Good Job, Brain! - 249: Make No Bones About It

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

Give your knuckles a good crack because it's time to bone up on bone trivia! What do Shakespeare, Chaplin, and Lincoln all have in common? Chris shares hilarious stories of major botched grave-robbing attempts in history. Test your bone superlatives knowledge, and learn some saucy facts about the most famous "pizza bone." And roll them bones! Colin looks into the tradition of using bones in games. So goth. Speaking of bone games, check out Colin's game, Bare Bones! 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. Bienvenito, Benevolent Benevolent Benefactor's Ben-Gay and Benelux. This is Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and Offbeat Trivia podcast. This is episode 249. And of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your cordial, quartermen courting cordyceps in corduroy. I'm Colin. I'm Chris.

Getting the cordyceps in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. Yes, the Last of Us show based on the Last of Us video game, just to give everybody a very blanket summary, they're their zombies. And the reason for these zombies is because of a, instead of virus, attack. It's a fungal attack. Corticeps is an actual real existing fungus in this world. It starts infecting humans. And we talked about this before in previous episodes of Good Job Brain. Oh, really? Yeah, the zombie ants. Oh, oh, right, right, right.

Funny thing about cordyceps in traditional Chinese medicine, cordyceps is a prized ingredient. And people eat it. And it's expensive. And it's good for you. All right, let's jump into our first general trivia segment pop quiz hot shot here we have again baby boomer edition baby boomer edition and trivial pursuit totally 80s totally 80s we're going to kill it we're going to kill it here we go which one should we do first let's do 80s all right get your barnyard buzzers ready here we go blue wedge for tv what tv series provided james brolin with gainful from 1983 to 1988. Colin.

I believe that show was called Hotel. Correct. I've never heard of the show before. One down. Let's go. James Brolin is Josh, Josh Bolin's dad, right? Correct.

Yeah, that's right. You have to understand that Colin is totally 80s. I am some 80s and some 90s. Me and Chris are partially 80s. Exactly. Yes. The partially 80s. Pink Wedge, what did Reg Morris blow 31 feet from his mouth to set a new world record in 1986? Let me just read it more naturally. It's, you know, when I don't pre-read, I like don't know where to break. Okay. What did Reg Morris, a person named Reg Morris, blow 31 feet from his mouth to set a new world record in 1986. Okay, ready? Chris.

Bubble gum. Incorrect. What? Collard. A sunflower seed. It is fire. Oh. A stream of fire.

I guess 31 feet would be a little large for a bubble. 31 feet is pretty day compressive for fire. A yellow wedge for H.L. What retailer unleashed the Discover card in 1985? Oh, huh. Huh. I didn't know they were connected. All right.

I have a guess. Go ahead, Chris. Ready? Sears. I like it. Correct. Yeah, I like it. Yep. That was, what is it, 85?

What's the one store? Everybody buys everything at. Totally. I did not know that that Sears was connected with the history of Discover. Yeah. Sears is no longer with us, right? The store. I mean.

Oh, it's still hanging on. Okay. Okay. A little. All right, Purple Wedge for music. What Diddy, thanks to vocals by his daughter, Moon Unit, was Frank Zappa's biggest selling single. Was that Valley Girl? Correct.

Yeah, correct. Lime Green Wedge for movie, What 1980 Dudd starring the Village People won the inaugural Razzie Award for Worst Picture? Oh, man. Starring the Village People. So the village people had a movie vehicle, I guess. Apparently. Yeah. Is it, is it YMCA?

Probably not, right? No, no, no, no. It is. Can't stop the music. Hmm. And it turns out you, in fact, can. Yeah. Get in its tracks.

All right. Last Wedge in totally 80s. Orange Wedge, Sports and Leisure. Which A.L. West. I almost said Al West. Al West. That's a name. Al West.

I was like, why is the L big? What, which, which AL West baseball team found ways to lose 893 games during the 80s? What? Say it again. Which AL West baseball team found ways to lose 893 games during the 80s? Oh, my gosh. It seems like it's like on purpose, calling. Oh, interesting.

Well, I, this is where. like the baseball heads are going to hate me because I can never keep AL and NL straight. But I remember like the Mariners were historically bad in the 80s. Is it the Mariners? You are correct. Okay. Mariner's. All right, here we go.

Baby boomer. Let's do this. Let's bring on the pain. Blue Edge for TV. What TV shows theme song was keep your eye on the sparrow. Keep your eye on the sparrow. Ready? The answer is Barretta's.

Barretta. Barretta. Okay. I would not have that any idea. Pink Wedge. What was the name of Elvis Presley's backup singers? Oh. Oh.

It was, uh, it's with a C. It's with a C. No, it's not with a C. Oh, I'm going to be so mad. If you're trying to do a cold reading? I don't know. Yeah. The C, D, E, F, G?

Uh, it is the Jordan Nairs. Uh, okay. Jordan airs. Jordan airs. Yellow Wedge. Who secretly traveled to Peking? Wow. This is an old card.

Uh, who secretly traveled to Peking to set the stage for Richard Nixon's China trip? Colin. It's got to be Henry Chessinger. It is Henry Kissinger. I would have guessed Big Bird. Do you guys remember Big Bird goes to China? I do remember.

Oh, I remember. Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh. That was a big deal. It was a big deal. Brown Wedge for publications, who, with Richard Nixon, was named Times Man of the Year for 1972.

With Richard Nixon. Colin. Is it Henry Kissinger? I'm so mad, but I... What? Really? Yeah. You remember, like, there was a time where trivia pursuit cards, it's all fiend.

Because you're not supposed to read every year. Exactly, yeah, to be fair, this is not how you're supposed to play with the card. Yeah, this is how we play. All right. Greenwed for literature, what visitors to his home did Elvis Presley tell? Look, if you're just going to sit there and stare at me all night, I'm going to bed. Chris. Richard Nixon and Henry Dixon.

Correct. Going for it. Really? Colin. I feel like I've heard the story. Is that the Beatles? It is the Beatles. It is the Beatles.

Last question for records, RPM. What Child Star's picture appeared on the cover of the Sergeant Pepper album? Oh. Colin. Is it Shirley Temple? It is Shirley Temple. Yeah. All right.

Good job. Not bad, baby boomer. Not bad. So today's episode, we have a theme. Our theme is Bones. I got some weird stuff. Hopefully you guys have prepared some weird stuff. Oh, yes.

So this week, make no Bones about it. Bones. All right. I'm going to read you some poetry. It's Poetry time. Here we go. A little four-line bit of poetry here for you all. Good friend, for Jesus' sake, for bear, to dig the dust enclosed in here.

Blessed be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones. Quiz, on whose grave site would you find those words? Hmm, uh, Po. No, it is a, it is a poet. It is certainly a poet. It is pretty goth. Good friend for Jesus sake forbear to dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones and cursed be he that moves my bones.

Uh, it is, it is a, it is a plaque that is sitting right on top of the dead body of Sir William Shakespeare. He is buried under a stone slab that is in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. That was his local church that he would go to. In fact, William Shakespeare paid, you can't just get buried in this church. Oh. You know, like inside the church under the floor. He had to pay them, he paid them 440 pounds to have the privilege of being buried inside the church. It was prime placement.

I was like, oh, 440 pounds. Probably a lot for somebody in those days. But when did Shakespeare and I? Oh, the year 1616. How much would that be worth today in dollars? It's $125,000. Wow. The equivalent of 125K that he gave for the church

for the privilege of being buried inside this church. He was apparently worried that somebody was going to go messing around with his bones. I got me thinking about grave robbing or not doing it but like thinking about it for purposes of this show are there famous instances of that actually happening

of well-known people's graves being robbed either because people thought something valuable was down there or they just wanted to steal some famous bones or some kind of weird whatever they were and anyway yes there were a couple of really interesting stories Here is a segment all about famous people's graves getting robbed.

Two big stories, two big stories. Charlie Chaplin, comedian star of the silent film age in the 1920s and the 1930s. And then, of course, had a lengthy career after that. Charlie Chaplin actually lived quite a while. He died in 1977. He was 88 years old. Yeah. And he was buried in Switzerland near Lake Geneva.

And two months after he was buried, two guys dug up his body. Oh, my God. It's not even fully decomposed yet. No, and took the coffin, took it out of the grave. And they sent a ransom demand of $600,000 to Charlie Chaplin's widow to get the body back. That is so nerve. They had dug up the grave and they took the whole coffin out of the ground and dragged it along the grass, you know, when people showed by the grave site, there's a whole, there's tracks

leading away, the whole thing. So this was treated at the time as a pretty big case. You know, the police in the area, you know, it was a big scandal. And the robbers kept placing phone calls to chaplain's widow. And so the cops decided we're going to monitor the phone booths in the local area to see if they can catch somebody using one of the phone booths to make the call. That's how they caught the guys because they eventually caught one making a call, a ransom demand call. They had made upwards of like 60 calls to try to get the ransom. So they finally got one.

They're questioning him and basically said this is the best part of this whole thing. Their plan originally was actually not to steal the coffin, but to go there, dig it out, dig the hole deeper, put the coffin back in, and then cover it with dirt but leave the hole so they could ransom the coffin, but they wouldn't actually have Charlie Chaplin's reins on them. It would actually steal some real Oceans 11 type like, oh, it was actually still there. The last place you'd look for it. It was in the grave just deeper. except the problem is they hadn't thought the plan out very well they got there they got the coffin out and they couldn't dig any further basically so they had to go to plan B which was oh like guess we'll just take it so now they got charlie chaplin's coffin they didn't plan on this they led the police to a local cornfield about a mile away and that's where they had they reburied the coffin okay okay it's not like in a house like in their apartment weekend at bernies so they put him back in the ground and they put a whole bunch of concrete you know over him so nobody can go and try to take it out again

this is not even the second story i started looking up famous grave robberies and like it's all mostly it's like famous failed grave robbery because people don't know what they're doing they don't know what they're doing and even just thinking about it it's like what are you hoping to get out of this you have to have You have to be a little bit, like, disconnected from reality to try this. Right. Somebody tried to rob and failed the grave of Benny Hill. Whoa. Why?

Of course, we're all thinking the same thing. We're all thinking of the yakety-sacky-sacks playing. Yackety-Sacks is playing. Yes. Yep. They left it in disarray and left before they were able to get in there, basically. Yep, exactly. So anyway, here's another funny story for you.

In the year 1875, there was a guy who his name was Benjamin Boyd. And Benjamin Boyd at the time was incarcerated for counterfeiting money, counterfeiting United States currency. Benjamin Boyd was a very skilled engraver. He had learned engraving from his father. He was incredibly good at engraving, and he put those skills to work engraving plates to make counterfeit money. Okay. And they were fantastic.

For years, he and his wife would basically go from town to town under assumed names printing fake money. They'd get all that fake counterfeit money out there and then they'd skip town and they'd go do it again. So they finally caught up to Benjamin Boyd in 1875. And by they caught up to him, I mean the Secret Service. The Secret Service, which had only just been established a few years prior with the mission of fighting counterfeiting money. That was the initial job of the Secret Service was fighting the rampant counterfeit currency that was all over the United States post-Civil War.

So the Secret Service gets Benjamin Boyd, they catch him in Fulton, Illinois, okay? Important where they got him. in 1875, he was put in jail. And this was not good for his counterfeiting ring because he was the master engraver. What good is a ring of counterfeiters when you don't have anybody to make the counterfeit money? So the gang comes up with a genius plan

to get Benjamin Boyd out of jail. And the plan is to steal the body of that's right, President Abraham Lincoln. so Abraham Lincoln is dead um he as you know notably famously famously unalived uh 10 years prior on April 15th 1865 right and he was entombed in Springfield Illinois okay okay hey Benjamin Boyd currently locked up in the state of Illinois now Lincoln's tomb which you can visit today is actually a fairly elaborate kind of piece of architecture.

It's got an obelisk. It's got statues all over it. And then there's an above ground, you know, it's a tomb. It's above ground, you know, room where you can walk into and there's, you know, there's decorations inside and stuff like that. In the central room, the tomb was completed in 1874, so about nine years after he died. And initially, Lincoln's remains were in a sarcophagus in the center of the room. So the gang figures, you know, going there at night, steal Lincoln's corpse and we will again the plan is we'll ransom it to the state of Illinois and our demand will be yes release Benjamin Boyd from prison oh my god and we will give you back yes I I don't want to call people dumb too much on this show but these people are

very dumb they will release the state of Illinois will release Benjamin Boyd from custody they will hand over President Lincoln and everybody will go their separate way yeah yeah yeah yeah Yeah, you first. No, you first. In terms of actually being able, like, physically to pull this off, it wasn't that difficult because the, so first of all, the Lincoln's tomb is like miles out of town. It's the late 1800s. There's no security guard works there. There's nothing. Camera. Right. Exactly. Right. It's, there's a lock on the door. Like, that's about it. They get to that. They can get to the burial room. That's where the sarcophagus is. The sarcophagus apparently was sealed, but it wasn't really sealed that. well. So, I mean, you could, you could get the top off. So, to the only thing, I mean, first of all, this plan was obviously doomed, but like, the thing that really doomed it, and this was really unfortunate, is that when they assembled the crew for the heist, they brought along a guy named Louis Sweggles, and Louis Sweggs, Louis Sweggles told them that he had grave robbing experience on his resume, but in actuality, Louis Spiegel's was an informant for

the Secret Service. I'm guessing he probably was already trying to get close to these guys because they were counterfeiters, but now he gets to go tell the Secret Service that they're planning to kidnap the president's body. So on November 7, Election Day, 18, 17th, election day, 18, They picked that because they figured it would be even more people would be even less paying attention to them, right? Election Day 1876, they go down there. The Secret Service has been tipped off, and they've got detectives from the, you know, the Pinkerton detective agency. They hired some guys.

They're like circling the tomb. They're just waiting for these guys to basically go in and be caught in flagrante delicto, you know, with Lincoln's corpse, basically, so they can charge them. So they go in, they file off the padlock, no problem, they walk in, there's the sarcophagus with Lincoln's remains, they open up the top. Then they realize that there's a coffin inside the sarcophagus, and it weighs like 500 pounds. And they are like, they're trying to like get it out of there, basically. Um, my understanding is that Lewis Sweggles, like, was the one who told them that there was going to be a truck to put it in, but then there was no truck. So they weren't even going to get it out of there. Before they can come up with Plan B, before anything can happen, outside of one of the

detectives, his firearm accidentally goes off. Oh, no. Before they can gersion and get the guys, the firearm goes off, everybody hears the gunshot, they blow out of Lincoln's tomb, no Lincoln, and they just bolt and they leave. By the way, the funny thing, I mean, it's all very funny. The other funny thing is that the Secret Service had actually been established by Abraham Lincoln. Yes. And in fact, Abraham Lincoln signed the document that established the Secret Service on April 14, 1865, the day that he was shot. Yeah. It was like one of his last official things that he did as president was to sign it, signed it, created the Secret Service.

and the Secret Service, then 10 years later, ends up stopping his grave from getting robbed. How about that? One way or the other, yeah, inadvertently. Snake eating its own tail. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, I digress. Criminals bail out, ditch the coffin. The detectives, there's a lot of them there.

They all split up to find the criminals at one point. The detectives end up shooting at each other because they can't see. They don't know who's who. Now, of course, they knew who these guys were. So they end up catching up with them a couple of days later, and they arrest them. Now the story gets even more ridiculous, because it's a scandal that these guys had tried to rob Lincoln's grave. Everybody knows about it. The country is scandalized.

These guys even do that. You're like, you know, charge them. But. So grave robbing in Illinois in 1876, not illegal. There is no law that says that you cannot take a body out of a grave. So they could not charge them with that because it was not a crime. So the charge that they laid on, the two guys that they got was that they, quote, did unlawfully and philoniously attempt to steal, take, and carry away certain personal goods and property to wit one casket. They were charged with attempted theft of Lincoln's casket.

Yep. And misdemeanor lock filing. They were quickly found guilty at trial. They each did a year of hard labor. Oh, my God. But it was just a year. Benjamin Boyd not released from prison. And Lincoln, yeah.

Unfortunately, he did have to serve out of his time. I'm in prison. The plan did not work. And Lincoln, Lincoln is actually now, he was, he was moved around a little bit because they were like, oh, geez, somebody could just come in here and just take him out, you know, what are we going to do? So eventually, after a while, they actually buried him underneath the tomb. Again, much like Charlie Chaplin covered in concrete. They just have to, like that's our solution, right? Yeah, just deeper down, more concrete. And it's still, so it's still sort of ceremonial above ground there? Above ground, yes.

There's still the quote-unquote burial room inside, but nobody, so nobody is inside the burial room. And Lincoln is buried, Lincoln is not buried in Lincoln's tomb. He is buried underneath Lincoln's tomb. Now, you might be wondering, what about old Willie Shakes from before? You know, he was worried about grave robbers. He did all he could to prevent it. did the cursed poetry and six-figure grave placement, did that ward off grave robbers.

Well, for 400 years or so, it certainly did seem so. Until 2016, in the year 2016, scientists went to the Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avonne, and used ground penetrating radar to see what was that. Because the thing is, nobody wanted to dig the grave up because of the poem. Because of the curse. They didn't want to get cursed. The church is like, no. Over the years, people were like, oh, we should look in there.

Church is like, nope, nope, nope, nobody touches it. No, absolutely not. Ground penetrating radar, they look in there. And they find that, number one, the graves are pretty shallow. They only dug a meter under there. So, I mean, they're not like super deep. It's not a vault or anything like that. The bones are just like a meter underneath the floor, the stone floor of the church.

The bodies were there, the remains were there. And unfortunately, William Shakespeare's body missing its skull. Oh. So at some point, it seems likely that somebody did, in fact, messed with Shakespeare's bones, got cursed and stole Shakespeare's. So Shakespeare's skull is missing. So check around your house. If you have it or see it, they want that back.

What a quest. Right? Like National Treasure, you know, like preamble kind of thing, right? Well, the thing is, back of the day, I didn't look too closely into this, but apparently somebody wrote back in the day like a quote unquote fictional story about like stealing Shakespeare's skull that people are now looking at a little bit more askance. Like, wait a minute. Did you actually, did you do it? This isn't like, this isn't like if I did it. This is like, did you do it? Did you take the skull? Wow. I'm just like, right? Someone for some period of time knew

where Shakespeare's skull was. Like, that's what that means. It's like someone took that secret to their grave. And like, maybe that became like a little... Maybe they'll find a skeleton with two heads. Right, right, right, right. Can you imagine the experts doing the radar imaging and then they're like scanning from the foot up?

You know, they're like, d-n-n-de-n-da-d-d-d-and then like... Oh, no. The operator's like, we start from... the foot because it's the most dramatic that way. All right. Well, I have a quick quiz here, specifically more about bones. I got some bone superlatives. Super bones.

Quick lightning round. So get your barnyard buzzers out. I'm going to name the superlative. You tell me which bone. Here we go. Largest bone. Oh. Chris.

Tibia. Incorrect. Ooh. Colin. Femmer? Femmer. Femar. The top three biggest bones are all the leg bones.

But femur is not only the largest, heaviest on average, and strongest. Tell me, what is the smallest bone? Oh. Oh. Colin. It's in the ear. And is it, is it that? hammer the stapie. I'm going to say the the the stapies.

Correct. It is the stapies. The stirrup. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Usually called stirrup. What is the only bone not connected to another bone? Oh. Wow. You guys all know this, Chris. It's the hyoid bone. Hi-o-oid. Hi-O-I-D. It's described as the base of your tongue, but really it's located kind of like weird tonsils. are on the upper part of your neck where your chin meets the neck and it's called the floating bone because it's not connected to any bone

it's just held there by my muscles and ligaments yes I heard it described as like a piece of fruit in a jello mold basically you can imagine that hyoid and it does

and it does like for humans it helps us talk like we wouldn't be able to talk and stuff like that without it. Did you, did you, did you, did you read about hyoids in woodpeckers? When they're smashing their face into a tree, the high, the hyoid bone, uh, actually absorbs most of the shock and sends it away from the brain. Oh, interesting. It's like a mass damper, like in, uh, tall buildings, maybe. Yeah, birds are weird. Birds are weird. Uh, experts say that that's

the, the least likely bone to ever get broken. That's right. Yeah. Right. Because it's like the fruit in the Jill moat. However, I imagine when it is broken, it's usually from like strangulation. Murder. Right. Right. All right. Tell me, which bone is the weakest bone? Ooh.

The weakest bone. Chris. The one in your pinky toe. Incorrect calling. Like the ribs. A rib. It is the collar bone. The clavicle.

Oh, okay, sure. part of the reason it's thin it goes across yeah doesn't have a lot of padding on top of it yeah so bones can repair themselves to some extent you can't really regenerate fully except for what kind of bone what you know like organs you can't your body's not just going to grow a new lung right right right i mean but you could grow is she looking for teeth. Just what one kind of bone? What kind of bone?

There are several of this type of bone, but... Oh, interesting. Hmm. The answer is biblically poetic. It is ribbone. Really? Oh. Rib bone, even with large parts of it destroyed, like can regenerate.

Really? All right. Last question. The giant of Castel now, Giant of Castel now refers to three bone fragments. discovered in 1890, the bones may belong to one of the largest humans known to have existed. Based on the bone size, it has been estimated that the human may have been how tall. Okay, all right. Give me a guess closest to, Chris.

Nine feet tall. I'll say eight feet. 11 feet six inches. Wow. Well, good job, everybody. Boaning up on Bone-Trivia. Nice. All right, let's take a quick break, and we'll be right back.

When Johan Rawl received the letter on Christmas Day 1776, he put it away to read later. Maybe he thought it was a season's greeting and wanted to save it for the fireside. But what it actually was was a warning, delivered to the Hessian Colonel, letting him know that General George Washington was crossing the Delaware and would soon attack his forces. The next day, when Rawl lost the Battle of Trenton and died from two colonial Boxing Day musket balls, the letter was found, unopened in his vest pocket. As someone with 15,000 unread emails in his inbox, I feel like there's a lesson there.

Oh well, this is the Constant, a history of getting things wrong. I'm Mark Chrysler. Every episode, we look at the bad ideas, mistakes, and accidents that misshaped our world. Find us at Constantpodcast.com, or wherever you're ever. you get your podcasts. This is Jen and Jenny from Ancient History Fan Girl and we're here to tell you about Jenny's scorching historical romanticcy based on Alarica of the Bissigoths, enemy of my dreams.

Amanda Boucher, best-selling author of The Kingmaker Chronicle, says, quote, this book has everything, high-stakes action, grit, ferocity, and blizzard. amazing passion. Julia and Alaric are colliding storms against a backdrop of the brutal dangers of ancient Rome. They'll do anything to carve their peace out of this treacherous world and not just survive, but rule. Enemy of my dreams is available wherever books are sold. You're listening to Good Job Brain. Smooth puzzles. Smart. trivia.

Good job, brain. You guys know I am a big board game fan, and I love dice games, old school kind of dice dance, Yatsi, among them, things like that. Chris and I used to play Yatsi all the time. Right, yeah. Just a classic, a classic game.

You have all heard the phrase, I'm sure, when you're playing the dice games. My friends and I, we say it. it's like it's one of those things you start off saying it and you're serious and then you start saying it as a riff and then you start saying it because you all know it's so dumb but you don't want to stop it's like roll them bones you know and so every it just becomes like almost a game now like who's who's not going to be the one to say roll them bones when you're playing with the dice um now i mean this is no big secret i you guys probably knew this as well but i i had heard

the ancestor of modern dice really were bones. Like, that's where the saying, roll the bones comes from. It sounds too good to be true. It's too convenient. Like, it makes me skeptical. It is absolutely 100% true. Oh.

There have been dice made from bone historically, as well as ceramics and glass and rocks and, you know, wood and any other substance that you could. Oh, ivory. Ivory, indeed. But the really, the earliest example of a item that people would roll and throw either for a game playing, but also, you know, divination, fortune telling was animal bones. It really was little animal bones. Well, so have you guys heard of knuckle bones, pretty common name for a family of games that kind of includes dice and jacks?

as well, but it really was historically used with animal loosely knuckle bones, specifically a bone called a talus bone of mainly hooved animals. And historically, a very common animal, be either a sheep or a goat. They are relatively flat-sided. If you toss it on the ground, it will land regularly on one of the four sides. And they're small enough that you could hold a few them in your hand and roll them and the shapes are distinctive. So there's a side position and a back position and a front position. So you can basically turn the ankle bones into a jacks type game, a dice type game. They're cubish. Yeah, they are cubish. They are definitely squared off and there are unambiguously different positions that you can roll them in. To this day, there is a historical

game called Shagai that Magolian peoples have been playing for generations. And it really is just like shooting dice, except you're shooting bones and you're rolling the bones. So, okay, all right, I learned a bit of a little interesting history there, kind of scratched the itch of, I knew it came from bones, but what kind of animal, sheep, goat, very common. There's got to be more games that use bones here, just because humans, we do some weird things, man, people. Have you heard of the game of bones? This is in fact a historical game that is colloquially called the Game of Bones. It is also known as Bunak, B-U-N-N-O-C-K. Broadly, Bunak is sort of a

descendant of the large family of Skittles or pin knockdown type games, which are sort of ancestors to bowling, the bowling and duck pins and skittles. Not really popular in America, but all over many other countries, revolving around the idea of you're stacking up some sticks and you're trying to knock them down. Oh, so which part uses the bone? The ball or the sticks? Generally, it seems that this game started in the early 19th century in Siberia, real, real far north Siberia, where Russia,

soldiers who were kind of stationed there with really not too much to do, turned probably a little bit of inspiration from Shagai, which they would have known and seen from Mongolian peoples there, right there. And they turned these inspirations into a game that used horse ankle bones. The ankle bone of a horse, as you can, is, it's big, it's big. But they found that talus bones, you could prop it upright. I mean, this is a little grim. They apparently had no shortage of horse ankle bones out in northern Siberia there. I mean, it's harsh, I suppose, life. So they had enough horse ankle bones that they could turn this into a game.

They'd stack them up instead of wooden dowels or duck pins or whatever. And you toss another bone to try and knock over the stick. So it's a very sort of gruesome goth version of skittles, essentially. from there this imprompt to you know hard scrabble soldiers life game kind of spread bunnuck at some point was introduced to canada in the early 20th century it seems by russian german immigrants in particular pockets of these immigrants settled in Saskatchewan In Saskatchewan, Bunak developed as sort of just a popular local game. A lot of farms, a lot of farms there. So they had horses and where you got horses, you're going to have horse ankle bones,

you know, if you wait long enough. There was a very particular movement that grew around Macklin, Saskatchewan. Now, Macklin, Saskatchewan is not a large place in 20, 21, the Canadian census listed fewer than 1,300 people in the town of Macklin. Macklin is home to the annual Bunach World Championships. Wow. Yes, they have, they have, they have leaned all the way into Bunuck in Macklin. There is the world's largest bunuck statue.

Is this still horse bones or do they use like regulation type of type of equipment? So in this particular example, they do use horsebones. Karen, you touched on this a little bit. A very common material for certain game equipment was ivory. Can you guys think of what was at one point far and away the number one use of ivory for gaming purposes? I was going to say chess pieces. It's not a terrible guess, not a terrible guess.

It is, in fact, billiard balls. Yeah. That makes sense. It does make a lot of sense. That's right. Now, there were some early pool balls and billiard balls that were made of animal bones. I read that ox bones were, I guess, a pretty decent choice. But far and away, the predominant material was ivory.

I mean, look, it's obviously destructive to the elephant on an individual and a population level. But it was a laborious process. Oh, I'm sure. You got to carve it. Exactly. Carve it. It was labor. It was an artisan kind of thing.

You might only get four or five balls. maybe six or eight from a single tusk. Oh, my God, that's so sad. It is very sad. It is extremely sad. There was a time when billiards was, it's hard to overstate how popular billiards was in the 19th century. It just took off.

There was a famous billiards promoter, player evangelist named Michael Phelan in the mid to late 1800s. He was driving the success of the game. Cashing in on the success of the game, loved the game. And he also had the foresight to realize this game is growing so fast that the ivory, he was starting to get concerned. Can't scale. It doesn't.

It didn't scale. That's right. And, you know, they had rapidly made improvements to a lot of the other technology. The cues have gotten better. The bumpers have gotten better. You know, the special bays and the, you know, the material on the table have gotten better. But not the balls, really. So, to be blunt, I think he was doing this for capitalist reasons.

I don't necessarily think he was crying about the elephants. He advertised a bounty or a reward of $10,000. Okay, this is an 1863 for a suitable replacement for ivory pool balls. Money and necessity of the mother of invention. So this opened the door to a man named John Wesley Hyatt and his brother. He decided, I'm going to be the one. I'm going to break through and build the world a better billiard ball. And ultimately, what he struck on was using a mixture of nitrocellulose.

And we've talked about nitrocellulose before. And we'll come back to this in the second. So working with his brother, they took what had been kind of a weakness of nitrocellulose up to that point. They mixed it with some camphor oil. And it basically made the substance easier to work with, but also would harden the way he wanted it to. So this new composition, he and his brother named this substance.

coined the term celluloid. Now, Chris, you talked on the show a few episodes about about celluloid. And you want to give us maybe just sort of the five second summary of what was the big takeaway from celluloid. Celluloid was used for old film prints and it was incredibly volatile and it would just randomly explode. Yeah, yeah. So it was a success. It was a business success. Reviews were a little mixed of the ball at first, but, yeah, I mean, people don't like change, but it really was a very, very, very good substitute, much more sustainable than slaughtering hundreds and thousands of elephants to make these balls. There were some drawbacks to the celluloid balls. He said, a lighted cigar applied would at once result in a serious

flame and occasionally the violent contact of the balls would produce a mild explosion. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep, yep. But it's like in a pool hall. Yeah, people are smoking cigar, I mean, even if you're not, the balls are going to knock together, even if you're not cinema. The whole point of this game is to drive the balls violently into other balls. You cannot play this game and not have. that happened? Also, it's celluloid, which they, I mean, they could put the balls away and leave them

on the shelf, and then they could simply spontaneously combust. Yeah, exactly. That's right. That's right. He said he received, quote, a letter from a billiard saloon proprietor in Colorado mentioning this fact and saying that he did not care so much about it, but that instantly, every man in the room pulled a gun. So this is the other problem. I mean, Karen is on the other side of the fancy scale with the cigar holders is you're out in the frontier town and every person in this saloon has a gun on them and they're an explode.

So he and his brother, they established the Albany Billiard Ball Company smashing success for over a hundred years. It was one of our first plastics. It was one of our first just easily manufactured,

widely manufactured plastics despite some of these drawbacks like it, you know, blowing up or catching fire. I can't believe people were okay with all of this. I mean, I guess they have no better option, but still, it's like movie theaters, catch and fire, pool halls. So celluloid itself was a hit. They made, they made a lot of money. It eventually, even billiard balls moved on to other materials, resins, you know, advanced other plastics and ceramic mixtures and things like that. I've read in a couple places. I really

hope this is true. There is one piece of recreational equipment that is still made of celluloid today. It's safe, celluloid. It's not going to blow up on you. Do you guys know what it is? You guys know what it is? It's a ping pong balls. Ping pong balls.

No! Yeah, yeah. One of the very few that is widely available. Today. Today. So, yeah, I had, I definitely, the bones took me places I didn't think they were going to take me. So I had to share that with you all.

No frills, delivers. First, get groceries delivered to your door from No Frails with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrails.ca. I got our last quiz. Last season, we talked about Learned League. Neville was the guest on our show, and we were trying to convince everybody else on the show,

Chris and Colin, to join Learned League. And I'm happy to report I did pretty good this past season. I won my league. I was first placed out of 30s. Yeah, Karen. Which means now I get to move up, kind of like British soccer. You've been promoted. And it's not because I'm that great.

It was just really what I call a slum dog league. A lot of questions that I knew the answers to, I was like able to suss out. There was this question. I'm going to read the question. A multicolored tri-pipped bone would oddly but accurately describe the logo for what American company founded in Michigan in 1960 now in my head when I was reading this question I was like okay okay there's a lot of a lot of different parts let's let's work it out say multi-color tri-piped bone okay I was thinking about like a dog bone I was like what are the pits are the pips like you know

like suits on a playing card three bone or three you know three thing bone it's kind of weird and I was like okay American company founded in Michigan okay what's a what's a industry city in Michigan. It's like, okay, Detroit. Oh, cars. It's going to be like something car related. And then I was like, okay, what car company logo has like bones and like three things in it? I thought about this for like a whole day.

And I was like, oh, what is? And I was like, okay, well, what other things? Okay, Detroit. Well, Detroit is known for like pizza. And then it was Zing. Just that one quick thought. I was like, oh, a tripiped, three dotted. bone as in a tile, a gaming tile, or a dice, or a domino.

And I was really happy to arrive at this answer because it was the correct one. Domino's pizza. Domino's pizza. Why the name? Why the logo? Did the founders like to play Domino's? Was someone's name Domino? What's the connection between the pizza and then the domino game?

So the Monaghan brothers, founders of Domino's Pizza, they took over a local pizzeria called Dominic, named after the original owner whose name was Dominic. So Ton Monaghan, one of the brothers, he then bought two more pizza shops and wanted to call all three of them Dominics. It makes sense, right? It's kind of like a brand. However, the original owner, Dominic, he was like, no. The original store is called Dominics. You can name the new two stories Dominics as well. So then an employee suggested, hey, why don't you rename it Domino's?

It's reminiscent of Dominics, but it's not exactly Dominics. And that's how the name came to be. Nothing to do with the game just because it sounded similar to the original name of the pizzeria. And this is why in the logo, there are three dots. for the three locations. And we talked about this, I think, Chris, in a very old quiz of yours,

where the original idea was they're going to add a dot for every franchise location. They were thinking too small. You're capping yourself at like 12 stores, right? One, you know, the highest number of dots you can have on a domino. Yeah, they're like filling in that 12th one. They're like, ah, now we're done. Yeah.

From this was 1960 until now, like Domino's has been making pizza, delivering pizza and pizza adjacent and non-adjacent items for over 60 years in 84 countries. So, question, in 2007, Domino's collaborated with what sweet treat brand to debut a dessert pizza that sadly failed miserably? Oh, yeah. Can you remember this? Colin. Was it Oreos? It was Oreo. It was the Oreo pizza. Wow.

Literally, it is a normal pizza crust with crushed up Oreos on top. And the sauce is the white frosting. Oh, my goodness. People hated it. It's too sweet. It's something a toddler would come up with and think it's just like, oh, you're just like cookie pizza. I was reading some market survey and market research in the U.S. Yes, people don't really want dessert pizza.

It's like they don't really equate pizzas as a dessert, but other countries do. Yes. So in the Ukraine, they have what's called Domino's Pies. And it is the pizza crust, they put like poppy seed filling. And then they put a beautiful lattice, like a dough lattice on top. And they bake it. So it's like, it is like a pie shape instead of crust. It's like bread.

It's like a bobka, but not swirled around. It actually sounds good. Yeah. It looks beautiful and people love it. The Domino's pies in Ukraine. And then in the UK, they have something called the Laudacaca pizza, which is pizza crust, and they just melt milk chocolate in the center. And people are like, this is exquisite. It's delicious.

Yeah. Question time. During the claymation craze of the 1980s. Yes. Totally 80s. Domino's had this unusual mascot. What was its name and what was its deal? Colin.

It was the Noid. It would stop your pizza from getting delivered on time. And it was like, avoid the Noid, go with Domino's, which will get your pizza in, what, 30 minutes or less, or it's free, right? It's like a villain that they came up with. The Noid is, is Claymation, a human guy in a Deadpool red superhero costume. but he has big rabbit ears. Yeah, I was always a little unclear what his biology was supposed to be.

If he took out the suit, he has the rabbit ears. It's so strange, but it was a craze. People loved the noid. Unfortunately, something really sad happened in 1989 that might have contributed to the end of the noid. So at a domino's location in Georgia, the state, a man came in with a gun and held two dominoes employees hostage. His name was Kenneth Noid.

No. Oh, no. And he believed that the entire avoid the noid campaign was about him. He was convinced that like Domino's pizza like stole his name. Oh my gosh. The hostages actually escaped. But you know, for a while there, America was obsessed with the noid mascot. Chris, please correct me if I'm wrong.

There was a noid video game, right? I believe. That's my next question. That's my next question. Tell me, the Noid has appeared in how many video games? Oh, my God. You're already blowing my mind because I would have capped it at one. But there were multiple, yeah.

I thought, gee, I thought there just was one video game. Is it more than one? Four. What? Avoid the Noid, computer game, 1989. Oh, okay. All right, sure. Okay.

Yo Noid, the N.S. Nintendo 1990 game made by Capcom. That's what I was thinking of. Which was a localized version of an existing Japanese platformer. They do that a lot where they kind of re-skin it. The Noid's Super Pizza Shootout in 2011, which was a Facebook web game in the style of a classic arcade game. And get this, the fourth game, Crash Bandicoot on the run. What? The 2021 mobile endless runner.

Wow. The Noid makes an appearance. We need to nip this in the bud right here. I don't think we should do Noid nostalgia. Yes. I think we should actively resist the Noid coming back. If anything, where are the California Raisins? They sang Motown hits.

I feel like they could come back. They have a skill. I don't see them anywhere. Exactly. They trained very hard to sing those songs. Yeah, I think out of all 80s, claimation, I think raisins earned their place. All right. So I said before, as of 2018, Domino's has stores in over 83 countries. But very, very, very, very recently, Domino's made the world news in August 22, so just last year, because they finally had to shut down operations in what country after trying for seven years.

Oh, gosh. I'm pretty sure. It was Italy, right? Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. It is Italy. The Italian franchise company of Domino's, they had to declare a bankruptcy. You think, yeah, sure, ballsy of them to sell delivery pizza in the land that invented pizza. But they actually said that it was the pandemic.

You know, once the pandemic hit, many of the local restaurants leveled up their delivery games. Oh, so that's essentially that's what they were trying. They were trying to go in and do delivery in a place where that wasn't really typical. Right. Like that was sort of their angle that were working and then everybody else started doing it. Yeah, the tech leveled up, the delivery apps leveled up. And so now your local restaurants could go into that game too. So Domino's just couldn't rely on that model anymore.

And it may not surprise you. Italy is the birthplace of the pizza. It also, of course, is the birthplace of the first. Documented pizza delivery. As the story goes in 1889, the king and queen of Italy were traveling in Naples, where the queen fell ill. The royal couple requested to have the best food sent to them. Here's my question. The king in the story, or the king in history, Umberto the first.

What was the queen's name? Oh. Colin. Has to be Margarita. Yes, it is. Queen Margarita of Savoy, of Italy. Of course.

The namesake of the Margarita pizza and, you know, basil, cheese and tomato, red, white, and green, the colors of the flag. Yes. Yes, it was in tribute. Very good. Her name was Queen Oreo pizza.

Finally, question. If you order a plain pizza from Domino's, what would you get? Whoa. It's a tricky question. So Chris comes from a land where

your plane pizza is very different. I'm from the New Haven area, which is that a plain, still technically means dough, crust, tomato sauce on the top, and then just like sprinkling of parmesan cheese. Like, mozzarella cheese is considered a topic.

That's not a plain pizza. But on Domino's, I would assume that a plain pizza includes mozzarella cheese. If you order a plain pizza from Domino's, you would get crust and sauce. Really? However, you're doing this probably on an app or online. Yeah. So when you, the cheese is pre-selected for you.

Ah, yes. If you order from the phone, the employee would say, would you like cheese on it, or do you mean cheese? pizza. Right. Right. And so it's a little bit tricky. Plain is no cheese. You're aware also of none pizza with left beef. What? What? None pizza with left beef. I just quickly looked this up to remind myself of it. It was in 2007. Really, it was when they were starting to roll out like ordering pizza online by picking the, you know, picking the toppings that you bought on the website. And of course, Domino's was, you know, at the forefront of this. The guy was like, I want to test what would actually

happen to just get something completely ridiculous. And you can say, I want toppings on the left, toppings on the right, right? You like split the toppings of the pizza. So he gets a pizza, and he picks toppings, absolutely nothing. Nothing at all.

And then except on one side of the pizza, he picks the beef, like ground beef. He's like, I ordered a nun pizza with left beef. And he posts a picture of it. And he And it's a bare pizza crust and just on the, with no sauce, no cheese, just crust. And then on the, on the left side are just a few like little sprinklings of brown beef.

It's, it's hilarious. And he got it. I mean, they'll make you anything that you specify. Yeah, they will. Yeah, exactly. No, and I'm sure they got it. And they were like, hmm, uh, what? All right.

Sure, okay. non pizza would like beef it's great yeah so that was my segment a little bit departure from actual bones but it was definitely inspired by the learned league question and the fact that Domino's is also called bones all right Colin it's time to talk about your game that you've been working on for so long

yes for so long And Karen and Chris, you guys, man, early on, we're both beta, or not even beta, alpha, pre-alpha testers of this game. The name of our game, it is called Bear Bones. And it is a little bit of a pun name. The focus of the game is on rolling dice. And we really were trying to capture kind of a throwback feel. I mentioned Yotsie at the top of the show. And there are also cards in the game.

We call the game, it's the dice game. that thinks it's a card game. And we have had a... We really have put a lot of heart and soul and effort into this game. It is now ready. If you go to the website, barebonesgame.com. And most importantly, we have a coupon for our loyal, good job brain listeners, and use the code good job brain.

All one word, good job brain. Look at you. You're a podcast advertiser now. So we get no money from this. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, I need to kick back some royalties to you. That will get you, dear listener, that will get you $5 off.

And it is real. It is real. We started, you know, with a dream. And now we're here. And the crazy thing is witnessing this journey, the big snag. I remember so clearly the making of the dice, because it's not your PIP. Yeah, yeah. It's like numbers on dice in how.

logistically difficult it is to make. They're custom diced. It individually numbered. There are seven sets of different dice. And manufacturing custom dice was no small feat. That means they had to make a mold. How does it work? Yeah, you can either have the molded, but a lot of games, especially for small run games,

they are laser etched. Yeah. So blank cubes. Blank acrylic dice, 16 millimeter dice. And then they're etched, filled in the paint, cleaned up. And our scale, starting to scale, is 500 units, which is a pittance. Wait, there are only 500 games? There are only 500 units.

And let's say, we're going to call this the first printing. And, yeah, if you have any questions or want to learn anything more about it, just you know where to find me. And that's our show. Thank you guys for joining me and thank you guys, listeners, for listening in. Hope you learn stuff about bone games, grave robbers, and Domino's Pizza. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and on all podcast apps, and on our website, good jobbrain.com. This podcast is part of Airwave Media Podcast Network.

Visit airwavemedia.com to listen and subscribe to other shows like Ancient History Fan Girl, history tea time, and a mindful moment. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye. It feels really good to be productive, but a lot of the time it's easier said than done, especially when you need to make time to learn about productivity so you can actually, you know, be productive. But you can start your morning off right and be ready to get stuff done in just a few minutes with the Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day podcast. episodes drop every weekday. So listen and subscribe to Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day

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