Good Job, Brain! - 26: Where in the World is...

Episode Date: August 27, 2012

DO IT, ROCKAPELLA. We celebrate our half-birthday milestone by talking about our favorite world landmarks: Eiffel Tower, Great Wall of China, Giza Pyramids, and Chris reveals his Statue of Liberty obsession. And of course, the gang relives the golden sleuthing days of Carmen Sandiego. ALSO: Our new favorite words, special edition listener challenge, easy trick for memorizing the colors of the eBay and Google logos in order Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an airwave media podcast. Hello, squishy and squeezeable squabbling squires. Welcome to Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and offy trivia podcast. This is episode 26, and of course I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your practically praiseworthy prancing pranksters. Yeah. I'm Colin. I'm Dana.

And I'm Chris. Okay. So in my search for this week's alliteration, I found some super cool words I want to share with everybody. So I had, I looked up at words that start with SQU, so the squit. So I found Squiffy. Oh, what? S-Q-U-I-F-F-Y, Squiffy.

I have one of those. I clean my floor with it. Yeah. It's like a cleaning. It's really good. Swiffer, Squiffy, my jet. Like a squeegey. Squiffy means slightly drunk.

Oh, very handy. Yeah, I know. And I also have squamation, or squamation, squamation. Is it animation using squabs? I wish. You know, you pose the squab. Stop motion, stop motion, bird animation. Swab motion.

The lost art, the lost art. It's scarier than pigeonmation. It is the arrangement. of scales on an animal. Do you guys know what Pratt means? Like a person? Yeah. Yeah, like a Pratt fall.

Doesn't it just mean like your butt, right? Yes, it does. Oh, really? Yeah, a Pratt falls you fall on your butt. Okay. So a Pratt is a butt? The butt talks. Interesting.

Well, they call people Pratt, but I guess that was like, you're a butt. You're a butt head. You're a butt head. Well, that's great. Okay. And yes, today's episode is show number 26. And what's special about that, Taryn?

It's our half birthday! Yay! Hard to believe we've been doing this for six months now. It is indeed. Crazy. Time flies. And we sure covered a lot of information so far tons. So I want to ask you guys, what are some of you guys' favorite facts you learn from the show?

I think one of my favorite facts goes all the way back to the very first episode. I think it was something that Chris was talking about with the beer purity laws that since those laws predated how they really understood how fermentation worked, They didn't include yeast originally, and that they had to go back and amend the laws. Oh, this is what actually causes it. Science. Yeah, we need to update the purity laws. The only thing you can put in beer is beer. Right.

I like that one. That was a good one. I stuck with me. I just like the other word scrump now, so I want to thank Dana for that. I use it. I try to use it as much as possible. Scrum is a very good word. Relatedly, one of my favorite things is the word snarge that Dana also shared back in episode four in our words show.

And I just can't believe that there's, like, a proper word to describe the smeared residue of dead bird parts. Hitting an airplane. Hitting after, yeah, specifically, after a bird plane collision, however that might work. My favorite, Chris, described the Rachel haircut. It makes me laugh when I just think about it, that it was a, like a helmet. Space helmet. It was a space helmet with tiny dreadlocks. With tiny dreadful.

Which, again, I think if you go back and look, you will see that it was completely, completely, completely. My favorite part is that he stands by it. Yeah, he adamant, adamant. Oh, man. And I also threw it out there to our listeners asking them what was their favorite facts. And people really liked our facts about cereal. Yeah, Brian, Ernesto, and Jeremy liked all the Kellogg stuff. Crunchmouth.

Crunch mouth. Captain Crunch's full name. Yes. Neville Fogarty wrote in and said that our Central American mnemonic was very, very handy, which is a baby Godzilla. Eat hot dogs. Not cocoa puffs. And then, of course, hands down, hands down. I have a couple people here, but there are many more.

Emma, Marianne, and Kate, and many more say that by far, of course, anal beaver juice. Or castorium is the one that they'll always remember. Right, right. The fluid obtained from beaver anal glands. Yep, yep. And we just want to thank you guys. The listeners and our original Kickstarter backers for making Good Job Brain happen. We're so happy that we get to share all of these weird facts with the world.

All right. And to celebrate our half birthday, I actually have a very special pop quiz hot shot. Get your buzzers ready. I have here cards from the first genus Trivial Pursuit. Here we go. Blue for Geography. What country is? Ulaan Batar the capital of?

That was Mongolia? Correct. Very good. And pink for entertainment. What March did Felix Mendelssohn compose? March. I know we're going to feel dumb when we hear it. It is the wedding march.

Oh, Mendelssohn's wedding march. Of course. So now you know. Yes. All right. Yellow for history. What form. movie stars children are Prince

Albert and Princess Caroline Dana Grace Kelly Correct, Grace Kelly All right and this is Arts and Literature which is a brownish tint It's a brownish hue

What British officer's autobiography is titled Seven Pillars of Wisdom Officer It makes me not like Churchill or something Yeah Pass It is T.E. Lawrence

Oh Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia. All right. Green for science and nature. What's the world's largest and heaviest mammal? The blue whale? Correct.

It is the blue whale. All right. Last question. I guess this is sports orange. Sports and leisure. Sports and leisure, because this is obviously not a sports question. What color is Manhattan-style clam chlam? Chowder.

Chris Collar. Red! Yeah! Got one! Wow. They're really stretching to fit that into sports and leisure. I mean, eating leisure. The gentlemanly art of chowder eating.

Or cooking. Job, everybody. No one really knows that, do they? Like, I grew up in New England, and I mean, we, I mean, typically you'd go to a restaurant. They usually have New England clam chowder, but then also, like, you know, typically, you could also get Manhattan clam chowder. I think people know that. I remember, like, even growing up in L.A., you would specify either, like, Boston or Manhattan or New England and Manhattan. And then there's, what is, what is the clear broth?

Is that Rhode Island clam chowder? Whoa. That's the one I don't know. It's because, like, historically, they were so poor they couldn't afford color for this. Yeah. The bigger states have the color. Now I'm going to look this up. Yes, you are actually right.

There is Rhode Island-style clam chowder. It has a clear broth. This is going to be the worst segue, but it's our half-birthday, and it's kind of a milestone, a landmark, if you will. I quit. I didn't think it was so bad until you called attention to it. You made me start questioning it. And our topic of the week is on world landmarks. One, two, three.

She sneaks around the world She's a sticky finger filter From her land down to release She'll take you a ride On a slow boat to China Tell me where in the world is So get out your magnifying glass and your warrants Super sleuths

Because we're going to get Carmen Sandigo up in here And of course for the youngens don't know who Carmen San Diego is. Carmen San Diego was a video game series, an edutainment game

that tasked children with determining what country Carmen San Diego Diego and her group of thieves had stolen some piece of loot

away too. And given clues about that country you would have to go to different countries learn geographical facts about

those countries and ultimately catch the crook. It was like a geo-quiz and the guys of a game. Indeed.

The video game was then spun off into a very popular PBS television show which introduced the world not only to games

for game shows for kids that were about smarts, but also the amazing Acapella singing group, Roccapella. Rockapela! The theme song, Where in the World is Carmen San Diego. Yay! And also, it's just really well-written. It's very punny. It's funny. You don't feel like you're reading textbooks,

you know, when you're either playing or watching the show. And so here, just to kind of go into the way back machine, I have some classic examples. I would do a quick Carmen San Diego quiz. And so in the game, you get to go to different countries and try to catch her.

And so there's some clues in the places that she goes to. So I'm going to tell you the sites that's listed in the game, in the original PC game, where the world is Carmen San Diego. I'm going to read out some of the sites and the landmarks and you have to tell me buzz in if you know the country. Okay. Okay. Okay. Can we buzz in as soon as... Yes.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Here are the sites. The Sahara. The Niger River. And ancient Timbuktu. Um, is it Ethiopia?

No, it is Mali. Molly. Yes, yes. Big African Empire back in the days, Timbuktu. Okay, here are the sites. The fjords. Norway. Correct.

The other site is the Barrens Sea. Here are the sites. One of the world's largest ports. The Raffles Hotel. Singapore? Correct, Singapore. And the last one. The Danube and Magyar are...

Austria? Incorrect. Is it Hungary? Correct. Hungary. Very good. And of course, I also looked up some of the villains all have very funny names. Some of my favorites are You'll Be Sorry.

Robin Banks. Nice. Sam O'Nella. and my favorite Bessie Mae Mucho That's cute That's pretty good My favorite from the show was Patty Larsonie

That's a good one Long long ago in the pre-good job brain days Karen and I came across a Sega Genesis copy Of where the West Carmen San Diego And we pop this thing in And we're like Oh we don't have the almanac You know you need the almanac to play

You have to look stuff up And we turn the game on And it's just like Sloots The crook went to a country where you can get sushi. Where did he go? You're like, oh, wait, we don't need an almanac.

We have an average adult level of knowledge. Totally, totally forgot that it wasn't eight. I think they made it easier. It was really hard. It was hard. All right, well, so speaking about trivia questions and geography, let me pose a question to you guys here. If I asked you, what is the only man-made structure visible from space?

Oh, what would you say? Chris. It's the Great Wall of China. Great Wall of China. Well, that's definitely... Well, that's what's believed... That's the answer I was looking for. Okay.

Indeed. That is a question that even now, you still hear a lot in various kind of trivia forms. And Karen, I think you were about to get to the point, which is it is, in fact, false. It is not the only man-made structure that you can see from space. And so some people have said, oh, well, it's the only man-made structure that you can see from the moon. And this is also demonstrably false. You can't see that level of detail from the moon either. You're either close enough to see it.

you can also see other things like roads and highways and railroads and if you zoom out far enough everything goes away. So yeah, there is nothing special about the Great Wall of China. And this is one that I always remember hearing as a kid or various trivia forums. Yeah, it's so big that yeah. Yeah, it's the only structure visible. And no one's exactly sure, you know, I did a little bit of digging into this. No one's really sure where this started. But it goes back to the early days of the space program as well. But, you know, great astronauts, including the late great Neil Armstrong, who just passed away this week, and Alan Bean and others, they're all on record saying, no, you cannot see it from space at a resolution where you can't see other things. That's one of those things where we talk about, you know, when you're asked a question in pub quiz, do you give what you know to be the right answer, or do you give the answer of what they're looking for? And unfortunately, I don't have any advice for you on that dear listener one way or the other.

But it is not, in fact, the only man-made structure visible from space. see any main structure from space? Well, you can. I mean, up to a certain point, before you get to a distance of the moon, you can see railroads and highways. And, you know, really the clue they say is things that are very long and straight, you know, and they talk about the Gemini five astronauts, actually, they set up a checkaboard pattern for them in Texas, like a giant checkaboard to sort of test and see like, hey, can you guys see this from space? And they could. And they, you know, they reported actually. They saw a lot of things. They also saw an aircraft carrier out in the Atlantic, you know, the one that, in fact, later was the one that was going to go pick them up.

Now, it's not to take away from the Great Wall. It is still the longest man-made structure on Earth. I think we had this question in Pub Quiz. Do you guys know what percentage is still standing? Oh, right. Some small percentage. It was like 20% or something. It's 8%.

This five-year-of-study, it just ended. They estimate 8% of it still remains of the original life. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, yeah. It is actually pretty amazing. So it's like so much bigger. It is highly, highly incredible and amazing, but it is not the only manmate thing.

you can see from space. Actually, I read, there is something man-made that you can see from space. Is this a pickup line? Yo, baby. So, I love Las Vegas, and I was reading about the different structures in Las Vegas. And so there is the Luxor Resort, the one that's shaped like a giant black pyramid. And at the very top, it has, like, the obelisk light. And on a clear day, when they turn all the lights on and you see the lights.

beam, you can see that beam from space. Oh, that's really cool. I do. I also, I do also love Las Vegas, and that is one of my favorite features there is that beam shining up into the night sky. Super bright. So speaking of pyramids, I was going to talk about the great pyramid of Giza. The OG Pyramids. The OG pyramid. First, I have a question for you guys. What's a tin letter word for a large elaborate cemetery in an ancient city? Uh, mausoleum? No. Large elaborate ancient cemetery in an ancient city. Yeah. Sarcophagus.

No, that's like a coffin. Oh, it's like necropolis. Yes. Yes. Oh, I'm a genius. A city of the dead. Yes, it means city of the dead in Greek. So this was the city of the dead for one of the pharaohs.

Do you know which pharaoh? He comes up in video games sometimes and TV shows. Ramsey's the second? No. It was Kufu. Oh, right, right. Yeah, he was in Tomb Raider. That's how we learn our geography.

He was also a real person. He was an Egyptian pharaoh. Yes, yes. He was that, too. I've heard of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World before. It comes up a lot. Do you guys know what the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World are? At various times, I've memorized all seven.

Pyramids, yes, that's one of them. Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Yep. The Colossus of Roads. The Mausoleum of Halakarnassus. The Libraries at Alexandria. At the lighthouse. The lighthouse at Alexandria.

How many is that? Four. That's only four? No, we've had more than four. Wait, five. I don't know. Did you say Temple of Artemis of the Faces? No, didn't say that.

And Statue of Zeus at Olympia? Oh, okay. Okay. All right. So what do those six except for the pyramids have in common? They're all in the Greek area. None of them exist anymore. None of them exist anymore.

The only one that's left is the pyramid. And the pyramid was around about 2,000 years before any of those were built. And it still exists today. A testament to a good construction. Right. Yeah, I mean, it is interesting that a lot of these, they only have suggested drawings or artist's conceptions of them. You know, here's what it might have looked like.

No one knows. Yeah. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, there's controversy about whether that one actually existed. And I think I also remember reading about the Colossus of Rhodes. Like, they weren't really sure how big and giant this thing actually was. Right. In the drawings, they're all, it's huge. Well, I remember reading something.

some translations about the Colossus Road stood astride the harbor. And so some drawings literally had him standing with one leg on either side of the armor, but then they talk about, I mean, the amount of engineering and just raw resources required to build that

would just be so daunting. I've also read that maybe it just meant he was standing on one side of the harbor, but that they're not really sure. It could be some poetic license. Two thousand years before that, the pyramid existed. It's true. It's true. 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. You can spend less time staying in the know about all things gaming and get more time to actually play the games you love with the IGN Daily Update podcast. All you need is a few minutes to hear the latest from IGN on the world of video games, movies, and television. with news, previews, and reviews. You'll hear everything from Comic-Con coverage

to the huge Diablo for launch. So listen and subscribe to the IGN Daily Update wherever you get your podcasts. That's the IGN Daily Update, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, and last week, we had a question about the eBay logo. Yes.

So I have developed two mnemonics, to help you guys memorize the colors of the eBay logo and the colors of the Google logo. Cool. So the eBay logo, E-B-A-Y, E-B-A-Y, E is red, B is blue, A is yellow, and Y is green. Red, blue, yellow, green. Yes, so R-B-Y-G. So the nemonic I have is, what's eBay for? eBay is for reselling and buying your garbage.

R-B-Y-G Affectionately, affectionately. It hits home, Chris. It does. Reselling and buying your garbage. Well, I won't forget that. Red, blue, yellow, and green. And for Google, more letters here,

the colors in order for the Google logos. Blue, red, yellow, blue, green, red. So that's B-R-Y-R-Y-R-Y. B.G.R. So what is, you know, what's your number one advice on Google? Bosses read your bad Google results. Bosses read your bad Google results. Blue, red, yellow, blue, green, red. So there you go. Actually, this comes up in trivia all the time. More than, more than I would have thought certainly. Yeah. Like, what color is the B and eBay? You're like, oh, God. Well, especially Google, you stare at it every day. And I have actually a quick little pro tip with Google.

So you know how if you go to the Google main page, they have like the search field and then search. And then next to the search button, there's the I'm feeling lucky. So these days, if you hover over the I'm feeling lucky button, it changes instead of I'm feeling lucky. It hovers into I'm feeling puzzled. And if you click on it, Google has a trivia question every day if you click on that. And it shows up and asks you a trivia question and it gives you a hint and you can go Google search and find the answer. You can submit your answer. I was just reading, in fact, yesterday that they're doing a lot of experimentation with that because when they introduced autocomplete, you know, not so long ago, it really took away a lot of the need for the I'm feeling lucky functionality so that it is basically going to go away.

It's going to go away. And they were talking about a lot of things they're replacing them with with the Easter eggs and some of the Google Labs products. So there may be even other things out there aside from the trivia. Yeah, there are. There's also, I'm feeling hungry if you hover it again, and it takes you to, like, you know, restaurant, results near your neighborhood. So check it out. There are so many different, like, cool Easter eggs in that I'm feeling lucky button. All right. Quick question. Where is the currently tallest man-made structure right now? Oh, Dubai. Dubai. Correct. Yes. Burge Kalifa. It's a built over. Big old building, right? Yep. Burge Khalifa, 829 meters and a little bit more. And it took over from Kuala Lumpur, is that right? Do I still have that right? It actually, so that's the thing with these tallest structure things.

There's a lot of, I would say, controversy. It's like, oh, do you count radio towers? Spires and antennas and skyscrapers. So it took over, I think, the last tallest skyscraper is Taipei 101. Okay. As of right now, it is Dubai's Burj Khalifa, which is a skyscraper. Good job. Well, I think that's actually a really good transition to what I wanted to talk about,

which is the building, which in its day was the tallest building in the world, which is the Eiffel Tower. Does that count as a building? Sure, it's a building. You could go up to the top. It was in, it was in use for a lot of different things. Absolutely. It was the tallest structure in the world until 1930 when they built the Chrysler building in New York. Yeah, yeah.

You know, the pyramid was the tallest building for about 3,000 years. Yeah, I don't think that anything will break the record of longevity that the pyramids held. Yeah. Gustav Eiffel actually compared the tower to the pyramids in the, the early days of, you know, trying to build glory for Paris the same way that the pyramids built glory for Egypt as well. We put a lot of dead bodies. That's the little known, little known fact about it.

Yeah, all the dead bodies. No, there are no dead bodies, mafletar. That white smells like that. That we know of. Yeah, exactly. Secret dead bodies. It was built for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris and also coincided with the 100 year anniversary of the French Revolution.

So it was very symbolic and had a lot of meaning to both the people building it and to Parisians at the time. It was not supposed to be. permanent, right? It was not, in fact, supposed to be permanent. Which is for show at that time. Well, it was originally one of the conditions of it being built was it was built for the exposition. It was intended to be something that could be disassembled at the latest after the end of its 20-year lease that it had on the property. So one of the reasons that it is such a lightweight lattice work structure is that Eiffel's firm,

which was who was contracted to build the tower, wanted it to be something that could be disassemblable when it had to be if it had to be. So obviously, as it, It turns out they didn't disassemble it 20 years later. But we still can. We could if we had to. You know, one of the main reasons, in fact, that the city and the government decided not to take it apart was that it had become such a valuable communications tower and still is. Oh, it's useful.

Absolutely. It was useful almost from the very beginning as radio transmission tower and as late as even last year, analog television transmission. So during both wars, of course, it had a lot of value. I mean, it was not just a pretty face. It's a giant, you know, structure right in the middle of the city. So it's a great radio tower, yeah. Like a lot of other things that we've talked about in the show,

when it first debuted, there was a lot of criticism for it. Like other things that have become iconic, you know, a lot of prominent Parisians were worried. It was going to overshadow, partly literally, but metaphorically, you know, overshadow all these other great historical buildings in Paris. It was too modern and too weird. Wow.

That's so weird to think like that now. It was called variously a metal asparagus. someone called it a suppository there was some harsh criticism of it at first you know and it is funny to look back at it now it is the iconic building of Paris in one of the iconic landmarks of the world take that in looking into the history of it

I found out some interesting things about the color of the Eiffel Tower so when it's black it's no actually the official color of it today is bronze the operators of the tower call it bronze when it first debuted Gustavifel had it painted red. It's been reds, it's been goldens and mustard yellows over the years. It's been a lot of different colors and in fact

they're very open to changing the color and if you go to visit the tower they have a section there actually that shows with corresponding stripes all the colors that it's been painted, which is really neat. If you do a little bit of Googling on the internet you can probably find it. It's a really neat picture. I want a hot pink one. You know go spam

the vote of the ballot box with your votes right. Here's something really interesting. It is actually painted in three slightly different shades of the base color. It's painted in stripes from dark to light. So the bottom third is darker. The middle third is a light slightly lighter and the top third is even lighter to sort of reinforce the feeling of height when you're standing there. To really, exactly, to play with your perception and make it feel really tall and imposing. Oh, it's a trick. Still, not just a valuable

icon, but still in use of communications tower. The metal asparagus. So obviously we're on the same wavelength here, Colin, because when I started thinking, about this, I started thinking about another famous landmark that Gustav Ifel had a hand in, which of course was the Statue of Liberty. Oh, well, I didn't know that. Yeah, Eiffel actually built

the inner metal structure of the Statue of Liberty. Huh. Right, right. His firm, I mean, yeah, being a specialty in the metal work. Statue of Liberty was, it had French origins, but I did no idea. Yeah, it was, the idea was

that it was going to be made by the French and given to America to sort of celebrate the special relationship that they had because, of course, you know, France, you know, won its independence essentially from the monarchy, you know, it was very inspired by the American Revolution, you know, and so they wanted to essentially give this gift. Clearly, French-U.S. relations were a lot better at the time than they are now. But yeah, I mean, you know, they wanted to make this gift. So it was actually called the official name of the statue is La Liberté Clairons Le Monde, which of course means liberty holding an eclair in a muffin. In the world. Yeah, yeah, little known fact That's what she's actually holding Yeah, you can't see it from the ground

No, it means liberty enlightening the world And so that's the actual name of the statue She is a colossus, the designation She likes to be called a full-figured woman And again, this keeps coming up She has a torch in her right hand And she has in her left hand a tablet It's not a book

So right hand is the torch And the left hand is the tablet So it's like in her fighting hand, the torch, so she could stabs. Oh, yes. Her main hand is the right hand. It's in her torch hand. Right, right. And actually, one of the metaphorical things about the sculpture that people don't typically notice or know about is that there's actually broken chains around her feet.

And she's stepping out of bondage. I'm stepping out. I want the broken chains. The sculptor's name was Bartoldi. Frederick August Bartoldi was the name of the sculptor. And it was kind of like, you know, we kind of like had this idea. And it took years upon years essentially to, obviously, to kind of, like, get everybody on board to do this. Right.

And get all the funding in place. Yeah. So basically what happened was France funded the statue. And the United States had to fund the pedestal. And so the island was called Bedloe's Island. It had a fort on it called Fort Wood. And it was that that actually forms the bottom part of the pedestal, that sort of star-shaped building. Right.

That was a working defensive. fort. Do you know what the Statue of Liberty is made out of? It's copper. It is copper. Yeah. So they decided to make it out of copper. He could make it in Paris and then ship it to the United States because it would be very light considering its volume. And very forgiving,

yeah, to the process of assembly he did. Yeah, actually, and really Eiffel's contributions have kept the statue up. I think they were originally considering like a masonry you know, kind of body inside. But he was like, no, you know, he built this sort of like the skeleton with an

armature, and the armature, it basically it could rock back and forth. It was a little bit... It's flexible. Yeah. Interestingly enough, you know, very much like the Eiffel Tower, public opinion about the Statue of Liberty was not... Everybody was not exactly on board with this. I mean, a lot of the sentiment in the United States was... We don't like change.

Well, you know what it was. It was like, wait, we have to pay how much for this pedestal? Oh, gee, thanks for your quote-unquote gift. This gift you have to pay a lot of money for. And politicians were not actually able to raise the money. money via, you know, just federal funds. Like, they were vetoing bills that would have paid for the pedestal. And what ended up happening was Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper publisher. He had to do this whole campaign to get people to, like, come on, donate money.

And they were really targeting not only just, like, you know, people with extra money, but everybody. It was this whole big thing where it's like, orphans, homeless people, don't eat. Give us your, like, two pennies that you found. It was, like, they were telling. Very populist. And he was very yellow journalism, like, telling all these stories in the paper about, like, Like, oh, this little girl gave, she only had 60 cents, and she gave it all for the pedestal, getting kids in school to donate money for the pedestal. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They started making it in pieces. And as some of the pieces were completed, they actually started sending them to the U.S. for different exhibitions because they wanted to do this for the centennial of the United States, but it wasn't able to be done in time. So in 1876, for the actual centennial year, they had a centennial exhibition. and the hand holding the torch was done. And so they just sent the handhold. There's photographs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like photographs.

But that's so cool. That's very symbolic. Yeah. But it is a thing to be proud of for both nations or both nations. Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So another really interesting thing that I found out about.

So first of all, the unveiling, which was in 1886. It was a big old party. Like once it was actually done, people were like, okay. Now, the statue had been in America in pieces from, months upon months upon months while they were working on the pedestal. And so then finally, put it all together, and may I do a reading from an article from the New York Times, October 29, 1886. All of this display was an inspiration to so many imps of office boys who, from a hundred windows,

began to unreal the spools of tape that record the fateful messages of the ticker, quote unquote. In a moment, the air was white with curling streamers. This was altogether too much fun. the office boys had to give way to their elders. More and more of the tape went skimming through the air. It was dangled in the faces of solemn horsemen. It was jiggled tantalizingly just out of the reach of the college youth. And the pretty country cousins were tickled under the chin with carefully directed points

until they screamed in feminine alarm. So is that the first ticker tape parade? Is that what you were alluding to? The first ticker tape parade arose totally spontaneously when, a procession was going through town to herald the opening of the Statue of Liberty. And Wall Street Stock Boys just started throwing the tape out and then everybody started doing it. Nice. That's where it came from.

Also, that passage made me feel a little bit uncomfortable. I was a huge Statue of Liberty nerd when I was a kid for some reason. So the restoration was being done when I was four or five years old and like 84, 85. And there was a lot of Statue of Liberty mania going on because it was the centennial and they were going to reopen it with all the restorations. And I started collecting stuff. And so I have, like, a whole mess of Statue of Liberty collectables. Like, anything with Statue of Liberty on it, I would collect.

And I have, like, a bunch of, like, Statue of Liberty Chotchkes. Wow, I do not know that about you. The first time we went, it was under, it was under reconstruction. So I must have been either four or five years old because we were in New York City. And all we could do was drive up to Battery Park, which is near there, and look at, you could see the statue from far away. And I just remember the scaffolding and sheets covering the whole thing. you kind of see the torch popping out of the top. And it was like, that's Statue of Liberty.

I was like, oh, but I knew. Like, I knew that there was ever a bit. You know, I knew. Use your imagination, Chris. Like, I knew, I knew what I was going to see. This figure of a human that's, that's so monstrously tall, and all of the things that it represents and where it came from and it's odd history. I agree.

Clearly, I like it a lot because I brought a lot of Statue of Liberty facts to the table. You look fantastic in the green crown, too. I'm not wearing underwear under this robe. Okay. My turn, and of course, everyone here knows that I am a big Disney nut. Yes. I go to Disneyland in Southern California. I go to Disney World in Orlando.

You go to a constant. Every year. More than one. Both. I even run marathons there. So other than the kind of iconic fairy tale castle, Disney World's Epcot Center is probably one of the most iconic landmarks. What I really mean is that giant sphere, that silver golf ball that you see. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Epcot, the center, it's Epcot Center. It's actually the theme park where the giant ball lives. As many know, Disney World, unlike Disneyland, is a giant resort made up of several theme parks, separate theme parks. They have a lot more space. And Epcot is the educational theme park. It's like themed with education. And they have a lot of showcases and rides focused on like future technologies. Before Epcot Center was a theme park, Walt Disney actually had a really grand and ambitious and maybe a little bit nutty plan for Epcot.

Do you guys know what Epcot means? I was waiting for you to get to it because I don't know. So Epcot is an acronym and it stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. So it was a model community. It was Walt Disney's Rapture. It was like, oh no. It was Disney's original vision, Walt Disney's original vision of Epcot. was for a model community, like a city, a city with like 20,000 residents.

And it would be like a test bed for a lot of different urban planning technologies. Well, I always associate the Epcot with futurism. Yep, yep, utopian. And he really wanted to design and run a city in Orlando, Florida, with all, you know, all his other parts. Of course it did. Of course it was never fully realized because Walt Disney died before Disney World actually, you know, officially opened. So what about the iconic golf ball? Like, what is it?

Do you guys know what it is? If the answer isn't a big golf ball, I have nothing bad. Yeah, I don't know. It's a ride. There's a ride inside the golf ball. So Epcot Center is the theme park. The golf ball is actually called Spaceship Earth. Oh, yeah, okay.

It's a ride that you go, and it goes kind of like a Statue of Liberty on the inside. You go around the internal, and then you come down. Like Space Mountain at Disney. It's more like an educational people mover. It's very slow. It's like a, it's a 13-minute ride. Perfect for like those hot days in Orlando. You're like, I just need some air conditioning.

You go on this ride and you take a nap. So it's like small world where it's like parents get to take a break, basically. So it's just a ride in there. It is just a ride. It's a 13-minute people-mover ride detailing the history of human communication with animatronics. So it's boring. It sounds like a nightmare. I'm not going to lie to it.

It's boring. Human interaction with animatronics. Like that sounds like. like nightmare town. You're stuck in a ball with these robots. For 13 minutes, they just talked to you. In this dark, hi-you. So the big ball, it's called a geodesic structure or a geodesic sphere, and it's made out

of the outer surface is made of a bunch of triangles. Kind of like the Eiffel Tower, there is a trick. There is a structural trick. So when you look at it, you're like, oh, they made a big ball, and then it sits on three legs, right? a big ball with three legs jutting out as support. The whole thing is actually not a sphere. It is made up of two separate domes.

So there's the proper big dome, and it starts where the legs jut out to the very top. So kind of your normal standard upright dome. And then the bottom part is actually hung from the legs. So it's not, they're not built together. They're two separate. One is right side up and one is upside down. Two salad balls. Yep.

There are two salad bows, and one is. hung from the bottom. Interesting. And the skin of the golf ball is actually structurally designed that. So when it rains, no water pours off the side onto the ground. All the water is collected from the gaps of the little triangles on the skin. And then they use that water. They channel that water into like the lagoons in the park.

They use the rainwater to power the scary robots. They rust. They rust. The jaw falls. Oh, man. Their eyes follow you, though. We're talking about the calculator. That is my new nightmare.

I'll see you in your dreams. Get to Toronto's main venues like Budweiser Stage and the new Roger Stadium with Go Transit. Thanks to Go Transit's special online e-ticket fairs, a $10 one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel on any weekend day or holiday anywhere along the Go network. And the weekday group passes offer the same weekday travel flexibility across the network, starting at $30 for two people and up to $60 for a group of five. Buy your online go pass ahead of the show at go transit.com slash tickets. So we talked about a lot of landmarks, and we have to close the show, a listener challenge, our half-birthday listener challenge. It's a riddle slash puzzle I came up with, and hopefully it's challenging enough.

And it kind of fits with this week's landmark theme, too. And since it's our half birthday, we're going to up our usual listener challenge prize this time. So earlier, we mentioned some of our favorite and most memorable facts featured in our show. So in addition to our usual mini swag pack of Good Job Brain stickers and trivia cards, we're also giving away a special custom Good Job Brain woodblock print. Oh, yeah. Made by yours truly featuring two of our favorite things. cereal and beaver

it's very cute it is really cute it's our castorios of woodblock print and we're giving away these limited edition prints to some of those who send in the right answer for this listener challenge and here is the puzzle hello hello where are you if you're dialing only the blue

from Irving Morrow's baby's hue and here it is again Hello, hello, where are you If you're dialing only the blue From Irving Morrow's Baby's Hugh So you have a week to email us What you think the answer is at Gjb.podcast at gmail.com

And the deadline is September 3rd And you just might win a very fancy Special edition of a Good Job Brain Price Pack Indeed. So our half-birthday listener challenge So get to it. Yep. And that is our show.

show thank you guys for joining me and thank you guys listeners for listening in hope you learned a lot about different landmarks and and karen's nightmare of being stuck in the epcot center with robots and you can find us on zoon marketplace on iTunes on stitcher and on our website which is www.gobrain.com check out our sponsors bonobos at b-on-o-b-os.com and we'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye, cheers. See you next crime. Amanda Boucher, best-selling author of The Kingmaker Chronicle, says,

quote, this book has everything, high-stakes action, grit, ferocity, and blazing passion. Julia and Alaric are colliding storms against a backdrop of the brutal dangers of ancient Rome. They'll do anything to carve their peace out of this treacherous world and not just survive, but rule. Enemy of My Dreams is available wherever books are sold.