There's a movie, 1928, movie called The Patriot. This is a biographical movie about Emperor Paul I of Russia. What is interesting about this one,

it was nominated for Best Picture in the Academy Awards. And it actually won the Oscar for Best Writing, and it's lost. It's the only Oscar winning film, the only Best Picture nominee that is lost. Oh, that's a good bit of trivia. Yeah, but I mean, yeah, it's not some little rinky dink, you know. And I'm picking out here a lot of things where it's like, oh my gosh, that sounds, you know, there's another movie called London After Midnight. This is also like one of the absolute holy grails of the lost movie.

this is a silent horror film with Lon Cheney, the famous, you know, sort of king of the silent horror movies, monster makeup and stuff. For this one, they apparently took lots and lots and lots of still pictures, like from the set for almost every scene. And they've used this to go back and like recreate the movie out of stills. It was a silent movie out of like stills and dialogue and stuff like that. This was actually, this was, they had this until 1965.

There was an MGM vault fire and a whole. vault full of nitrite film, you know, all went up and went up in smoke, and this was lost there as well. MGM actually was trying to preserve movies. Like, they actually really were trying to keep this stuff around, but, you know, ultimately, it probably just took a long time to, like, transfer these things onto a film that was safe. Yeah. Um, 1921 short feature called humor risk, uh, humor and then RISK, humor risk. This was the first, uh, Marks Brothers short. Oh, wow. For this one, there's a rumor. that Groucho Marx himself destroyed it

because he didn't like it. But it's lost. And then many of the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit black and white short films that Walt Disney did in the 20s, many of those are lost. Every now and again, somebody recovers in Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. They had

pretty wide distribution around the world, you know, so I mean, every now and again, what will be found in Britain or somebody found one in Japan at one point, you know? Also jumping over very quickly to Australia for the final movie I want to talk about. 1909, very early, an Australian film called The Story of the Kelly Gang. And this is a movie that tells the story of Ned Kelly,

who is a real-life figure who is a Bush Ranger, basically like Australian outlaws. This is considered to be like the first ever feature film, the first ever like feature length, fictional narrative. You know, motion picture, 1909. And this is partially lost. This is Australia's most wanted film. Again, just quickly paraphrasing Wikipedia.

This is partially lost in the sense that there's, there's some of this film is still around. In 1976, they found a few seconds of it. Wow. Seconds. Seconds. In 1978, they found 64 meters of film in somebody's private collection. In 1980, they found more footage of the story of the Kelly Gang in a garbage dump.

No. Oh, my gosh. And in 2006, they found a few more minutes of it in the United Kingdom. So as of now, they have 17 minutes of the full length. I feel like, I feel like. like years ago, I may have seen something on cable about like film restoration or something like this. And they were talking, I seem to recall that they were saying that they kept some of these movies that they were in the process of trying to restore, like in an artificially chilled,

you know, storage unit to basically try and minimize the chance that this thing may just up in, you know, combust on you. That's what they do now. We have much better technology for preserving. Well, it's the same thing with, I mean, there's no, I mean, obviously there's there's boss Disney shorts but um you know with animation cells i mean a lot of the thing with the animation cells is that the acetate that they used was very expensive and so disney would finish a movie then they take all these incredible animation cells that they had drawn to shoot for the movie then they'd and they'd wash them all and they'd use them again put in a sink well it is solvent right oh man and we have our purple patreon

patron. This is Mr. Mr. Ho or Mr. Amber from Kennesaw, Georgia. Chris, I want to ask you, in video games, there's the idea of permadeath. Yes. Can you quickly explain what perma death in a game

mean? It's like as you're sometimes in a role playing game or a strategy game, your character dies, but then you can bring them back to life using a certain item or a magic spell or something. So death is not really death, death. But, But Hermodeath is the idea that if you're playing through these battles and a character dies in battle, that's it. And so you could reload your old save file or something like that. But it's like you can't just bring them back to life.

So you've got to actually like make sure that your characters never die over the course of the game if you want them to actually stay with your party over the course of the game. Now there's some, there are some games where the game is sort of constantly saving behind you. there is no save so if you die you just get a game over and you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the game like that could be permadeth as well um and so there's some games that are meant to be played over and over again from the beginning um you know without saving essentially uh so sometimes that that means that as well but it is an interesting um it's not an oxymoron but it seems like a it seems redundant you know what it is in video games it's now right like death originally like was permit you know it's perma that's but death.

is but death in video games is reversible. So the irreversible death in video games is a big deal perma death. Yeah. We grow up thinking yeah, when you die in video games, there's there's some compromise. Maybe you'll lose your stuff. Maybe you'll lose your money. Maybe you have to start some more. But like you can still technically continue with the game. So Mr. Amber writes in and he said sometimes games, the games would kill themselves permanently. Not your file or not your character, but the game itself for a more economic reason to deter piracy and bootlegging. So he talks about, especially in arcade machines in the 90s, an example of this would be

the Capcom CP System 2 boards, which were arcade boards for games like Super Street Fighter 2, Turbo, aliens versus Predator, which actually had something called a suicidal battery. Okay. So as soon as like the battery is tampered, the machine knows like, oh, it's being tampered. I'm going to wipe my entire, I'm going to wipe the machine. Wow. And so when people like, yeah, yeah.

So when people steal or try to like maneuver things, get their hands on it, it would sense it and it would just wipe the game. So you can't get to it. So you can't take the game and like start disassembling it to take the ROM chips and try to extract the data. Backwards engineering. Yep. As soon as you take the battery. out of the board everything just goes yeah sure like like the security tags with the ink on yeah yeah on money right right yeah soon as you start trying to mess with it you just sort of render

it all moot yeah interesting do they still make them like the clothes you know like when you buy clothes and there's like a with a little dye tag yeah yeah yeah i've never seen it go off or i've never seen what happens when you tamper with it you know what i mean well you don't hang out with criminals. Yeah, I've definitely seen them. I have, I've seen it in, uh, the bathrooms at shopping malls. That's where you got to go. Go to the bathroom at the shopping mall.

Look in the garbage can and see if you see a piece of clothing with like ink all over it. It's like somebody stole out of the store, tried to get the tag off in the bathroom, failed, ditched it and left. I've read about also, this reminds me of this of some like super high security like thumb drive, like USB thumb drives that are set up. if you enter, you know, the wrong password too many times, it basically wipes itself. Yeah, it just wipes itself.

Yeah, yeah. Right. Well, so thank you, Mr. Amber, and congratulations on your recent-ish nuptials. Yeah. Thank you and congratulations. Did archaeologists discover Noah's Ark? Is the rapture coming as soon as the Euphrates River dries up? Does the Bible condemn abortion?

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or you're just interested in a clear-eyed, deeply informed look at one of the most influential books of all time. We think you're going to love the data over dogma podcast. Wherever you subscribe to awesome shows. You're listening to Good Job Brain. This week, we're talking about things that are erased, redacted, gone. I have one last segment for this episode. I hope I'm not alone in saying that I was one of those.

kids when it's like back to school season. I'm just super excited because I get all the stuff, right? Like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. No books and pencil cases and pencils. Like, were you guys like that? I feel like you shouldn't even sit here if you weren't. I did like that part of it. I can't say I was always excited about going back to school literally, but no, for sure. I loved, I loved just that smell of just, yeah, just fresh. Foulders. Yeah, just fresh school supplies. Yeah, I will admit I was that I was nerdy. So I do want to talk about one of the things that you probably have to buy for back to school. Well, actually, not nowadays.

When we were growing up, we probably had to buy erasers. Yes. Now, did you get the sort of student that I was? I wasn't taking a lot of art classes or anything like that. You know what I mean? So I had no need for like a big eraser. I would get the little kind of, you know, trapezoidal shaped or, you know, rubber pink. Yeah.

Yeah. Actually, that was a big culture shock moment for me coming to America. America is, is eraser tech. Yes. Like, in Asia, holy crap. So, so superior. So superior. Just in every way.

Like, I mean, erasers that smelled like candy, erasers that, you know, looked like little characters, erasers that actually erased the writing without just like tearing a big hole in your paper. Yeah. I mean, I'm not, I'm not here to crap on American erasers. We had a back-to-school episode. And Chris, you talked about pencils. Yeah.

You talked about, like, the history and the U.S. of pencils. And so basically, when you're writing with a pencil, you're depositing tiny, tiny powder, tiny, tiny bits of graphite that sits on the paper. Sure. So with an eraser, what you're doing is basically kind of attracting all the, all that graphite dust onto the eraser, away from the paper. Do you guys know what, uh, the UK or other Commonwealth countries call the eraser? Oh, gum. Rubber. Oh, okay. Just the rubber. Oh, okay.

All right. Actually, most erasers are made out of synthetic rubber. I'm 40 years old, and I didn't know that rubber, the material, is named after the object. No. It rubs. Are you kidding me? So it was called the rubber. And I was like, because we're like, oh, rubber ducky, rubber gloves.

I was like, oh, that's the name of the material. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You just don't even think about it. Oh, you've got to be kidding me. so an eraser was called a rubber and then that backfilled onto the material yeah yeah yeah so the material is named after the object material rubber is named after the object rubber anyways so so that's pretty much how erasers work right they they attracting the the graphite particles away from the paper they're lifting it up and this is why you can't erase pen right because how a pen works is there's actual liquid pigment right and it's soaking it doesn't sit on top of

of the paper it soaks into the fibers of the paper right so it's kind of just integrated so there's no external things to rub away or attract so if you try to erase pen you will just sit there erasing it until the paper you put a hole in the paper yeah yeah exactly however there are erasable pens yeah i remember that old eraser mate yes so so there's two types the one type we probably grew up with the eraser may um and how does it work so how can you erase this ink. So that's what they call like a rubber cement based pen. So the ink itself is pigment with basically rubber cement. And so as you're writing it out, when it's kind of, you know, fresh, it's tacky. It's like rubber cement. And so when you erase it, you're kind of like

peeling, peeling the cement away. However, if you leave it onto the paper for a really, really long time the cement hardens and it's now it's really really stuck on the paper you have a window of having it be erasable like a window where it's still pliable and it's kind of yeah there was that's right that's right yeah it doesn't write completely like a pen it's true it did it did have kind of like a i don't know like a just like a squidgey oozy quality to it or yeah and like i remember at least one time like i i don't know i sat on it my backpack or something and like the ink everywhere and it just it felt yeah more viscous and kind of sticky tacky yeah that's the kind of the old school eraser pen

however there is a recent type it's been in development for decades like 30 years came on the market in the 2000s made by pilot pilot the Japanese pen brand stationary brand they've been developing this for years and years and years and they have perfected it the pilot pens are called it's called friction but it's spelled funny it's friction f r i x i o n frixion friction right friction okay all right it is a pen it writes like a normal pen and then you erase it and it disappears you you literally erase it how does it work oh my god let me tell you so in this what they call thermo chromatic ink

there's three components let's call it one two and three number one you have the dye, which is the colorant. Number two, you have the color developer. So the dye won't show up unless it pairs with the developer. Okay. Right. So you don't see color unless, you know, with the developer. Okay.

And number three, so one, two, three, three is a temperature regulator. Yes. So you have the dye, the color, the developer, and then the temperature regulator. And this all just sort of comes out as you write. It's like microns wide. Yeah, sure. I mean, that's part of their development was to get it that small, to get these little capsules. Oh, oh, my gosh.

Microcapsules. Capsules. Capsules. Capsules. Elemine. What can I capsule? Capsule. Why do I say capsule? Capsule.

When you're just normally writing it out and you see the color, what you're seeing is the dye bonded with the developer. Okay. So those two things have to be bonded together for the. color to show up. Yeah. And the thermal regulator is chilling. No pun intended. When you're erasing what you're writing, you're not peeling away.

You're not attracting a way. You're not subtracting. You're changing the temperature. Right. Yeah. Because when you're rubbing all you're, you think you're like you're trained to think like, oh, I'm wiping in a way or I'm like peeling in a way. No, all you're doing the rubbing is just to change the temperature.

And so once the temperature gets up to like a heated friction temperature range, then number three, the thermal regulator interferes with the bond. And so now the regulator and the developer bonded together, leaving out the dye, leaving out the color capsules. Oh, no. So now the color is not activated. It's like a little love triangle and you're just like tipping the balance. It is. Who's going to like who? Who's going to bond together with who?

Oh, my gosh. The ink is there. You're not, you're not deleting it. You're just, you're like rendering it invisible. It's like reverse visible, reverse invisible ink. You're just changing the temperature. Wow. So it does it have to have like a specialized eraser that gets just the right friction

coefficient or just, yeah, could you do it with like a hairdryer or? Yes, literally. That is really cool. Does it come back when it gets cold or like once it, once it drives out the dye, it's. It can. It can. if you put it in the freezer, sometimes you can still see. You're basically now like rebonding the lovers again,

like the developer again, and it'll show up. I'm going to buy one. I'm going to get one of these pens. I have them. They work great. I mean, it doesn't even stop at pens. They have stamps that use this ink, markers that use this ink. Cool.

The advancement of this type of technology, it didn't mean that people didn't try to erase ink back in the days for a really long time people did use what was called pen eraser or ink eraser but it's essentially a knife that you carry you literally just scrape layers of paper where the ink was maybe on you know parchment or even you know animal hide you might have maybe a little thicker maybe you have a little more you know room to play with for erasing like a modern sheet of Paper, yeah. So I want to end our segment with a sad, morbid, but random, interesting story. All right.

And I'm going to start off by saying I went to a site called findagrave.com. Okay, cool. If you happen to live in the Bronx in New York, you can head over to the Woodlawn Cemetery. Yeah, famous cemetery. Where you can find a particularly strange. grave. This is what is engraved on this particular headstone. George Spencer, born February 15th, 1894, died February 15th, 1909. Lost life by stab in falling on ink eraser, evading six young women trying to give him

birthday kisses in office metropolitan life building. no that entire block is engraved onto the headstone so what a a crazy what happened who what kisses birthday ink eraser poor george spencer he was working as an office boy in new york city and it was his 15th birthday and you know i think he was probably a pretty popular maybe a good looking nice boy who, you know, on his 15th birthday, a lot of the women in the office wanted to give him kisses. Okay. It's 1909. He was trying to run away from from these kisses, run away from these women. And there was a little bit of a scuffle. And he tripped and he fell. And in his pocket was a metal ink eraser, which is, you know, like I said, it's pretty much like,

a knife. And he fell on it and it just completely pierced through an artery. Oh my God. And he he died from escaping kisses. Brutal. What a crazy story. What a crazy situation. What a crazy invention of this metal, metal pen eraser. To die from the, yeah, just like this is your tool of the trade and it you can you can find this this very very strange headstone at the Woodlawn Cemetery Wow

in the Bronx they are not paraphrasing anything on that engravement they're there we're giving you the whole story yeah yeah I went from learning that this object existed to learning that it killed this poor 15 year old boy in this space of about one minute there I know yeah

when we when we first started to think about you know stuff for this episode I started looking at something that ended up just being an interesting little factoid. And I almost forgot to mention it. Speaking of erasing things that maybe aren't supposed to be erased, if somebody takes a Sharpie marker and accidentally writes on your whiteboard with permanent marker, like, do you know the best way to get that off? I've seen that happen so many times.

No, I don't. Oh, really? So the way that you, if somebody writes with Sharpie on your dry erase board or with Sharpie on other things, the way to get this off is take a dry erase marker and just scribble dry erase marker over the Sharpie I saw a teacher do this once yeah and if it's on I mean if it's on a dry erase board it will immediately the Sharpie and the dry erase

just wipe it right off and it will come right off I've done this on like if I've had like a video game box that somebody wrote on in Sharpie I've done that and especially it works really well in like plastic or you know things like that where it's like less like where the sharpy can't penetrate you know but even if the sharp even if it's on a box or something like that you could potentially do it so what is the reason

because inside the marker you have the color and then you also have a solvent that's mixed in with it so when that when you write with a dry erase marker on the board it's just sitting on the top of there it can't stick on there because there's solvent mixed in so it's just sitting in a permanent state of being dissolved so when you take this and you draw a draw a draw the dry erase maker over the Sharpie, the solvent, which is suspending, it gets into the molecules of Sharpie and dissolves all of them too. Liquefifies it. Liquefize it and then you just wipe it right off.

Yep. Whoa. People do this all the time. They put Sharpie on the dry erase board or whatever it is. They're intuitive. Yes. Yep. Draw over it with dry erase.

Well, that's our show. Thank you guys for joining me and thank you guys listeners for listening in. Hope you learn stuff. about Da Vinci Kod, about lost movies and a combustible film and typos in stone. 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 the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit airwadmedia.com to listen and subscribe to other shows like, I know what scares you,

the Explorer's Podcast, and The Secret History of Hollywood. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye. If you like this podcast, can we recommend another one? It's called Big Picture Science. You can hear it wherever you get your podcast and its name tells part of the story. The Big Picture. questions and the most interesting research in science. Seth and I are the host. Seth is a

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