Good Job, Brain! - 242: Crashing the Party

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

To celebrate NASA successfully smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid, we're all about impactful trivia this week! Oh dear, two words have collided into each other in Karen's portmanteau brand name quiz. We find out about the first ever recorded "car" crashes. From molasses to jelly packets, trucks spill the darnedest things! Chris tells us how to prevent a computer crash, and American hustle of the humble bubble wrap. 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. Welcome, Menagerie of many menaces manifesting manifestos about manicotties. This is good job, bringing your weekly quiz show in Offbeat Trivia Podcast. This is episode 242. And of course, I'm your whole. Humble host, Karen, and we are your serious cerebrum's serenating sermons about serotonin and serpents at your service. I am Colin.

And I'm Chris. Well, I guess we should kick things off with our errors and omissions segment. Actually. Thank you, disembodied voice of former co-host, Dana. We miss you. We miss you. We can't replace her. We can't replace that performance, that delivery.

She gets 35 cents every time we play that. Yeah, she does. She does. And that's like largely what we make off this podcast. So we're really in the red now. Yeah. But yes, I do have an um actually pertaining to the precise manner in which I was assaulted by a rooster. You may remember on our episode, Good Morning Brian. We talked about various things that happened in the, no, no, no, no, I'm just saying. We talked about various things that occur in the morning. I talked about roosters. As an aside, I mentioned that as a youth, I was once a rooster handled by a rooster, manhandled by a rooster. When I walked into a place on a farm and a summer camp that I shouldn't have been, the rooster came at me and I turned around and started running, but I started getting attacked in. the backs of my calves by the rooster who, and I said on the show that the rooster pecked me

out of the, out of the gate of the farm, which I believed until now was what had happened to me until the other day when listener Kevin Flout, who is a some sort of chicken man, he seems to own or hang around with roosters and chickens. He showed us a picture of his his rooster herald oversees hens who have names such as ruth feather ginsbeak and chicky minage um and he let me know that um actually while validating my trauma heaven let me know that quote having been in many many fights with roosters it's not the pecking that hurts it's the spur because roosters do not on their legs, attack you. What they do, yes, they grab onto you with their beak and then, Kevin writes, hammer the crap out of you with the big, sharp back claw, often flapping their wings

to stabilize. And Kevin said this and I thought, yes, that's right. That is part of the nightmares because, because, so I'm not looking back to see what's happening back there, but I do absolutely remember the rooster was flapping its wings. You know, and as it turns out, yes, it was probably trying to grab on to my jeans, flapping its wings to get its feet up so that it could poke me with its back claw. And I hurt you the most. That was, yeah, you know, it didn't, it's like I had bruises, but I was not, he never broke the skin or anything. So it's entirely possible that maybe they kept the, um, Kevin says here that the, the nails. they are very dense and hurt really badly.

So I'm guessing maybe they kept it, you know, flip or yeah, not sharp or not long. Capped. Yeah, exactly. And so, yes, now I know, thank you, Kevin, a lot more about the method of attack that was perpetrated on my body. So I appreciate that, in a sense. And that, and that concludes this episode's, actually. Wow, so they attack mid-flight. Well, yeah, well, he probably getting himself up into the air a little bit so we can get that leg under and flack the wings to, you know.

So doesn't fall back on his, you know, back and look silly or anything. Well, that would be terrible. Yeah, wow. Yeah, I wouldn't want him to get hurt when he was assaulting a defense child. Without further ado, let's jump into our first general trivia segment, Pop Quiz, Hot Shot. Okay. Here I have a random trivial pursuit card. Get your barnyard buzzers ready.

Here we go. Let's answer some questions. Blue Edge. What is the name of Earth's most recent supercontinent, which formed about 270 million years ago? Hmm. Chris. Pangia. It is Pangia. Pink Wedge for pop culture.

Ooh, as a teen, Justin Timberlake appeared on which two shows that showcased his singing and dance. Oh, my gosh. As a two-year. Well, maybe we do this as a tag team here. I believe one Mickey Mouse Club, which I think was one. But it is called the all-new Mickey Mouse Club, is the official title. How about, okay, how about this? Are you ready?

Here we go. Star Search. Correct. Oh, good one. Good, good. Next question, Yellow Wedge. Pope Francis was born in which South American city? Oh, gosh.

Call it. Buenos Aires. Correct. Argentinian Buenos Aires. Great. Purple Wedge. Oh, man. To which school did William Faulkner bequeath a majority of his manuscripts and personal papers at the time of his death?

Hmm. To which school did he bequeath? Okay. Well, I mean, associate him. I mean, it's either where he went to school or where he died, right? I mean, it's, yeah. Where do you associate him with? the south? I mean, maybe. I think like the south-south. I don't know. Really. We're just stalling

for time. LSU. LSU. William and Mary. University of Virginia. Okay. Yeah. I guess that makes sense. Yeah, we're close. Yeah, UVA. All right. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. It makes sense. I love it when you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Green Wedge for Science and Nature. After Jupiter, what is the second largest planet? Oh, gosh. I hope I'm right. Is it Saturn? Yes, it is.

Okay, okay, all right. Okay, okay, okay. Last question, Orange Wedge. Which MMA fighter appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated SwimSuit issue, Sporting Body Paint? Wow. Oh, geez. MMA fighter, body is, okay, Chris.

Okay. Rhonda Rousey? Correct. Rhonda Rouse. I'm like MMA fighters that I can think of. Yeah. One. Oh, speaking, I mean, this is MMA adjacent.

I just read a wrestling fact that John Sina has broken the record of completing the most make-a-wish wishes. I saw that several hundred, right? I mean, a lot. 650 wishes. Wow. I remember reading that about him at one point that he was. absolutely just committed, did as many of them as he could. But it also means that he's of high demand.

Sure. Do you know why I mean? Like a lot of kids want to meet him. Yeah, probably the most famous person to have read my book. Really? Yeah. Which book? Power up.

Whoa. Why did he read that book? Because I gave it to him. Because it's a good book, Karen. At an E3. And then the next time he interviewed him at E3, like 2005, I was like, oh, I wrote that book about Japanese video games I had somebody give it to you he's like oh power up yeah I read it on the airplane oh my god he wasn't even WWB champion then yet I mean he was he was mid tier enough

to be like giving interviews to people at the east at E3 about video games you know what I mean yeah yeah yeah right the very beginning of his career super nice though wild that's why yeah well this past week I I tuned into a live stream of something smashing into something and is absolutely riveting because of where it happened and how long it's been in the works. On September 26th, NASA successfully smashed a spaceship into an asteroid.

NASA, we sent, yeah, like I was on the team, we sent on purpose a spacecraft out into space on a collision course with an asteroid named Dimorphos, pretty sweet name, by the way. and the goal was to crash this thing into the asteroid and we'll see what happens. I mean, it's just the best kind of science. It's just the absolute best, in my opinion, kind of science.

The idea of being if an asteroid was ever coming towards Earth and we needed to divert it, it's like we were testing out the idea of like, can we potentially smash the spaceship in an asteroid to divert it and, yeah, see what happens in that. Chris is correct. When you write up these proposals at NASA, you want to move it up the chain.

You can't just say we want to smash it into a rock and see what happens. You got to come up with, you know, a good story like, oh, we want to see if it's feasible to divert the path of an asteroid that might be threatening all humanity. Okay. Yeah, exactly. That's marketing. That's just the spin. Yeah. It honestly, it really is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. They had a camera on, it was called the DART, the DART, the DART spacecraft. And it was, you know, live streaming essentially, it's fatal descent, you know, down onto the asteroid dimorphos. It wasn't like a smooth video.

It was maybe one frame every, I don't know, a few seconds, but it was, you see it. It's this little speck. And then, you know, they have like a countdown. I like to estimate an impact and it's getting closer and closer and closer. And then we can see up close like this, like it's, you know, it's a collection of rocks. It's not just like this kind of, you know, amorphous blob. And then, yeah, you know, the feed cut out because it smashed into the asteroid. Yeah, 11 million kilometers from Earth, they nailed it.

So, I mean, the goal is to see, yeah, how much can we deviate it from its course? Because we know what course it would have taken otherwise. It's a well-charted asteroid, yeah, no expensive property on it, no one's going to sue them. You know, we'll see what the results are here. And if indeed it is feasible to smash an asteroid out of the trajectory of hitting Earth, that seemed like, a really good inspiration for an episode. Woo! We like smashing things.

So this week, we're crashing the party. Oh, no. Two words have crashed into each other. I made a quiz all about portmanteau. company names or brand names and portmanteau words are two words smashed together little bits of each words smushed together into a new word so for example Pokemon pocket monster so here we go I'm going to give you the brand name all right and I need you to buzz in and tell me what two words make up that name okay some of them you might not even know that they're portmanteau so let's see we're going to

go easy to hard. Nice. First one. The dried fruit treat, crazen. Chris. Cranberry and raisin. Correct. All right.

Box meal, riceroni. Ooh. Huh. Colin. Rice and macaroni. Correct. Oh, okay. I was way over thinking that one.

Yeah. Yeah, I never really thought about that, but yeah. It's literally, yeah, rice and then pieces of. Pasta, I guess macaroni. It's the San Francisco treat, Karen. It is. It is, truly. If you're not from San Francisco, you should know we eat that all the time.

At least like two, three times a week, yeah. The streaming service, Netflix. Chris. Internet and flick. Correct. I'm not seeing. I'm not siking myself out anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

learn my lesson with rice errone. All right. Inspiration website, Pinterest. Hmm. Oh, okay. Pin and interest. Yes. Pin board.

Yeah, I was just a pinboard. Pin board. Oh, okay. Well, then I, yeah, okay. Yeah. Frozen treat brand Popsicle. Oh. Oh.

No. Colin. Lollipop icicle. You know, it's pop soda. And Icicle. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The online directory website, Yelp.

Yelp. Yelp. Yelp. Huh. Okay. Okay. Okay. Colin.

Yell and help. Oh, if help is right. Okay. How about, is it yellow pages and help? Yes. Yellow pages and help. It just very conveniently turned into Yelp, which is. is a real word.

Yeah, right. You're right, yeah. Cable giant Comcast. Oh. All right. Chris. Communication and broadcast.

Yes. Oh, good. You know, it could be like community. It could be, you know, but it's, yeah, computer. Communication broadcast. All right. Wheat Cracker, Trisket. Oh, gosh.

Oh, we've talked about this. There's a good story about this, yeah. There is, and I forget it. It's, what's the trit? What was it? Oh, my gosh, we told us the biscuit. Biscuit is right. What's the trick?

It's a reference to how it's made. That's right. And it is made because of electricity. Oh, right. That's right. That's right. Electric biscuit. That's right.

Oh, my gosh. Back then, it was a very big selling point. The fact that they're based in like Niagara Falls. So they use. That's right. they use the power to, yeah, create the energy or create electricity to produce the biscuit. I have to remember that. Trisket stands for electric biscuit.

Yeah, it is not three types of wheat, three types of whatever. It's not try as in three. All right. Japanese streetwear brand, BAPE. Chris. Baving ape. Yes, bathing ape. Do you know what that is a reference to?

why what's what's a bathing ape i have no idea it comes from a japanese saying about a ape baths in lukewarm water and it's a phrase to refer to the rich young japanese youth who tend to be like lazy and kind of indulgent oh funny all right last one this blew my mind oh cheese the dairy alternative silk chris so it's not soy milk? It is soy milk. Oh, okay. All right.

Did you guys know that? Yeah, it's soy milk. Right when you said it, I kind of put it together. I never really thought about it. But yeah, my wife buys it. Yeah, it makes sense. Soy milk. I was.

But I never, honestly, I did not know it was a portmanteau. I really, until you just said it. Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was like, oh, the texture is silky. Yeah. It works. It's like Yelp, where it really just fits and kind of works.

but yeah yeah yeah yeah that is a good one i didn't know that well good job you guys those are two words crashing together to make these company names nice crash i had i yeah uh what's the dumbest car crash that you guys have been involved in ever i mean like i don't want to hear about an injury yeah maybe you were driving maybe you're a passenger i don't know i know i know that both of you got driver's licenses relatively late in life right Uh, you mean one of us. You still haven't gotten your driver's license, Karen? No, I have a learner's permit.

Okay, all right, all right. I'll tell you guys about the silliest, kind of just the dumbest car crash I've ever been. It was kind of like, you know, they say sometimes like, oh, you know, everything was happening in slow motion. And I really had a slow motion car crash. This was when I was in college driving with my friend and friend of the show, Jay. We were driving to a storage unit way on the outskirts of Berkeley. here. And it was in the part of town where the roads were actually, I mean, Berkeley's, you know, a pretty modern city, but there were some dirt gravel roads here in the part of the town that we

were in. And so Jay and I were going down the road in my 1986 Camry, my old little beater, and not going very fast. We're going like maybe 25 miles an hour. And we saw up ahead, a car coming perpendicular from a little side road onto this side gravel road. And as we're approaching the intersection you know we have the right away there's a stop sign on this other car and we're driving and jay and i we both kind of look each other and like she's not going to stop is she i said i should probably break so i put my put on the brake and but the car being on a gravel road just kept on sliding you know even though not going all that fast 25 maybe 30 miles an hour and the car just kept on sliding and this other car pulled out in front of us not even looking at us totally

unaware. I remember, is it just a big Volvo station wagon. And I looked at Jay and I said, we're going to hit her, aren't we? He's like, yeah, I think so. And, you know, just, it was, yeah, all, you had so much time to process it. It didn't, there's no, nothing traumatic. Like, I don't even think I was breathing fast.

It just went from like, oh, we're about to hit her too. Yep, here we go. And sure enough, the car just kind of sort of slowly came to a stop in the side of this woman's car door. It was, I mean, it was a slow motion T-bone, basically, which, sounds like a wrestling move, but everyone was fine. Most importantly, my car was fine. There was a

dent in this woman's car door, but she was fine. Her passenger was fine. We all got out after I backed my car up from being in her car. And she's like, I'm sorry. I wasn't looking. I said, it's okay. I kind of saw you. I tried to stop. I'm sorry. So we all just said we're sorry. It just sort of went on our separate ways. So that was my silliest car crash. I know. You know what? I don't have stories like this because I only really got my driver's license a couple of years ago. So I only have one story so far, which is I was at the flea market, of course, and waiting to pull out of the parking lot. And one of the ladies that, like, sells stuff at the flea market who has this massive white, you know, van, you know what I mean? With the back windows

are all covered in stuff. She has no visibility whatsoever. She's waiting to pull out onto the road. I'm waiting behind her, for some reason I still do not understand she decides having no visibility at all that she needs to start backing up. And she starts backing up and I have enough time to be like, she's backing up, she's going to keep backing up, I lean on and I lean on the horn because it's all I can do. I'm like, hunk smash, she smashes right into me and slowly smashes into the front of my car. I'm like, you've got to be freaking kidding me. get out of the car and she knocked the front license plate off of the minivan and other you know and scraped up the front bumper but otherwise there was no damage and she gets out of the car it's again it's a lady who sells not even she doesn't even have a space in the actual flea market she's just like selling stuff out on the other side of the fence on the street and she's like okay so you know it's an old lady she's like And she's just like, so this car is not insured and I don't have a driver's license. So do you want to call the police on me?

And I'm like, no, I don't want to call the police on you. And I took my license plate and put it in the car and sent her. I'm just like, what is going to happen here? You know what I mean? I'm not getting any money. You know, it's like, so I'm like, okay, bye. No, I mean, she's lucky she shouldn't hit a person because there's people walking all throughout this parking lot. and vendors and people carrying stuff and I couldn't even believe it but that's the one time so

far than anything happened to me in a car anyway so knowing our love of historical details and internet rabbit holes I wanted to research what was the first car crash oh had to be the first one didn't exist forever love it so I thought I could figure out what is the first car crash got some books out went on the internet you know going into it I sort of thought all right you know this might you guys know what I'm talking about right like this might you guys know what I'm talking about right like this this might be one of those rabbit holes where the stories you find maybe contradict each other or maybe there's a single source or just hard to track down or verify or just a lot of um actuallys or things like that so i was prepared for that a little bit what i was not expecting to be faced with

are some very foundational existential questions like what is a car and that's true you have to You want toify that before you get into the first car. And then what is a crash? You know, is it, how do you, what do you define a crash? You got to, you got to really put these things into concrete terms here. So, yeah, how would you guys define a car? What are your minimal requirements to be considered a car? So it's like, it's a, it's a horseless carriage.

It's a four-wheel, you know, a sort of a buggy shape sort of thing that holds like at least, you and like some other stuff like it can't be like a motor bike engine has to have an engine it has to be self-propelled and that you can steer and control not just not just like like a like a parade flow or something yeah right right or just like you know a log flume or you know a rocket or you know right yeah right yeah well you guys you guys kind of yeah came up with sort of the same way here's what I came up with like it's got to be ground based conveyance right yes um It's got to specify a ground-based conveyance. It's got to be self-powered, right?

Yeah, it's not being pulled by a horse or relying on gravity. It's got to be capable of transporting, I think, at least one adult human, right? It can't be like the size of a newborn, right, or, you know, a grown cat or something, right? over a non-trivial distance. I feel like that's important too. You know what I mean? Like it's got to be functional in some way. And Karen, as you said, I feel like it's got to have some steering mechanism and at best acceleration and breaking.

But at the minimum, at the minimum, like stop and start, right? And like that's kind of what I came up with. It's interesting that you guys said number of wheels. I didn't even think about that. But you're right. You're right. I feel like it's got to have more than two at least. I don't know about four, but certainly more than two.

If you research books, whatever, internet, whatever your source is, on the first car, you'll see a lot of the same names coming up. Big name, you will see a lot, often credited with the first proper automobile. Carl Benz, of course, whose namesake company, companies hugely successful, still continue today in the Mercedes-Benz brand, a division of Daimler. also a very big name from the early days, Gottlieb Daimler. In fact, Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, almost at virtually the same time, in virtually the same place, invented candidate for first automobile.

Carl Benz usually gets the credit in most authoritative sources. We'll credit it to the Ben's patent motor wagon, or patent motorcar, basically. 1886, it was commercially viable, self-powered. It was really kind of just like a motorized tricycle. It had three wheels. It has three wheels, notably gas-powered engine, but yep, that's a car. And so a lot of people will list that as the first sort of proper automobile. But I came across in almost every source.

Everyone talked about a much earlier invention as perhaps a candidate for first automobile, invented by Nicholas Joseph Kunoz. he was a captain in the French army and in the mid to late 1700s all right late late 1760s early 1770s he invented the first working self-propelled

ground-based wheeled vehicle okay and I'll give you some more details about it in a minute now he called it the in French he called it the the Fardier a Vapur or in English say a steam powered dray have you guys heard this word before i i i it's an old-timey word d r a d r a dry a d'r is like like a flatbed cart or a flatbed trolley or like an open-sided

truck they would use drays a lot you know for hauling things around or you know in the military in particular and so he had the steam dray right okay we don't yeah we don't use the word uh too much anymore. You might say we forgot about Dre. And so, um, yeah. So, uh, Captain Captain, Captain, Captain Cunoz invented the, the steam Dre. And his goal in the army was in particular to haul around cannons. Heavy. And that's right. Big and heavy. And you got to, you know, take them from place to place when you're, when you're fighting your battles. And, you know, most of the time, uh, up to that point, you'd hook up, you'd hook them up to your horses, and you're good to go. Just drag them off. But he said, no, there's got to be a better way in French, probably. And by 1770,

he had full-scale working prototypes of his steam tray working. This thing was, it was huge, super heavy, many tons. It had to carry many tons of equipment, right? I mean, so it makes sense. This is this big giant thing. It had a big steam boiler engine on the on the apparatus. It was hooked up to a piston driven mechanism. And it was essentially just like a giant ratchet mechanism. So the steam engine drove the piston and the piston kind of ratcheted forward the drive wheel, which sort of just it lurched along.

It's like an old Mickey Mouse cartoon. You can go online and there are more than one hobbyist and historical recreationist versions of the steam dray, including some of, you know,'s original. prototypes. Well, are they tricked out? Tricked out, I mean, by the standards of 1770 maybe. Oh, okay. You're not going to see it. Yeah. No, not like I pimp my steam dray.

It sounds like, yeah, it moved at the absolutely blistering pace of two to three miles an hour. Oh, my gosh. And it was very hard to steer, extremely hard to steer. Poor traction turned out, you know, hey, who would a guest, the steam-powered wheel, maybe not as good as horses and traction. On top of that,

apparently you had to stop it approximately once every 15 minutes to get the fire going again and get a good head of steam built up again. And then it took a lot of get up to speed. So it's like, start the steam, get up to your two and a half miles an hour, cruise for 15 minutes, struggling to steer this thing, and then start the process all over again. Um, ultimately the French army gave up on it. They, they decided that, you know, kind of, you know, yeah, thank you. This is not really worth the investment. Thanks, but no thanks.

So, remember how I said this thing is big and I said it's heavy and I said it's hard to steer. Now, it has a driver, okay, and it could also carry passengers. I still, I still feel like it has to be essentially a product that was designed to replace the horseless carriage, like on the, on the street, basically. I'm on your side, Chris. A civilian invention. This is not an everyday thing. I'm inclined to agree with you. Yeah.

I mean, it's a military vehicle that you could ride on, but that doesn't make it a car in my mind necessarily. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in 1771, one of Kuno's early prototypes, they were out for a run, you know, putting the esteemed ray through the paces. And depending on the reports, by some manner it lost control

and at the stately base of two and a half miles per hour it knocked down a garden wall yeah now it is shocking I know yeah it knocked over just a little stone wall they got out kind of assessed the damage and said yeah yeah sorry we knocked down that wall

that's a shame yeah and this is what some people will credit as the first car crash the first automobile act Accident. And they didn't have car insurance either. Absolutely not. Or a license. Nothing of a license. Yeah, exactly. If you quantify that as a car, and if you quantify knocking over a stone garden wall at two and a half miles an hour as a crash, that is potentially our best candidate for the first car crash in history. I guess theoretically he said it could do up to five miles an hour, but it sounds like it never actually reached that, yeah, that did. Dizzying speed of, yeah. They just put that on the speedometer to make you feel like it's possible. Yeah, exactly.

A few more perhaps milestone dates here. I'll throw out at you guys that I came across in the course of my research, that depending on your definition, maybe among the earliest car crashes, in 1891, inventor James Lambert, possibly had the first car crash in America. Yeah, USA. Yeah, James Lambert, who founded the Lambert Automotive Company. His company produced the Buckeye gasoline buggy based in Ohio. That's right.

Hey, hey, that's right. So, you know, birth of the tire industry there too, right? So he was out for a joyride with one of his buddies in the passenger seat, apparently ran over an exposed tree route, caused him to lose control of the gasoline buggy. buggy, yeah, bump, bump, bum, bump, crashed into a hitching post. And nobody seriously hurt here, just minor injuries. I'm sorry, what is a hitching post?

For horses, because at this time... It's a parking spot for horses, yeah. That's right. For everybody else who did not have a gasoline buggy or a steam tray to trapes around town. And that's right. You had a hitching post, that's right, and you would hitch your horse to it. In 1896, there is a report from New York City in the New York Times, possibly the first accident involving two people.

There was a report in New York City on what is today, Broadway report of a horseless wagon race where Henry Wells lost control of his vehicle, crashed into a bicyclist name Ebling Thomas. Now again, here we're getting into kind of, okay, car hits a bicycle, car crash. Yeah, I guess that counts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Poor Ebling Thomas broke his leg. Driver was arrested.

I will say, I can't talk about this without at least mentioning the first fatality in a automotive-related incident. Yeah, and this was actually very early in 1869 in Ireland, in fact, Mary Ward. She was a scientist and a writer from a pretty well-to-do family, actually. She was out basically out visiting at the family castle and one of her cousins who was an inventor and had, in fact, built an automotive device. They all went out for a ride. And again, just traveling at just a few miles an hour. I mean, they were not racing around, but it took a bad turn, basically. She pitched out of the vehicle and, sad to say, was running. over by the wheels of the vehicle, yeah, and died from her injuries there. In this bootleg car.

Yeah, I mean, safety was not a big concern, nor was it a requirement back then. They were not wearing helmets. There was no seatbelts. There were certainly no laws about it. Yeah, I mean, there was an inquest, you know, to kind of see, like, did the driver break any laws? Was there a crime here? I mean, they essentially chalked it up as an accidental death. But you don't want to be this first. But, yes, poor Mary Ward was, by most accounts, the the first death related to a car accident. But again, not really a crash, was it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No disrespect at all. But so the answer that I have for you guys is it's really kind of how you want to define it. You know, take your pick from these various anecdotes that I have reported back to you. Yep. What counts is the first car crash in history. All right. Time for a break. And we'll be right back.

No frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. Are you dreaming about becoming a nurse or maybe you're already in nursing school? I'm Nurse Mo, creator of the Straight A Nursing podcast, and I want you to know that I'm here for you. I know nursing school can be challenging. I've been there, but it doesn't have to be impossible. Sometimes the key to succeeding in nursing school is to hear the concepts explained clearly and simply,

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and I'll see you on Thursday. You're listening to Good Job Brain. Smooth puzzles. Smart trivia. Good job, brain. Yeah, okay. My piece here involves fewer fatalities. So I'm...

We didn't say zero. I didn't say zero. I didn't say zero. No, it's zero, it's zero, zero. I want to talk about preventing a computer crash. Oh. But maybe not the sort you're thinking of. So a few episodes back in this season, we talked about IBM.

And IBM was formerly known as CTR, the Computing Tabulating Recording Company, founded in 1911, making like electrical, like time clocks, you know, punch clocks and adding machines and stuff like that. You know, prior to the advent of computers, businesses would use these sorts of what were called unit record machines. like, you know, gears and cogs and punchstones and crank shafts and, you know, God knows what else. You wouldn't want to put your hand in one of these, basically. I mean, it was, but it was, this is how you were, you know, this is how you would essentially do like fast tabulation of numbers, right? Now, in, in 1959, uh, IBM rolls out the 1401, so small business computer, about the size of like a desk. It's big, but it's not that big. It's not a mainframe. It's not a wall.

It's not in the vacuum tubes and it takes up a whole room. You know, it's a big piece of furniture, but it can get it into a room. You know, it runs software. It uses transistors. You know, you can write software for it. And essentially it was meant to replace, like, those electromechanical sort of tabulating machines, you know, for businesses to, like, do their payroll or do sales data, stuff like that. So the IBM 1401 was quite successful right off the back. They got 5,000 orders in five weeks.

And the 1401 is kind of, tying back to cars, the 1401 is known today as the Ford Model T of computers. Like, not in any way, it was not the first computer by any way. It means that it was not the first, but it was the first one to be like, mass produced, relatively inexpensive, very popular. It just got computers out there into these businesses. Within a few years, IBM 1401 style systems would end up making up about half of all the computers in the world. It was very, very, it was like affordable, mass produced, popular, and it just made it big. You know, this is a big, heavy metal device, but inside this computer are a whole bunch of fragile circuit boards with all the transistors on them for all the programming logic, right? So when these like 5,000 customers, these big businesses, you know, they opened up the crates where the, you know, 1401 was in to take it all out, assemble it and start using it.

when they opened up one of the what had probably a wooden crate or cardboard box or whatever it was, they opened up and they all laid eyes on something that they had never seen before. That was not part of the computer at all. And do you want to guess what it was

that they saw? This amazing space age thing that they had never seen before. Is it packing peanuts? It's not packing peanuts. It's not packing peanuts. Those actually had been introduced to just a couple of years earlier to as a synthetic replacement for like packing things in straw or packing things in old newspapers were horsehair or you know whatever else they were using but these the circuit boards were wrapped in bubble wrap in bubble wrap and in fact the IBM 1401 computer is is very tied in with the advent of bubble wrap it is said to be and apparently was the very first use of bubble wrap to ship a mass produced product and it is essentially single-handedly credited with putting bubble wrap on the map

it looks i mean the bubbles were maybe a little bit bigger than they are today on the sheets with the tiny little bubbles but like but it basically looked like it did today and they're like whoa what is this what is this how do we get this this this is cool so bubble wrap uh had been invented just two years earlier in 1957. And as usual, with these wacky out there inventions, its creators were trying to create something

else. Oh. Does anybody want to try to guess what bubble wrap was originally supposed, what were they trying to actually do? I think this was in episode four of Good Job Green. Let me see if I

remember. I feel that it was funky, wallpaper. Yes. Correct. Yes, they were trying to create. The inventors, Alfred Fielding and Mark Chavanez, were trying to create an ultra-modern Jetsons type, you know, like plastic wallpaper, textured wallpaper.

And they had taken two shower curtains and they heat sealed them together in a way that trapped air in pockets in between them because they wanted like a cool textured wallpaper. pattern. Yes, yep. They called it air cap. And people did not want it. But they had the stuff and they're like, okay, well, what could we do? They considered using it as insulation for green. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it wasn't really great. It wasn't really good insulator either. No, this is what I think is great. This is the American dream stuff right here. Because these guys, by all accounts, did not know what this product could be used for. But by God, they started manufacturing it

and trying to sell it in anyways. Like the ultimate fake it till you make it. They were calling an air cap, the wallpaper, no, insulation, no. Let's just make it and see if we can sell it to somebody for something. And it was, like, two years later, like they had established the company. It was called Sealed Air Corporation. And they hit on the idea of they went to IBM when they heard about they were going to start shipping out these computers.

They were like, oh. Hustlers, man. Totally. You guys should wrap it in our product, bubble wrap, which they renamed it to bubble wrap. It was a phenomenal shipping material. It was low cost because it was just a couple pieces of plastic heat sealed together. It was lightweight air, and it added very little to the weight of the package. So it added, so it subtracted a lot from the cost of having to ship the package.

And it works. So they changed the name of Air Cap to bubble wrap. Now, to this day, bubble wrap is a registered trademark of the sealed air quality. I was going to ask you. Yeah, I was just going to ask you. And if you look at generic products, it never says bubble wrap. It's going to say bubble roll, bubble cushion, bubble cushion, bubble, bubble cushion wrap, roll, whatever. Like, you can have wrap, you just can't say bubble, not bubble wrap, yeah.

Yeah, right, right, right, yeah. In 1971, a sealed air corporation invented the bubble mailer, which they called the mail life. envelope by gluing some bubble wrap to the inside of an envelope. And so they invented that too. Now, there has been one more sort of major innovation in the field of bubble wrap that I wanted to talk about. So have you ever gotten a package, and I'm sure you have that had bubble wrap in it where it's like there's bubble wrap, but it doesn't have little tiny bubbles, just has a whole lot of big bubbles and you can't you can't pop them because if you puncture one of them they're like in a line with the other bubbles. Oh yes. What is the deal with that? What do you guys think that product

is? Why does that exist when bubble wrap also exists? Why does that happen? Are they used as packaging for something else? And when they're not packaging that stuff, they fill it with air? No, I was thinking like condoms, you know, like, you know, they have the, If we don't put a cond in there, we put air in it. You're kind of, okay, so you're sort of kind of close. So when you get bubble wrap like that with the huge bubbles that are all kind of connected, that is inflatable bubble wrap. That is not sold to people as bubble wrap with the air already in it.

It is sold in black rolls. And you buy a machine that inflates it on site, on demand to whatever you need. And that's what has the channels kind of. connecting all the... That's why it has the channels because it pumps the air in from the sides and it filled the channels. So that is something that

was inflated, not at the company that sold it to them, but was inflated by the company that sold you the item right before they put it in the box. And it's fantastic... They pass the savings on to you. They do. Well, imagine it is somebody... I saw somewhere basically it's like

I can't verify this, but it's like it costs 40 times less to send that to the the company that's going to use it then inflated because you're just sending a flat roll instead of big because you know i mean i've ordered bubble wrap from amazon it comes in a gigantic box you know yeah yeah yeah and you run out of it in like 10 seconds because it's yeah bubble wrap obviously a serious business but as you know once it got out to consumers we invented a second

use for it which is of course popping the bubbles which is extremely fun all cases kids love bubble wrap. In fact, in trivia, in 2016, bubble wrap was nominated for, but sadly, not inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame. Other toy Hall of Fame inductees include things like sand or like a stick actually is in the Toy Hall of Fame, a stick. It's all, it's about things that kids actually play with that have like a longevity. It's not just about celebrating like commercial toys yeah guinness world records uh says the most people popping bubble wrap simultaneously is two thousand six hundred and eighty one achieved by the denver area council boy scouts of america u s a at the peaceful valley scout ranch in elbert colorado u s a on

19th of september 2015 oh oh thousand six hundred eighty one boy scouts all popped bubble wraps simultaneously getting the Guinness World Record, and I will also tell you that scientifically verified popping bubble wrap is a great stress reliever. A 1992 study titled Popping Sealed Air Capsules to Reduce Stress. Can't say bubble wrap. Showed they cannot. Showed that, quote, subjects reported feeling significantly more energized, less tired, and more calm after popping the capsules. And advantages of popping bubble wrap versus other methods of stress relief for that it involved minimum ability and essentially no training or practice. Training.

Just, I'm imagining like a government style, scratchy film. Yes. Step one. Repeat. Chris, I know you buy and sell a lot of stuff on eBay. I do as well. I know you know the the sort of joy of you get something and you open it up and it's got the clearly used many times before bubble wrap where like three quarters of the bubbles are

popped. It's really soft because it's been wrapped. Yeah. There's usually a piece of tape wrapped around one of the edges. And you're like, all right, you're really pushing the limits of how much protection this can offer. It's just like just like he does with wrap it in terrain. And really protective anymore. It's a thing.

I remember the first time, I think maybe I was in high school, the first time I saw the air-filled pillow in a package. Oh, I know what you're talking about. Oh, my gosh. This is the smartest invention, and it literally is just bagged air. My daughter loves those. When I get like a box in the mail and it's got like the strip and she's all, and my little pillow.

And she'll go and she'll take it up. And she makes like little pillows for her stuffed animals out. of them. Yeah. Such a good use. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then, yeah, and then when she's at daycare the next day, we, you know, put them in the trash.

Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry. More are coming. 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. work. 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. You're listening to Good Job, Brain. And this week, we're talking about crash. And this may seem a little bit unrelated, but did you guys know that Florida, the state, has the largest fresh tomato industry? as in they grow the most amount of tomatoes for us to eat fresh. Really? I did not know. However, California love here.

California is number one in processed tomato production. So there's a difference. Florida grows the most tomatoes that we eat like salsa, you know, that we cut, put in our sandwiches. But California grows the most what they call processing tomato. Their tomatoes grown especially. for canning, for paste, for sauce. Right. Yeah, it's like we talked about with pumpkins on an episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We think about like these, you know, gorgeous, you know, orange colorful pumpkins. But then like when you get canned pumpkin, it's from something that is not grown to be like perfectly bright orange and round. It doesn't matter what it looks like. Yeah. It's canned pumpkin. It's grown to taste really good when it's in a can. Yeah. So here's a story on August 29th of this year.

Which is not that long ago. It was like weeks ago. August 29th at 5 a.m. Right outside Bay Area, Vacaville, a big rig transporting, processing tomatoes collided with another vehicle. The truck lost control and crashed into that middle dividing wall on the freeway and proceeded to spill 150,000 tomatoes onto the highway. Now, these tomatoes are still in tomato form, right?

Yes, yes. They're taking a ride to go to a cannery factory. They're on their merry way. I just want to say this first. No critical injuries. Okay. All right. But the tomato spill did cause a four-car pilot.

Just how much is 150,000 tomatoes. It's estimated around 50,000 pounds. Oh, my gosh. Just to give you an idea of how much that is, I looked it up. That's a humpback whale. That's how much a humpback whale weighs. That is actually quite, that's quite vivid picture. I have in my head now.

Yeah, yeah. It's a lot of tomatoes. It's a tomato humpback whale. Or an F-15 Eagle fighter aircraft. Also, quite a good mental image. I'm just picturing, I'm just picturing, like, you know, made out of tomatoes, just like in the shape of the sand castle, but it's like tomatoes. That's right.

That's right. Earlier the spill, it literally looked like a ball pit. It was reported that parts of the highway was two feet high with tomatoes. Oh, no. Oh, yeah, okay. This is when the tomatoes haven't been driven through yet. This happened at 5 a.m. Right at the start of rush hour on one of the busiest freeway.

This is the 80. Right. That's a big freeway. It was really dangerous. I mean, any of these kind of truck spills can. be very, very dangerous. Because, you know, you have to close off the lanes. The road conditions might change. Yeah, I feel like 50 pounds of tomatoes would be a pretty substantial hazard. Like if I saw that on the road in front of me. Okay, first of all, tomatoes by themselves, they can roll, right? So they're

kind of scattered and they just kind of roll and traverse, right? Then all these cars in high speed, because it's a freeway, driving through them, squishing, releasing the liquid and also the pulp, Right. What they said was the skin. It was the skin that made the conditions really dangerous because it was super slick and slippery. You think about like, yeah, the tomato skin sitting on top of the surface of the road on top of each other. In order to clean this up, they had they had to like scoop the pulp and the solids, pry off all the skins. And then what's left is like the juice. You know, they might like hose it off, but it's still very, very wet. And so they had to sprinkle, like, fine kitty litter, a fuller's earth. Right, right.

They had to crash another truck full of kitty litter on there. But not to be outdone the very next day in Memphis, Tennessee, a tractor trailer shipping jars of Bertoli-Alfredo sauce crashed into a median wall. you know in the in the center of a highway and this is not like a tanker filled with sauce it is jars of sauce it is it is transporting it's not like yeah a big storage unit and a hose for all for individual jars just a lot of jars of sauce shattered glass and garlic cream across lanes and this happened on interstate 55 this this happened uh you know i guess luckily at like 5 p.m. around nighttime. However, it was like a really hot day. And so mixed in with the humidity of Tennessee. At first, it was like, great. This smells like an olive garden.

It's so like creamy and garlicky, but hot road, humidity. It just turned bad real quick. Cream. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a website called truckspills.com that documents weird things being spilled off of trucks. That, you know, maybe they crash into another car, maybe something happened or an accident, and it's just these big rigs on their side. Here are some of the things documented on Trucksbills.com. Industrial amount of smuckers jelly packets, you know, like the jelly you get at hotels, the little strawberry jelly.

Palettes of these jelly packets. There was one truck that was transporting porta-potties that got. got into an accident. Oh, jeez. There's also a truck that spilled lottery tickets, and this is in Florida. Like legit lottery tickets flew out. Oh, no. People were grabbing them.

Florida had to cancel the lottery due to the tickets. But my favorite one is one truck overturned and spilled marbles. It was transporting marbles, glass marbles. And it's just like, man. This is something you see in a cartoon, just literally. a cartoon just the truck full of marbles spilling on the rotten hot dogs just anything and everything pretty much got spilled off of a big group truck the thing i want to i want people to take away is that you know this for me this really was a glimpse of like how we get our things

our marbles our alfredo sauce our jelly packets you where do you get your marbles and you where do you get your alfredo i'll tell you where they have to be transferred from somewhere to somewhere and then to you. And it's usually transported by human beings and drivers and truck drivers. So really like hats off to truck drivers. Thank you for shipping almost everything in our lives, including the tomatoes for tomato sauce, jars of Alfredo sauce. So stay safe out there.

I have done on the drive between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. There are a lot of produce and agricultural truckers there. I have seen trucks with tomatoes, and I've occasionally seen, you know, a couple of go over the side, never seen 50,000 of them. One time I remember driving behind, it took me, it took me a couple minutes to figure out what it was. I was driving behind some kind of truck. And the best thing I can describe it is it's almost like horizontal snow kind of coming back at me at my car off this truck. And I'm like, what the heck is this? What is, what is it?

Is it feathers? Like, no, it's not feathers. What is it? Like dust? No, it's not. dust just like little kind of whiteish sort of fluttering what it was was it was an onion truck and it was the onion skin paper like just the little onion paper just jostling and fluttering off the side yeah just and it happened to be kind of a windy day traveling and so i got out of the the you know

the onion skin slip stream there but it was very pretty you know for for what it was yeah so poetic yeah onion skins in the wind Yeah. And that's our show. Thank you guys for joining me. And thank you guys, listeners, for listening and hope you learn stuff about bubble roll, bubble caps. Yeah, watch out. Watch out. Yeah. The first car crash and portmanteau company names. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, and on all podcast apps. And on our website, good job, brain.com. This podcast is part of Airwave Media Podcast Network. Visit Airwave Media.com. to listen and subscribe to other shows like The Pirate History Podcast, Food with Mark Bittman, and The Explorers podcast. We'll see you next week. Bye. Bye. It feels really good to be productive.

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