Good Job, Brain! - 51: Oh What a Circus

Episode Date: February 26, 2013

Come one, come all! Behold as we uncover tasty circus and carnival factoids from under the big top: circus lingo, superstitions, and codes for danger. If so many people are scared of clowns, why are they an integral part of the circus? Join in on our elephant parade of pachyderm myths and the story behind Jumbo. And find out how carnival games are rigged and the best ways to beat them. ALSO: International House of Pancakes quiz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Welcome fellow frenzied fact fanatic followers and friends. This is good job bringing your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. Today's show is episode 51. And of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your Happy Snappy Chaps Who Yap About Fraps and Maps Wow, I'm Colin

I'm Dana And I'm Chris All right Without further ado Let's jump into our general Trivia segment Pop Quiz Hot Shot Here I have a random

Trivial Pursuit card And you guys have your Barnyard buzzers Get them ready Here we go Blue Wedge for Geography Who became the first Former Donut Maker

To Walk on the Moon Buzz Aldrin Incorrect Neil Armstrong Correct Neil Armstrong Former donut maker Huh okay

All right Pink Wedge for pop culture Oh what founding member of the Beatles Is credited with Coining the Band's name Hmm The name came to 50-50 chance

Oh man oh man The name came to John Lennon in a dream Incorrect Oh I'm gonna guess Paul McCartney, Karen? Incorrect.

Oh. Wow. Was it Stu? Yes. Stu Sutcliffe. That's a good one. That is a... I made that a false 50-50 choice.

Oh, you did, yes. Like many, many other people I forgot about Stu. Right. Yellow Wedge for history. What kind of gun was used to kill Abraham Lincoln? Oh. Was it a Derringer? Yes.

Wow. Good job. Yeah. That's sort of the pocket-sized pistol of choice from that era, as far as I know. Green wedge for science. What plant is also known as Spanish juice root, sweetwood, and lickweed? I don't know. Agave?

Incorrect. Spanish juice root, sweetwood. Liquid. I just, I got nothing. It is licorice. Ah, weird. Okay, last question. What parlor game do you end by Going Woo?

Going, can you spell that, please? G-O-I-N-G, going, woo, W-O-O-O. What parlor game do you end by going woo? All of them? Yeah, technically it should be going who. Going who? I'm going to guess Mahjong. Correct.

Oh, oh, oh. That was the American-E-N-G-E. Chinese going woo. All right, good job, Brains. So this week, we will be talking about something that is the source of nightmares for some people. We're going to be talking about the circus. So step right up. Come down and join the circus.

It's easy to do. You can marry the strong hand. But I think the knife to always got his eye on you. One of the things that I looked up and I thought was really fascinating is we've talked about this before. You know, different professions have different set of vocabulary that they use. You know, we talk about vaudeville in our comedy episode and other jobs. They have all these like interesting lingo and even, you know, some of the terms we know date back into that profession. So I didn't know this, but there is a private language of the circus and fairground folk.

And it's called Parlori. P-A-R-L-A-R-I. And lots of languages kind of contribute to Parlori. It is not a written language, obviously, because it's spoken by people who work on the fairgrounds. A lot of European terms and most notably Romani, which is the gypsy language. So you make the connection that back in the day, circus traveling groups of nomads, a lot of gypsies and kind of a lot of their language spill into their work lingo. And some of the words have slightly different meanings according to where you hear them. But one of the primary advantages of Pilari is that customers wouldn't be able to understand it.

Ah, it's like restaurant slang, right? Yes, it is. So, I mean, there's the benefit of that. I'm going to go through some of the interesting words I found. So, do we know what a Ballyhoo is? A Ballyhoo. I mean, I just know it in the sense of like a big production or a big... Like ruckets.

Yeah, yeah. Ballyhoo. Bruchner. Much ballyhooed, much hyped. Yes. So Ballyhoo, there's two circus meanings. Ballyhoo is the name of the moving spotlight, like at the beginning of the circus. It's all dark, and you see the spotlight's kind of spinning around in a figure eight circle.

That's called a Ballyhoo. And the other one is related to what we know. It's kind of like publicity, hype, and it comes from early 1900s, which is kind of like a sample of the circus or of a sideshow. So go into town, they have a couple of performers perform to kind of entire. the crowd, you'd be like, come check out the circus. And, uh, geek. Mm-hmm. The word geek.

Yeah. I learned it that geek historically was the person who bit the heads off chickens. Was that right? Yeah, or like, you know, the sword swallowers and those sort of side show type. Right. Yeah, so it's sideshow freak, but also in U.S. circus slang, it could be a variant of the word geck, G-E-C-K, which means a fool, a simpleton. I mean, it still carries some of the sense of sort of being a...

Fringe, ostracized, yeah, it's sort of, I can see the connection. And there's also Gaff. And we probably are more familiar with the word Gaff in, like, movie productions. Sure, from the Gaffer. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. And so Gaff means a fairground, and probably it's from the Romani word, G-A-V, Gav, which means town or a place. And Gaffer means boss, someone who took care of the grounds.

And so I can see how that kind of circus lingo then trickled into theater, then trickled into film. So you have the gaffers, you know, a person who rigs stuff up, who takes care of, like, the venue in a way. And then I also didn't know that there is an actual word for this. So we see in movies or actually, you know, when we watch circus, they have like the kind of the parade of clowns that come in and they fumble and there's a lot of music and a lot of hoopla. There's a name for it. It's called a chari vari. Shivari. Chari Vari is also very closely related to shivari, which is another word, and it's the noisy whirlwind entrance of clowns. It's stuffing all these people into a van. So do you guys know what colrophobia is?

I'm going to guess, since we're talking about circus fear of clowns. It is, yes, it's fear of clown. But the etymology of it is a little bit weird. It might actually mean fear of stilt walkers. How do you spell it again? What is it? C-O-U-L-R-O-phobia. Yeah, because ancient Greeks didn't really have clowns, but they did have stilt walkers. I am going to talk about clowns. I think bozo phobia personally has much snappier. Easier to remember, for sure.

So the reason why I started with calrophobia was, I'm kind of afraid of clowns. I know a lot of people are kind of afraid of clowns. There's this study in England, and they surveyed 250 kids from the ages of 4 to 16, who were in a hospital, and all 250 felt uncomfortable with the idea of every single child. And I was like, do you think that's like some sort of weird negative reinforcement thing where like hospitals put up pictures of clowns trying to reassure kids and then kids only associate them with like getting shots or, yeah. They were saying it's like it's a human body, a recognizable human body with an unrecognizable

human body. It's uncanny. Yeah, it goes into the uncanny valley for them. And it freaks them out. So I was like, well, why are there clowns at the circus? Like, if it's such a nightmare for people almost universally, why do we have them? And they actually serve a really important purpose in the circus. They keep the show moving.

They help usher people in. They're the breaks between the animal acts and the big acrobatic acts. They kind of give comic relief. And then I was looking at the design of clown shows and how they organize those performances. and they have all these different terms for it. So the hour or so before people are coming in, it's called the come-in, and they are in the seats hanging out, and they're doing things in the main area that encourage people to go to their seats.

So the circus is this big moving machine. We have all these different acts and things that don't necessarily hang together. The clowns are the glue that we're all together. The benefit is it draws your attention away visually from them sweeping up, you know, elephant poop or moving animals around. It's like, you're something to watch while we're changing. I was like, oh, I like thinking of clowns as the glue that holds the whole thing together to make it just keep moving and be a positive, exciting experience, even though clowns are terrifying, like, when they're upping your face. It's like the modern day loading screen, but there's, like, things going on.

Interesting. So you're waiting for the big show to load, but there's something going on to keep your attention and making the wait time a lot, a lot, seem a lot slower. They're like the cut scenes in a video game, right? Exactly. Wow nerds. So clowns used to be a much bigger deal probably than they are today. There's this guy named Dan Rice, and he's been called, the most famous man you've never heard of. I contest, I've never heard of him. I've never heard of him. But during the mid-1800s, he was a circus clown, he owned a circus, he traveled all around.

So Wikipedia says this, and I couldn't find the exact source, but they said he was more recognizable than Abraham Lincoln. At that time. At that time, he ran for Senate and Congress and president, and he actually coined. some phrases that you might know today jump on the bandwagon the bandwagon yeah was for the circus and had the clowns and the music and the excitement and he was campaigning for zachary taylor to be president was like oh come up here at candidates and people will see you and it became common practice for politicians interesting on the bandwagon so he's really playing on his direct association with the circus so he also is said to have coined or people and his employee have coined the

term hey rub which is uh the distress call yeah i don't know yeah i don't know this what is it so basically you have to understand like when the circus came to town not everybody in town was happy that circus could come to town because a lot of people saw circus you know performers as being like not respectable or you know some of them were scammers you know so you'd have altercations a lot very violent altercations sometimes between the townspeople and the members of the circus if they they're all out drinking or whatever hey rub was the distress call from one circus person to another if they found themselves in mortal danger, like if somebody was assaulting them, that's the code word, you know, that they would sort of yell out so that any circus performer

or itinerant or anybody who was in on it heard, they would come rushing to his aid. Dan Rice, huh? Dan Rice. Have you ever heard of one horse show? Yeah. What does that mean? It's a small show, but like they just really max out and milk it the most for what they have. Okay. Yeah. So people were saying that about Dan Rice's after he kind of fell on hard times. He only had one horse and they were like, oh, it's just a one-horse show, and then he worked it. He made it work. He embraced it. We are a one-horse show.

I like that. Yeah, I like that. In reading about the circus and preparation for all of this, kept coming across a lot of lists of circus superstitions. Oh, yeah. Interestingly enough, you know, also found a good rationale for why there are so many circus superstitions. The author of the book, The Encyclopedia of Superstitions, said this to PBS. The most superstitious people are those in the bestious people.

involved in occupations or activities that are potentially dangerous and involve circumstances beyond their control. Makes sense. Makes total sense, right? You're facing danger every day, or you have circumstances that are beyond your control. Like, are you going to get audience members coming in? Are you going to make any money? Right, right.

The other two populations that tend to be really superstitious are just showbiz and theater in general and sports and athletics. And the circus is kind of an intersection of both of those. It is. It is, absolutely, yep. So here's a bunch of circus superstitions for you. When I have them, the explanations for people's best guesses for how they evolved. Well, the first one, I mean, we've all heard this now, but this is often cited as a circus superstition, is that accidents happen in threes.

Bad things happen in threes. And so, I mean, it may not have come from the circus, but at some point it's certainly settled into circus lore. So, like, you know, if one accident happens, watch out for the next two accidents. This is one of those self-fulfilling prophecies because, you know, as soon as one accident happens, everybody is going to be on the lookout. something little that ordinarily wouldn't have been thought of as an accident will be counted as the two and then the three. It's the Bader Meinov phenomenon. Yeah, sure. It's like consciousness.

Yes. If a bird flies into the big top, it portends the death of one of the members of the troop. Inside the tent. Inside the tent, because that would be the bird coming to take the soul away. Yeah, exactly. A good luck superstition is that the hair of an elephant pulled from his tail or his trunk is good luck. Oye. Yeah.

The elephant's like, all right, enough guys. Right, right, right. Well, no, actually, I mean, it's, I think the reason it's considered good luck is because it's so hard to get your hands on one. Like, you don't want to walk up to an elephant and, like, pull the hair out of his trunk because he will stomp your head into a fine paste. Also, you are not supposed to have any peacock feathers on you or as part of your costume. This also comes from Romani tradition because apparently they believe that the signature. your eyeball sort of design that we see in peacock feathers is considered to be like the evil eye.

Oh. Yeah. When you're entering the ring in the big top, always put your right foot in first. I've heard that. I've heard a lot of the stuff with the first foot in. And you see that, you see that one actually a lot in sports and athletics, too. Yep. Yeah.

A lot of players, yeah, you know, right foot across the line under the baseball diamond first. Yeah, look at that. Left is bad luck. Left is bad and right is good. Never sleep inside the big top. Do not go into the big top and go to the big top and go to. sleep. Don't sleep there over the evenings. The real reason or the best reason I can find is because, remember, we have this acrimonious relationship between the townspeople or just really curious townspeople or drunk townspeople. If they walk over to where your circus is, the first thing they're going to do if they're going to try to sneak into your tent and see all the sideshow freaks and geeks up close and personal is they're going to gravitate right towards the big top. So if you're sleeping in there, that's where they might break into and find you. Never count the audience. Don't look at the audience and don't count up the audience.

This is just practical. You don't want to go out in the audience and look at the audience and be like, oh, there's not a lot of people. Then you're going to get depressed and not perform really well. Also, you don't want to go out and be like, oh, my God, there's so many people. And then you get really nervous and you don't perform really well. That's just practical. Once someone puts down their dressing trunk, don't move it.

Because that means that person might then be leaving the circus. And in fact, this is really one of the ones that is still, I think, followed today. When you bring in your dressing trunk and you put it down, that's where it is. Don't eat peanuts in the dressing room. I have no idea why this is true, but this is absolutely. It invites the elephants. Yeah, the elephants would come raging in there.

Come on now. And then finally, this is not so much a superstition. You will never hear a circus band play the song Stars and Stripes Forever. And again, there's a practical reason for this. And in fact, if you hear a circus band play Stars and Stripes Forever, get out of the tent. Stars and Stripes Forever is the disaster song. It is the cue to the members of the circus that there is a fire, something terrible has happened. And the thing is, it's because when there's a fire and everybody's inside of a tent, you don't get on the PA and go, there's a fire, everybody panic.

You play Stars and Stripes Forever, and then all of the circus members know something is really, really wrong. And then they can, in an orderly fashion, start escorting people out. This happened in the great Hartford Circus Fire in the, I believe, the early part of the 20th century, one of the worst fire disasters in terms of loss of life that ever happened in America. The band played Stars and Stripes Forever. They started trying to evacuate people, but unfortunately, exits were blocked and bad things, and like hundreds of people died. Yikes. Yeah, yep.

So if you hear Stars and Stripes Forever, get up, get out. You talked about peanuts, and I want to know if elephants actually really do eat peanuts. Because you see it in Dumbo, the movie. Sure, it's certainly a trope, yeah. I'm actually quoting from the Ringling Brothers resource that it is false. Elephants might eat a peanut, but they don't really eat peanuts as food. And it's because they're too high in fat. And they're also really small.

And the elephant is huge. It's true. The mass of peanuts that they all have to eat a lot of peanuts. Yeah, and some other cool elephant facts, a common myth, how elephants are scared of mice. As so many cartoons would have us believe. False. Also, propagated by Dumbo.

Also, Dumbo, that movie had some scary clowns. Yeah. There was some scary. That was mean clowns. Nightmare fuel.

Oh, yeah. That whole movie was scary. Yeah. Last myth. Elephants do not drink water through their trunk like a straw. It's their nose.

I mean, it would be like you're trying to snort water through your nose. You can do that. They do snort water halfway. Oh, okay. And so it's like a receptacle

and they curl their nose and then they put it in their mouth. So, which is kind of gross like drinking from your nose. Yeah. Yeah. They get some boogers and stuff. Well, speaking of elephants, there is no more famous elephant that I can think of than

Jumbo the Elephant. Sure. And if you have never heard of Jumbo the Elephant, Jumbo the Elephant was, this is one of my favorite trivia bits. So let's just get out of the way right off the top. Jumbo the elephant is where we get the word jumbo. Right. So he was not named Jumbo because he was so big.

So when you talk about a Jumbo Jet or a Jumbo size anything, that word was introduced, Jumbo shrimp, introduced into our language from the elephant. So when we say that, we are invoking the memory of Jumbo the Elephant. So certainly in America, he is tied really closely with P.T. Barnum. I think we can agree probably the biggest name in American circus history, maybe even worldwide circuses. Jumbo really became famous as part of the Ringling Brothers in Barnum and Bailey Circus for being a 13-foot-tall-at-the-shoulder elephant. I mean, he really was huge. But let's go back.

Jumbo really came to fame in London. So he was an elephant captured in Abyssinia, what today is Ethiopia, in the 1860s, and was in Paris for a little while, ultimately ended up in the London Zoo. And he was just an absolute smash hit. I mean, people loved Jumbo the elephant. Because he's big? Because he's big. And it was just, you know, again, this is the mid-late 1800s when the golden age of exotic things traveling the world and expositions and shows. And Jumbo really fit right into that craze.

P.T. Barnum. So he bought him to bring him over to the States. and show him as a spectacle. And he did. He paid $10,000 in 1881, which is about a quarter of a million today. Brought Jumbo over, had several shows at Madison Square Garden in New York, and it was just a huge hit. I mean, he made his money back almost right away. One of the other things about P.T. Barnum, the many, many innovations he had to the circus. He is credited as being the father of the idea of the three-ring circus. That was his idea. You know, and we associate circuses with traveling on railroad. that he's also kind of credited with really pioneering that

is the means of moving your circus around, yeah. So, you know, unfortunately, Jumbo met his end in a railroad yard. After a show in 1885, they were getting everybody back to the railroad yard trains, and he was hit by a train. Oh, no. And, yeah, it actually is really sad and really tragic. This is one of the dangers of having the animals around the trains. He was hit by a train.

Ever the Huxter and Shoman Barnum even spun a story that, well, you know, Jumbo was heroically trying to save the life of a younger elephant, and he moved him out of the way of his trunk at the last second and took the blow himself and died. And that's all hogwash. That didn't happen. But of course, you know, Barnum found a way to turn tragedy into treasure. So he now went and sent two separate traveling shows, one of Jumbo's skeleton and one of Jumbo's hide that he kind of reconstructed, you know, taxidermy-wise.

And he's like, well, I'm, you know, doubling my profits now. So he had two traveling shows after that. I mean, because, again, Jumbo was almost like a folk hero at this point. And people still flocked to see his remains on display. The other thing that I should mention about P.T. Barnum, P.T. Barnum was an original trustee of Tufts University. Very true. Yes.

And he basically gave them a lot of money. After Jumbo died, he bequeathed most of Jumbo's remains to the university. And I guess to this day, he is the sports teams, the mascots names there, the Jumbos at Tufts University. Yeah, I may have pointed out that I went to Tufts University. So, I mean, everybody learns this, that the stuffed remains of Jumbo were donated by P.T. Barnum, two Tufts. We had it there for a long time. It burned in the 70s. They had apparently taken the tail off for a restoration job that they were doing, and so we have the tail.

And we have a can of ashes, but that's all that remains, unfortunately, of the, of the, of the original, the jumbos, the tacheter me jumbos, sure. Apparently, a quote, over-exuberant fan accidentally snapped off the end of his tail, which they then put into the private collection and replaced with a replacement tail. Yeah. Decoid tail. Yeah, as a decoy tail. And then as you said, they have these ashes that are the remains.

Yep. It's unclear whether they are actually the direct remains, but it is some ashes from the fire. So the belief is somewhere in there, there is a little bit of, Jumbo still hiding in there. And I guess it's a lucky totem among the sports teams. I think that the tail is not on display, unfortunately. The tail is in their college

archives. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. After it was broken off once. But there is a by a train. There is a big, ugly, concrete statue of Jumbo in the quad. It's not the, it's not the most attractive thing. Right, right, right. All right, let's take a quick break.

A word from our sponsor. The new BMO V.I. Porter Mastercard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card.

And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO V.I. Porter Mastercard. And get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit BMO.com slash Viporter to learn more.

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.

You'll hear advice on everything from how to build confidence to how to get the best night's sleep. New episodes drop every weekday, and each one is five minutes or less, so you only have to listen a little to get a lot more out of your weekdays. Listen and subscribe to Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day wherever you get your podcasts. That's Inc. Productivity Tip of the Day, wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Good Job Brain. Smooth puzzles, smart trivia. Good Job Brain. Good Job Brain.

We're back, and this week we're talking about the circus. And one of my favorite things to do at the circus or at carnivals, I love playing the midway games. Totally. You know, with the little booths and like a barker. From the entrance of the fairgrounds to the big top, there is the midway, which is the way leading up to the big top. Makes sense. You know, they have the concessions there. They have some of the side show stuff, and they have these games.

So, you know, as you trickle over to the big top, or, you know, when the show's over and you're coming out, there's more stuff to do. There's more money to be made from the townspeople. And, of course, a lot of these games were essentially scams. Oh, I mean, a lot of them stole on. Oh, yeah. I mean, no, absolutely. Trying to put in a diplomatic way.

There are two sources. I looked up. There's Glenn Hester and Bill Howard, and they're both. police officers who investigate scams, especially within carnival games. Glenn Hester actually is a magician himself. They're police officers, so they try to crack some of the stuff down. And I'm going to talk about some of the popular and common midway games and how they scam you. Great.

And how to win them despite the scam. All right. So, Colin, I'm sure you probably as a kid love basketball free throw. Oh, yeah. Basketball free throw, it's simple. you have a basketball and there's a hoop in a net and you try to make the throw. Maybe you pay like a dollar for a ball or a dollar for three balls. Right. And so that's pretty much the setup, right? The scam is that the balls are your regular basketballs, but they're over inflated. So they're super, super bouncy. And the hoop is kind of far away. So you can't really tell. It's usually a little bit smaller than regulation basketball hoops. Sometimes you're not even round. Yeah, I've heard that they're oval sometimes. They're oval, not really a perfect circle.

The backboard is made out of plywood, making it extra bouncy. The net may be positioned higher. Some say that there's stuff in the background, like nets and stuff, and it screws with their depth perception. I think that might be too much of a stretch. But already, you have all of these things going against. You don't even need to mess with depth perception, yeah. At that point. So what's the trick to win?

sadly the basketball free throw is probably the hardest game to win just with so many things against you right in addition to having a perfect aim you have to throw the ball with a perfect high arc swish right because almost has to come straight down yep it cannot hit the backboard it cannot hit the hoop it just needs to be perfectly swoosh right in that's not really the trick right right that's a strategy um another one i'm sure colin you like this one because you always talk about this one too. The balloon dart throw. So the setup, you pay and you get a set of darts. There is a bunch of balloons tacked on a board. And each one, each balloon inside contains like a slip and it denotes like a prize, you know, what different colors or whatnot. And your

job is to throw the darts to pop the balloon and get the prize. The scam is the balloons are underinflated. So there's a lot of stretch. There's a lot of give. And there's bouncingness to the balloon surface making the dart deflect or bounce off. And of course, the darts themselves aren't like your regulation, awesome, sharp darts. They've been pre-dalled. Yeah, they've been pre-dalled. It's like a magic trick where the guy pulls out a deck of cards and you assume it's an ordinary deck of cards, but it's not, you know, like all these assumptions in your brain

like, oh, how did they, how do they, how is this possible? It's like you're making assumptions about these things that are not true. The difference between a magic trick and a carnival scam is that the carnival scam person. and he's out to like take your money yeah what's the trick to win you know what forget accuracy just throw the dart as hard as you can just to have the balloon pop is already you know hard enough so just make that your your priority got it another popular one the milk bottle throw oh yeah yeah the setup you pay these all start with you pay they all start with you pay and they all start with you pay and they all end with them taking your money yeah uh you get a set of heavy

like hacky sacks, there's a pyramid of milk bottles, one bottle sitting on a base of two. And the objective is to throw the beanbags or the softball to knock all of the milk bottles down and have them on their side. That's the important thing. It's not like I'm just knocking the top down and the base bottles are still standing up. They all have to be on their sides. The scam, obviously, is that the bottles used at these carnival games are often made with leaded bottoms so they're actually really really really heavy right another trick they do and i saw this i think in nova before is when the game operator is setting up the pyramid they'll place one bottle an inch closer to you just kind of sticks out a little bit so when you throw your ball it'll most likely

hit whatever is protruding first and just ricochet off right before hitting anything else the trick to win does anybody know i always just throw it as hard as i can at the base of the pyramid man yes oh okay most people hit at the intersection be like oh i'm trying to get all three just hit the base hopefully create a topple effect the top one won't stay up if you knock the bottom two down well and the other thing too i mean like chris as you said like a good magic trick part of these good carne games is setting them up so they seem easy so oh you know the guys can stack them in such a way that they can knock it down you know you might have the heavy one on top or something like that but then they stack it against you when it's your time that's right yep yeah and there is the one that i've always been

confused about and also... I'm sure I know what this one is. Which one? Is it the one where you drop the metal circles onto the big red circle? No. What? Oh, the dot. The dot? You're not going to talk about the dot? No, I'm not going to talk about the dot, but we can.

We can? So the dot, I mean, this one fascinates me. So they have a big red circle on the table in front of you, so they take your money, obviously, and they give you five metal circles. And then they say, you have to take it and hold it above the big red dot and drop the metal circles so that it covers the entirety of the red circle. If after you drop the metal circles onto it And you can't move them once you've dropped them Like discs

Metal discs to drop onto a red dot And if any red remains you lose But if you cover the whole thing you win There's no scam Like you can do it It's just deceptively hard Like it's really really really hard But they make it seem easy

And the trick to it is You can look online They will tell you exactly how to do it it. Just you have to lay the dots down an incredibly precise pattern in order to do it the right way. And if you mess up dropping one of the discs by like a centimeter,

you're done. You're done already. I have to say, I like the ones that aren't really scams in the sense. They're more just, you know... Hard to do. Yeah, or just find out little loopholes or playing on your expectations. You look at it and it's like oh yeah, I can do this, but you really can't. It's actually very difficult. Some of them don't need to be stands. Like the guess your weight, guess your thing.

There's no scam. You just make the cost of playing more expensive than the cost of the prize you get out and if the guy guesses right great and if a guy guess is wrong you're still making a profit i'm like that's so deviously brilliant so that's the thing i would say the guess your way or guess what month you're born it's not necessarily a game it's you have to really treat it like it's a show um there is a trick with guess your birth month there is a very common trick it's called the j line the usual rule is the carnival barker has to guess within two months of a buffer and so what they do is you're like guess what month and then he'll scribble down

a piece of paper so what they scribble down is something that obviously starts with a j and scribble does it say January does it say June or July right any of the jay months they can that covers like nine months out of the year no no it covers 11 out of the 12 that's right within a J month. Only if you were born in October. Correct. Yeah. So, then they say, so am I two months away and you say, no, you're like you were born in October?

You can't be like, so what does this say? What did you write here? Yeah, well, that's, read that out for me. Right. So if they show you a J with a scribble after it, say, and which month is that exactly? Well, because they will ask you first. Be like, oh, I was born in February. Aha, I guess January.

Yeah. Yeah, oh, right. Yeah, I guess January. Well, again, like good magic, so much is misdirection, yeah. Oh, the J-line. Yeah, it's called the J-line. The guess your way is, like I said, it's more of a show. It doesn't really matter who wins or loses because usually the price that you get is crappier than the $1 you put in.

There is a gender play, right? If it is a woman, the guesser will always guess low on the age and weight. Yeah, that makes sense. They don't care if they're wrong. Because part of the final, oh, no, I don't. No, exactly. It's like, you're, okay, I'm going to guess you're 26. And they're like, I am, yes, you're absolutely right. Yeah, exactly. If it's wrong, she wins a prize. The prize is worth less than a dollar. What a fun game. Yeah, what a fun game.

Sometimes a carnival barker might have a string of wins, and that might attract like a whole crowd, be like, oh, wow, he's doing it so well. Or if he has a string of losses, you have a crowd be like, oh, I'm going to go next and win a prize. No matter what, if he's right or wrong, his main deal is to draw a crowd and to make sure people have a good time. And even if that means he guesses wrong and they win a crappy prize, he got the money. That was your favorite. your favorite? No, my favorite, my favorite is milk bottles. I've actually won. Oh, nice. Did you really win? How many times did you have to pay them a dollar before they gave you a $2 stuff to him? I remember I won a giant troll doll. Like a giant troll doll. It's like stuff with styrofoam beads. You, you know, Karen,

you may have been the person that they used to get. There might have been like a big strong dude with his girlfriend standing next to you and they might have set the milk bottles up to let you win and giving you a huge troll doll so that the big strong man would go, oh, we got to go. What, this girl just knocked over the bottles? I can do it. And then he'll do it a million times with it set up the wrong way and never do it. Another slang term from the carnival,

which I don't think you covered, was Mark. We use this in, me and the other professional wrestlers. No. They use this in professional wrestling to also... It means our target. It means this guy is buying into all of this. They use it in professional wrestling.

It means somebody who believes in professional wrestling. Do you know where the mark comes from? I do. They, uh, if, if a carney, where a carnival worker were to identify a person who is a real big sucker, they'd pat him on the back and say, oh, too bad, you lost. You'll get him next time. And they mark his back with chalk. And so that chalk mark will identify him to the other carnival workers because,

sir, step right up. You look like a winner. Exactly. Yep. Yep. Yep. On August 1st. May I speak freely?

I prefer English. The Naked Gun is the most fun you can have in theaters. Yeah, let's go! Without getting arrested. Is he serious? Is he serious? No. The Naked Gun.

Only in theaters. August 1st. Well, we've talked about performers and acts and all these other things. We have not talked about food at the circuses. I mean, I suppose with the exception of peanuts. Yes, that's true. Peanuts, food. If you were in Australia and you asked someone for fairy floss, what would you be expecting to get?

Punch in the face. Probably cotton candy. Good guess. Yes. In Australia, what we call cotton candy, they call fairy floss. And it actually makes sense. I kind of like that imagery. The beauty of cotton candy, I mean, also, it's just its simplicity.

I mean, do you know how many ingredients there are in cotton candy? One. There is one ingredient in cotton candy. It is sugar. It is just sugar and air. But, you know, this is one of those things where it was really, it didn't become a huge widespread. hit until just the right kind of machinery was invented to mass produce it. The basic idea

is actually really old. I mean, you can find old cookbooks and old references to what is essentially what we would call cotton candy now. The problem was just, it was just really tedious to make. And it was not at all suited to large steel production. So it'd be the kind of thing you'd find it like an upscale confectioner's shop or if you were making something really fancy dinner at home. And the old process was you melt some sugar, you put like a knife or a fork into it and you kind of just draw out these little threads and you just do that over and over again until you've got a little mass of cotton candy. There are some competing claims to who's sort of the father of modern cotton candy, you know, as there are with many other things. But it definitely

has true, honest roots with circuses and fairs. It's indisputable that the patent was first issued to William Morrison and John Wharton of Tennessee in 1890. And there are a lot of machines that are very similar. It's essentially just a little spinning bowl. in the middle of a larger cooling bowl. And you put the sugar in the middle. It heats up and melts. And then as it spins, it shoots out the side of the bowl in little holes to shoot out little threads.

And as soon as they hit the air, they cool. And then you just sort of collect the little threads from the outside of the bowl. And their machine and their food, they named it fairy floss. So the fairy floss was the original name for this mass produced product. So they took it to the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, which is really where cotton candy became a thing. Now, to say that people went bonkers for it would be a gross, gross understatement. It was a absolute smash hit. No one had seen it in mass charities before. So it was 25 cents for a box of cotton candy. Now, this is 1904. That's roughly equivalent to $6 today. They sold

around 70,000 boxes of cotton candy at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. So, I mean, just To put them perspective, this is just heated sugar spun out, and they made equivalent of, you know, $400,000 profit on this. Nice. And so you can see why very quickly this became a favorite of carnivals and circuses and foods. Profit is huge. It's so simple. Right. But you've got to have the machine.

You've got to have the machine. You've got to have the machine. You can't make it at home. That's right. It's, I mean, it's about 30 grams of sugar. You know, the cotton candy industry loves to point out that, well, there's less sugar than the average can of soda, which is true. 90% air, 30 grams of sugar, and you're selling it for upwards of $5. Yeah. Quintessential circus food.

My really, my earliest memory of going to the circus was of cotton candy. I remember that more than the bears or the elephants or whatever the clowns. I just remember this gigantic thing of cotton candy the size of my head. Oh, wait, hold on. Yes. How do you guys eat your cotton candy? Because I have a very specific. Well, I learned really quickly.

You can't just go biting in it. That's what you get like sticky face. So I pull off little chunks of it, and I kind of roll them into a little ball. Yes. Yes. And then I put it in my mouth. And then the fun part for me is you let it dissolve. Yeah.

All right. And that was a good trip to the circus. Time for our last trivia segment. And I'm going to name our last trivia segment, the International House of Pancakes. We know that there is always some sort of pancake-like food. Oh, yeah. in different cultures. It's like the dumpling.

Like every culture has their version. Every culture has some sort of sandwich. Every culture has some sort of dumpling. Every culture has some sort of pancake food. So this quiz, International House of Pancakes, is quizzing you guys' pancake IQ. So here we go. This particular traditional Slavic pancake is usually made with buckwheat flour and often served as a vehicle for caviar. Collin.

Those blini? Yes, blini. All right. Lots of baking soda is added to this English yeast-laden pancake to give it its characteristic holy texture. Dana. Crumpet? Yes, crumpet. Nice.

Also known as a pikelet. Pikelet? That's kind of offensive. Like a small pike. The Welsh and other Commonwealth countries call it a pikelet. This type of pancake from. Japan can feature almost every savory topping under the sun, but most likely, cabbage, meats, fried noodles, and seafood.

Not done by God. Oh my God, how long is this question? Go ahead. It's Okonomiaki. Yes, Okone Miyaki, which literally means whatever you liked cook. Yeah. Cook as you like it. I was served once something they called like, oh, it's like an American Okonomiaki, and

it was like two Okonomiakis, almost like the big mac of Okonomiakis, with like cheese, and they stuck an American flag toothpick on the top of the whole thing. They may have made this just for me, I'm not really sure. I don't know whether to be delighted or chagrin that to make something American usually just means adding cheese to it. Double it, double it and egg cheese. Yeah, make it bigger with cheese, yeah. What type of pancake originated from the region Brittany?

Dana. Is it a Crip? Yes, it is a. A crepe from the French region, a north region of Brittany. Follow-up question, Dana. What beverage is traditionally served with crepes? Vodka. It could be anything.

That may not be what you're going after. You're kind of close, actually. Oh, really? It is alcoholic. Is it lab beer? It's cider. Creps and cider. Yep.

We know there's the waffle, but there's also the Vietnamese waffle, which is pretty famous and common in Vietnamese restaurants. Very, very tasty. It's flavored with coconut. And what other plant that gives the waffle its green color and nutty, sweet vanilla-like aroma? Vietnamese waffles are green. What makes them green?

Is it pastasio? Incorrect. It is a plant used in Southeast Asian cooking. Salantra. Mint? Lemon grass? No. What is it?

It is pandan. Oh. You guys may have never heard. heard of it, but definitely you will know that taste. It's used in a lot of South Asian cooking. A lot of rice is cooked with pandan extract or pandan leaves, and it gives it this nutty, like that rice, that good rice flavor. Pandan is, it's just grass and it smells nutty and vanilla.

It's very delicious. Also, a cockroach repellent. Good to know. What country produces the most maple syrup in the world? Chris? Canada. Yes. Yes.

Not a trick question. Specifically, do you know what province of Canada? Oh. Quebec. Yes. Okay. Quebec is by far... It's north of like where Vermont is and stuff.

Yeah. It makes sense. Very close to the region. Yes. Quebec is responsible for three quarters of the world's maple syrup. Wow. I was really interested in like the chemical composition of what makes maple syrup taste like maple syrup, like, what's the flavor? It's actually not yet known exactly what compounds are responsible for the maple syrup flavor. So last question. IHOP or the International House of

Pancakes is, of course, a restaurant chain here in America, features a lot of breakfast foods, including pancakes. Ironically, it wasn't until 2012 when International House of Pancakes open its first actual international franchise location. What city did IHOP appear in the world, outside of America? Shanghai. Incorrect. Tokyo. Incorrect.

Not Asia. Oh, not Asia. Dubai. Yeah. Another show I'm ending very hungry here. I know. I know. Well, let's go get some lunch, guys.

Sorry. All right, and that's our show. Thank you guys for joining me. Thank you guys, listeners, for a listening. And hope you learn a lot of stuff about circus, jumbo the elephant, clowns, not get scammed at carnivals, and of course, pancakes. You can find us on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, and also on our website, goodjobbrain.com. Check out our sponsors at bonobos.com. And we'll see you guys next week.

Bye. Later. Hello, this is Matt from the Explorers podcast. I want to invite you to join me on the voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers in the history of the world. These are the thrilling and captivating stories of Magellan, Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark, and so many other famous and not so famous adventures from throughout history. to Explorespodcast.com or just look us up on your podcast app. That's the Explorers Podcast.