Good Job, Brain! - 68: Fun in the Sun

Episode Date: July 3, 2013

Ready for summer vacation? Load this episode up while you bask under the red hot day-star! Tan your brain with awesome glowing facts: the (kind of gross) history of the icecream cone, weird trivia about daylight saving time, wacky watermelon stories, the inspiration behind the Slip N Slide, and the summer nectar of the gods - Slurpee. Summer jams lyrics quiz. And what makes a movie a "blockbuster"? Why is it even called that?  ALSO: Tech company animal mascot quiz, "Um...Actually..." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, ecstatic, excellent, exciters and exclamers. Welcome to Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode 68, and I am your humble host, Karen, and we are your great greeting, group who graze on griddle cakes and grits. I'm Colin. I'm Dana. And I'm Chris.

We're going to start the show with a chain of, um, actually. Yes, we have a two um actuallys. Oh, a double header. I recently talked about the marathon. And we got a lot of, a lot of Facebook messages and tweets and emails about a controversial, meaty history of standardizing the length of marathons. And I only briefly talked about commemorating the Greek events. But there's a whole bunch of Olympic hoopla.

In that episode, I mentioned that the Marathon actually came from an historic event. Or maybe it was legendary or mythical or fabled event where a Greek soldier during the Battle of Marathon was sent to run all the way to Athens to deliver the news that the Persians have been defeated. We may have left you with the impression that the length of the running was based on, you know, the length, the distance between those two cities. It's not the exact length. It's just commemorating that run. When it was reinstated as an Olympic event, the distance sort of varied from Olympics to Olympics for a while. And we're 22. Somewhere 24.8.

Some were 26.01. And they varied. But as some of our listeners wrote in and pointed out, there is the fun part. It was in the 1908 Olympics in London that they had agreed the length was going to be about 40 kilometers, 26 miles. And that was from Windsor Castle into the stadium. So they would chart the castle and in the stadium. they added an extra lap, basically, so they could finish the race in front of the royal box. And so that's sort of where the point two now is attributed to, as several listeners pointed out.

That darn point two. Yeah. It's like, you run 26 miles and you're like, oh, my God, I still have like, a fifth. Well, you're like, but I see the queen. She's right over there. Just got to make it to the queen. I got to impress her. Yeah.

And our second, actually, well, we joked about snakes in our last episode. We had a trivial pursuit question, and it was a. Which one of these snake is not a constrictor snake. And it turns out it was the water moccasin. And Chris, you joke that it'd be hard to constrict in the water because it's all slippery and stuff. Sure. Which is not necessarily true. Someone did write in to tell us that water provides a good measure of camouflage for a constricting steak.

So constrictors do sometimes hide out in the water because you can't see them. Man, tricksy. A former herpetologist, Andy, he actually wrote in. And this is something I. actually never really thought about when we talk about constricting snakes you know we always assume the prey that's being squeezed would run out of breath and that's how they die right that's not necessarily how it might work um so the current line of thinking is that constrictors apply so much pressure that the prey's heart is not strong enough to pump the blood against the

pressure and so what happens is the animal instead of suffocating actually goes into cardiac arrest Oh, man. Yeah, there you go. Well, another classic example of getting to the right answer the wrong way. And speaking of Trivial Pursuit, let's jump into our first general trivia segment, Pop Quiz Hotshot. All right, Blue Wedge for Geography. What is both a city in Virginia and a hipster neighborhood in Brooklyn? Colin.

Williamsburg? Yes, correct. And you actually lived in Brooklyn. I did. What a weird tripper. That was, I thought you made that up. No, no. It's printed right here.

Yeah. Pink Wedge. Who was the frog that promoted sugar smacks? Oh, what is his name? Digum. Yes. Whoa. All right.

Next question. What product does Vince Shlomi claim will make you say wow every time? Chris, your favorite. The shammer. Wow. Jam, wow. Are you getting this camera guy? Okay, a purple wedge.

What unusual utensil is deployed in the Edward Lear poem, The Owl and the Pussy Cat. I'll give you a million dollars, whoever gets this. The owl and pussy cat went to see. Very specific. D-to-do-do-do-da-da-man. Oh, man. Spork. Incorrect.

It is a rolling pin, right? A runcable spoof. Oh, runcible, runcible. Runcible, spoon. Oh, I wonder. Me either. Are those the spoons with a slot in it? Is that what that is?

Is that a grapefruit spoon? Mm-hmm. I don't know. A runcible. That's what I thought maybe it's the grapefruit one with the jagged edges on the top. So it would be a spork? No, it's not, it's not like a fork. It's like a knife.

A spoon knife. Oh. A spife. Colin's looking it up. I think we need to retract mocking Chris. The picture does look like a spork. It's the spoon, but it has the pointy. It is totally a spork.

All right, I'll take the point. As you said, right answer for the wrong reason. Written here, part of the poem, very handy for dining on mints and pieces of quince. So runcable is a nonsense word invented by Edward Lier. He wishes he came up with spork. It is a better nonsense. It is a spork.

Well, some of the pictures I'm seeing have serrated edges, so it's a spork guy. Sporkife. It's like all three and one. Oh, wow. Yeah. All right. It doesn't really roll off the tongue as well as runsable.

No. All right. Green wedge for science. What is the only planet whose name is not derived from Greek or Roman mythology? Everybody. Earth. Earth. Good job.

Now, I can see people getting that wrong because they don't think about the Earth. Do they think about all the other planets? Yeah. All right. Last question. Orange Wedge. You guys got to wait until I finish the question Just as a disclaimer

In what educational computer game Do players try to avoid dysentery While traveling in a covered wagon Halfway across the United States Everybody Oregon Trail Zelda Good job brains

Let's jump into this week's topic We are sweating right now In our recording studio A.k.a. Collins' apartment This weekend has been very, very hot in Northern California, and I believe actually yesterday a couple of records were broken for the hottest day for a lot of the different cities. So we thought to commemorate summer and summertime and summer heat, this episode is all about fun in the sun. Yay. Fine, I can't control my brain.

And, of course, we mean no slight to our friends in Australia or New Zealand where it's not actually hot right now. No. Yes. Well, it's probably temperate-ish. But it's not summer for them. Yes. This is for our northern hemisphere listeners. And you know what?

You can still eat ice cream, even if it's not technically hot out where you are. Oh, the best summer food. we made ice cream yesterday. Turns out, making ice cream these days pretty easy. What flavor did you make? Patriotic. What's that mean? That's vanilla ice cream

with red and blue M&Ms. With a light dusting of Eagle. Yeah, it was a good thing. Eagle flavor. Eagle, Eagle beak. And Patriot tears. Yes. Yes. Yes. As it turns out, it kind of easy to make ice cream nowadays. You buy an ice cream maker.

Put milk, sugar, and cream into it and turn it on. Put, press a button. The press a button. It wasn't always the case. So I wanted to do some research on the ice cream cone because we've all heard the famous story, right? Of, like, it was invented at a World's Fair. Yeah.

And the ice cream maker ran out of cups to serve the ice cream in. And he looked over to the stall next to him where his friend was selling waffles. And he's, and in a fit of inspiration was, give me your waffles. And I will roll them into a little. a cone. Yeah. I feel like I'm about to be very disappointed. That is the story or that is the quote fact. Right. That is printed everywhere. Yes. And that is somewhat true. Okay. I will say somewhat true. The thing is, while we have a lot of records of frozen ice dessert sweets being served to kings, of course, we don't really know if they were just that same recipe of ice cream that we have. For sure, there's a cookbook that was published in. in 1733 called Mrs. Mary Ilse's receipts, and she was credited as having been the confectioner to Queen Anne. And she does describe in this book the process of making ice cream the way you can still make it

today by 1733-ish. They definitely knew what to do. George Washington is said to have spent $200 on ice cream in the year 1790 alone. That's a lot of money. That's in $17.90. That's a lot today to spend an ice cream to the tune of probably about $5,000 today. His money will an ice cream. Because remember, long time, good job, brain listeners may remember something that Colin talked about before, which is the birth of the ice industry.

If you lived in an area where you could just go to a frozen lake and cut out a block of ice or, you know, snow or whatever, you could make frozen desserts. But if you didn't, you couldn't plug your refrigerator in because there's no refrigerator, like, how do you make ice? You don't. And it was only once people started innovating in terms of shipping ice all around, you could start having, like, ice cream as a summer treat. And by the mid-1800s, that's when you could start walking out of the streets of England or America and buying ice cream from street vendors because they could actually make it. And the common people could afford it, not just kings or George Washington blowing 200 bills with his face printed on it. Please do not write in and let me know that. He wasn't done the dollar when he was spending the dollars.

So here is how you would buy and eat ice cream in England in the mid-19th century. And I find this fascinating, absolutely fascinating. It was called a penny lick, a penny lick. And that's what they would sell you on the streets. Yeah, it's not as gross as it sounds, but it's close to be. Give me a penny and you can have a lick of my ice cream. Yeah, that might have actually been more sanitary. So what they give you was they would make these custom, tallish, medium height glasses that looked like, you know, little miniature ice cream Sunday glasses.

Most of the glass was filled in with glass. Like there was only a shallow indentation at the top of the glass. And you would buy it from a street vendor, a glass with like, it would be like a third of a scoop of ice cream would fit in there. And then you would just eat it out of the glass. You just stick your tongue in the glass and lick all the ice cream out of it. And it was a shallow indentation, no spoons. Okay. And then, that's fine.

It's very cone-like. It's the cone-like. The cone was made out of glass. And then you would hand it back to the vendor who would, of course, then sanitize it. By sanitize, I mean, he would wipe it off on whatever filthy rag was handy. And then fill it up again with ice cream and give it to the next person. Wow. And this was super, super gross. And people recognize this, too.

Here is a quote that I found from the archives of the British Parliament in which Parliament member Sir Herbert Maxwell in 1898 said, I beg to ask the president of the local government board whether his attention has been drawn to recent deaths of children owing, as is alleged to their having eaten so-called quote unquote, ice creams sold by Italians in the streets, whether he is aware that several samples of these creams have been reported on by Dr. Klein to the effect. that all of them were swarming with colonies of the bacilli characteristic either of sewage matter or putrescence or both. I mean, this was unpasteurized dairy products that they, in the hot sun, children with their filthy mouths would lick them.

And then he'd be like, ha, ha, ha, you know, oh, good. And then give it to the next child. So you're making out with not only the ice cream, but with everybody else who made out with that ice cream. They banned them in 1926. Now, it took a long time for them to ban them. A long time. It was a long time, and it was well after the invention of the edible ice cream comb. What we largely saw after that were paper, metal, or glass cups that the ice cream was served in.

So, everybody in their great Aunt Tilly claims to have been the guy who invented the ice cream cone at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. We have George Bang, owner of the banner creamery, said that he was there. He sold ice cream and ran out of cups and was like, you know, he ordered some waffles from another vendor, and he did it. Ernest A. Hamwe, a Syrian immigrant who made waffles, says that he saw his friend who made ice cream and who was just like running around like a chicken with his head cut off, didn't know what to do. And he, the waffle maker, came up with the idea of rolling his own waffles into a cone and giving him to the ice cream guy. And then we have Abe Dumar, also a Syrian immigrant, coincidentally, made not waffles but ice cream. And he says that he purchased the waffle from a separate vendor, and he rolled the cone after he got the waffle from the vendor. Here's the thing.

The St. Louis Expo ran. It was not a weekend thing. It wasn't like, oh, Saturday and Sunday. No, it ran for seven months. Right, right. Plenty of time for, like, somebody to come up with the idea and then for everybody to copy each other. We'll never really know who had the spark of inspiration first. But people have pointed out that it kind of makes sense because the guys who were from Syria,

would have been really used to, like, eating falafel sandwiches by taking a round bread and rolling it. Yeah, rolling it and putting falafel into the open end. Ice cream cone kind of made sense at that point to them. But depends on what kind of waffles they were making. If you're making... They're making thin. Yeah. Okay.

Like strewp waffle. Okay. Yes. Yeah, I think they are. They're like the strep waffle. Not fluffy. No. Belgian waffles.

That's like the hardest thing to roll up. No, they're thin and... Yeah, they're not... Giant mess. I'm a genius. It's all hot and it's all melting You're like, ah, this is the worst idea ever Not only, I mean, is the waffle cone delicious

And it's like a portable thing But it's also sanitary versus like the glass It probably the waffle cone Probably saved a lot of lives I probably did Yeah, so many children Saved are alive today Well, I mean they're dead now

They're dead now They would have lived longer But they live It's bittersweet all right so I can't think about summer or every time I think about summer I always think of summer jams like the music the soundtrack of the summer and so I made a quiz for you guys about summer summertime music summer jams summer jams so all of these songs are huge hits you would know this song if you heard it so I'm not going to play the song for you I'm going to read the first few lyrics of the song

and you have to tell me what song it is and who sing it. You're going to buzz in. Wait till I am done reading the lurch. Okay. All right. First one. In the summertime, when the weather is high, you can stretch right up and touch the sky. When the weather is right, you got women, you got women on your mind.

I know the song. I think that's in the summertime by Mungo Jerry. Yes. Oh. In the summertime. Yes. Man, we've had this one at Pub Quiz. before and sometimes we even get it right.

All right. Here it is. The groove slightly transformed, just a little bit of a break from the norm, just a little something to break monotony of all that hardcore dance that has gotten to be. Karen. Summertime by Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff.

No, I think you were solo at that point. Nope. You guys are close, but you're wrong. I thought it was Will Smith, yeah. It is DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. His name was not Will Smith at that time. He was not performing under the name Will Smith. His name was Fresh Prince.

He got second billing, so DJ. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. That's the name of their group. Even the album, right? He's the DJ. I'm the rapper. Yeah, okay. Thanks for Clarifying.

Riding in the drop top with the top down. Saw you switching lanes, girl. Pull up to the red light, looking right. Come here. Let me get your name, girl. Oh, my God. What is it? This is the Beatles.

No. Karen, you would... He wants your name, girl. Karen's grappling. She's turning red. I can't. It's summer love by Justin Timberlake. Yes, dang it.

Hot summer streets and the pavements are burning. I sit around trying to smile, but the air is so heavy and dry. Is it summer in the city? Nope. Hot summer streets and the pavements are burning. I sit around. trying to smile, but the air is so heavy and dry. It is Cruel Summer by Banana Revelo.

If you'd have played that. Yes. If you'd have played that. That is why I did not play it. These are all like, yeah. Right. Ah, that's good. Okay.

It was 1989. My thoughts were short and my hair was long. Caught somewhere between a boy and a man. She was 17 and she was far from in between. It was summertime in northern Michigan. Oh. That's specific. Northern, who's from Michigan?

Oh, is it like Kid Rock? Am I? Yes, it's Kid Rock. And I'm like from Detroit. All summer long. Yes. Good teamwork. Yeah, good team up on that one.

All right. See, the curtains hang in in the window, and the evening on a Friday night, little light is shining through the window. Let's me know everything's all right. Chris. This is summer breeze. Yes. But I do not know the artist, unfortunately.

I think that's Seals and Cross. Yes. Oh, hey, all right. Good teamwork. Very 70. Highly, picturing sea lions lying around singing Sun Trees

Makes me feel fine That's so cute Blow in the jasmine in my mind I can see their little seal melts Yeah, right It would be a funny music video Like them barking to that Last one

Hot Town, summer in the city Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty Been down, isn't it a pity Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city Well, I think we know the song Ah man So summer in the city Yes

I can't retrieve it It is love and spoonful What's a good mnemonic for that? Just a spoonful of grit Yeah Gross That is good forget now I guess now we'll never forget that

All right Good job you guys So not only are there a slew of summer hits That come around every year And try and stake their claim But of course There are summer blockbuster movies which I think we kind of just take for granted at this point.

You know, that every summer there's some huge hit, some big blockbuster. I mean, and it's, think of Independence Day or Armageddon or... Yeah, yeah. I have a quick question. Yes. I would assume... Squirrel. There's a squirrel outside.

So for movies, there's summer blockbuster and there's also holiday releases. That's true. I wonder which nets the most amount of money. It's complicated, but generally speaking, the summer movies net more. But it's not an accent. And so we'll come back to that point in a second. I'm glad you asked that, though. So first of all, let's back up.

I mean, do you guys know what the original meaning of the word blockbuster is? Like, it's non-metaphorical meaning in terms of, like, big entertainment. Do you know where it comes from? Originally, a blockbuster was a bomb, a giant bomb. So going back to, like, World War II. Like, Kaboom bomb. Yeah, Kaboom. Yeah.

Not movie flop. Right, right, right, right. Although it is funny that a box office flop is a bomb and a huge success is a blockbuster. Yeah. But no, I mean, in World War II, to a blockbuster would be a giant bomb that would bust a block if you were doing aerial bombing raids. Yeah. But I mean, you can see how it sort of transitioned from there to just mean

anything that was a big hit or a big success. So I want to go back with you guys to the summer of 1975. And we've had this. We did not exist at that point. Yes. I have very dim memories of 1975 myself. Do you guys know what far and away the biggest hit of 1975 was in terms of cinema? Jaws. Yes. Jaws. I, I, I have very dim memories of, I, I I've only heard that, that Jaws was the first summertime blockbuster movie. You are absolutely right. You're totally right. That really kind of put that concept in studio exec's minds of like, oh, wait a minute,

this can actually be a really profitable way to structure our movies. And so let's back up. I mean, prior to the 70s, you know, movies would be released generally throughout the year. They'd be released when they were done. You're right, Karen, that there was a little bit of a bias toward holiday releases for movies that studios wanted to perform really well for obvious reasons. people are on vacation. It's family movies. People are home. It's a way to be with your family, but not talk to your family. I love my family. They listen to this podcast. It's really hard

to overstate how big of a smash hit Jaws was at the time. It was just a sensation as well as being, at the time, the highest grossing movie of all time. So now let me just put this in perspective. All right. So from 1915 until 1975, there's had only been four movies that could hold the title of highest grossing film of all time. Gone with a wind. Gone with a wind is one. Godfather? Godfather, yes.

Yes. I'll give you the other two. Birth of a Nation. Oh, right. And the sound of music. Oh, yes. So that's a span of 60 years there with only four movies taking the title. So Godfather took over the title of highest grossing film of all time in 1972.

That movie was released in March, opened fairly normal. It opened in five theaters, which was pretty common practice at the time. would open, we'd talk about a movie opening wide, cross everywhere, versus opening small. Select cities. And at the time, that was sort of the general practice for movies. You know, even prestige films or movies that the studios really had a lot of faith in, you know, you would open in a few premieres, you know, New York, maybe L.A., whatever. And then you would gradually expand as word of mouth went out or whatever. Up until Jaws came out, in fact, movies opening wide was kind of considered a bad thing. You know, you would, as a studio, you would open a movie

wide, meaning in many theaters, if you thought it was maybe a stinker or wasn't going to last, and the idea is you're like, let's make as much money as we can before people start telling each other. That's right. That's supposed to slowly building. That's so weird. Jaws

changed the rules in more ways than one. First of all, it opened in over 450 theaters. At once. At once. On the first weekend, which was just for a movie that the studios expected to be a hit, they just didn't do that at that time. it had unprecedented amounts of money put into advertising, advanced advertising, close to $700,000 just on TV spots alone.

Like, you could not watch TV in the days weeks leading up to Jaws without seeing at least a couple Jaws commercials. They would send the producers around to do interviews ahead of time. So now here's the other thing, too. So the movie was actually optioned from a book by Robert Benchley. The movie and the book were sort of coming out at the same time. And they really developed them together, even down to the level of the movie poster, being intentionally designed to look like the book cover. Here's this book that's going to be a huge hit, leading into our movie that's going to be a huge hit.

Oh, that's funny. I've seen the book cover before, and I thought it was like, oh, we're trying to tie it in. It used to have a different cover at some point. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The phenomenon now, or if a book gets turned into a movie, they'll change the cover, as you say. In addition to the advanced marketing blitz, the other thing that really changed. Hold on.

Did no other movie spend that much money in. promotion or hiking it up? No, not in terms of advanced promotion. What made Jaws special that the studio decided to pump so much money in the hype? It was a really exciting book, first of all. I mean, if you guys haven't read the book, it's a pretty exciting book. It's a little different from the movie in a lot of respects, but it's a thriller, you know, and for better or for worse, they felt they were on to something. Now, I should say that if the movie had flopped, we would be talking about what a stupid idea it was to spend all his advanced marketing. I can't believe they said so much money yet. Right. But now, I mean, it's just all the things you're talking about. I mean, you know, setting the producers out for interviews prior to the movie coming out. And it's commonplace and spending tons and tons of money on advertising. Yeah. Because Jaws sent the template. Here's another one. Advanced merchandise. Whoa. When the movie came out, they already, they already, oh, you, the list goes on and on beach towels, T-shirts, toy sharks, games for kids. And it was already available in stores. They had it in the pipelines and ready to go. They were so.

They had such a good feeling the movie was going to be a hit that they wanted to capitalize as much as possible. And this, too, is another change in thinking of studios is the movie isn't just the movie, or maybe the movie in the book. The movie is the movie and the merchandise and the toys for your kids and everything. So Jaws opened in June, 1975, very quickly recouped its investment, made a household name out of Stephen Spielberg. He was only 26 at the time he started filming this. And he had a couple movies under his belt. But this is what made Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg, and able to do whatever he wanted, essentially. You know, the summer had really kind of not been a special time for movies up until that point, but it became an obvious moneymaking machine that all the studios very quickly wanted to copy this formula.

And the formula became, instead of several smaller movies throughout the year, you muster your giant budget, all out tent pole title that comes out by July 4th, and that carries you through the rest of the year. And to some extent, can subsidize some of the other movies. You know, I mean, it's pretty rare for the same studio to have more than one summer blockbuster because they don't want to cannibalize tickets. Yeah. Let's just go back to the highest-grossing films of all time. As I said, there were four different films from 1950 to 1972. Godfather set the highest-question record of 72.

Jaws then claimed the record for highest-grossing film of all time. Two years later, Star Wars took it over for highest-grossing film of all time. A New Hope. That's right. Also a summer opening. Five years later, E.T. took it over as highest-grossing film of all time. So it became really clear to the studios that if you put a lot of money and advanced marketing and merchandising and tie in, this can be a formula for success. Keyword can be.

Can be. That's right. Can be. All right. Let's take a quick break. A word from our sponsor. 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 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 no frills So my fun-in-the-sun segment kind of is related, but we'll get there. Chris, you grew up in Connecticut. Yes.

Dan Collin, you guys grew up in California. I grew up in Taiwan, but I'm sure we all shared the same childhood experience of drinking this. Fish juice. Drinking this item. I know it by its Chinese name. That's a brand name. And it literally translates to happy thoughts ice or happy memories ice. And in Mandarin Chinese, it's called Slurping, which means happy memory ice.

And of course, you guys know it as Slurpee. Yes, the 7-Eleven Slurpee. What a treat. What a gift from the gods themselves. It's weird to think that it's so simple. It's a cup with frozen water and chemicals. And it has become an icon in promotion and market. and marketing and making money and for just consumer culture.

It was invented by Omar Nedlick in the late 1950s. Omar managed a dairy queen, which is kind of like an ice cream shop. One day, his soda fountain broke down. What he had to do was just put all his sodas in the freezer to keep them cold. And of course... Sotas don't freeze, though. They become like a slushy, like sludge. Delicious sludge.

People fell in love. with it. And that's the big thing when we're comparing icy drinks and smoothies or whatever. The main thing that sets Slurpees apart is that it is carbonated. And a lot of people don't really realize. Oh, really? That's right. That's right. You didn't know that. When you drink that, you feel the fizz on your tongue. I mean, you've got a jamba juice. It just tastes like, you know, whipped up ice in juice. But there is carbonation. So this guy decided to make a machine to make slushy sodas. And he named his company the icy company. I-C-E-E. Yes, that same icy you're thinking of.

Oh, my God. The icy company with the... I thought they were mortal competitors. They're red and blue with the logo, with the little icy logo, and a polar bear. A polar bear, yeah. So that, originally, Icy Company was, he wanted to call it scold as ice, all in one word. Wow. Skold as ice.

Skold as ice. Okay. So mortal enemies, you say. Yeah. In 1965, 7-Eleven began. and a licensing deal with IC to sell the product in their stores, in 711 stores, under certain conditions. 711 must use a different name for the product. And there's no place where 711's product will compete or be on the same shelf or be in the same area as the icy slushy.

That was in 1965, they struck this deal. In 1967, they released Slurpy. Not necessarily mortal enemies, same company that basically makes them a lushy. It's kind of like a white label for their... Yeah, because you go to movie theaters or amusement parks and you have icy, you know, the blue and the red flavors, and then... So it's all a conspiracy. It's all one... This is why there's been no improvement in the slushy technology.

Oh, we're competing with each other. No. No. So Slurpy debuted in the late 1960s. From then on, this little cup of ice just is a money-making machine. Yeah. It's weird to think that, well, A, it's delicious. B, it's cheap enough, or people of all ages can go to their local 7-Eleven and slurp it up.

They even invented the straw. I was just going to ask you. I was just going to ask, like, what do you mean? The straw with the spoon end, the shovel end? That is a slurpy. Oh. Yeah, they made it for slurpees. The Slurpee in its crazy marketing career.

First got it start in 1970, where Slurpees were so popular that 7-Eleven stores released a 45, a record of a song titled Dance the Slurp. And it was given away for free of Slurpy purchases. And like, it was catchy. They played it on the radio. It was a big hit. And basically, the song is just like kind of like dance music with the. sound of someone's sucking slurping. Oh, do you know.

No, thanks. No, thanks. Hold on. I actually haven't. Let's play a clip of it. This would send me into a violent rage. Uh-oh. Why?

I hate that sound. I agree. I hate the sound of people chewing and or slurping things. Why do I know that? That sounds so familiar. Was that? That was remix. in a DJ Shadow album.

Oh, yes, that's what it is. But this is the original version from 1970. Handed out on records in 7-11, do the slurp. So in addition to the record, 7-Eleven was like, hey, kids really love the stuff. How do we make kids buy more of this stuff? I know we'll sell special cups. Commemorative cups that people can collect in a series.

This is in the 1970s. Now, when we think of slurpees, we think of a lot of movie tie-ins or whatever. It's always kind of coupled with something. This is back in the 1970s. They already started doing this. So with rock bands, with comic book characters, with cartoons, with video games. There's a whole 1983 video game series of Cups, Gallagher, Pac-Man. And the kids just kept coming back to get the entire collection.

And then later, then that's when they started releasing special limited edition flavors that started accompanying the cup. And now it's like a package. You know, how you talked about the summer blockbuster movie and merchandise. This is flavor plus cup, plus whatever they're trying to promote a tradition dating back from 1970 to today. Here's a, God, a mind-boggling example. 7-11 in 2010, and this was on the Motley Fool business money show.

So there was a special flavor released for SpongeBob SquarePans. It was called Under the Sea Pineapple. They made so much money just from SpongeBob Slurpees that it's amazing. Who makes all these slurpy flavors? The Dr. Pepper Snapple Lab, they're the flavor chemists that come up with all the slurpy flavors. Oh, okay. And so they have to test it.

They have engineers. They have scientists to come up with new ones. They have to stay ahead of the flavor trend. And this is not just Slurpee. This is for like all foods. And this is so interesting. So, of course, they're trying to test for new things, exotic flavors that people haven't really tried or don't know yet. But at the same time, they have to be careful.

So there's new and exotic fruits today, like a sye or lichy or dragon fruit, blood orange, black currant. Starfruit. Yeah. This is what flavor chemists do. They always couple it with a normal fruit. So that it makes the consterns. consumer feel a little bit more safe, but also kind of like, oh, I'll try cherry aside. It's like, I know cherry. I've heard of cherry. I also want to be adventurous. So I'm sure this rule applies to

not just slurpees, but like, remember when Snapple's strawberry kiwi came out? Like, no, I don't think a lot of people knew what kiwi tasted like, but the strawberry was kind of the country. I do. Yeah, you see that in gums and things too. Yeah, you're right. You're right. So all this said, there is a 7-Eleven day, an official 7-Eleven celebration day. Of course, on July the 11th, if you go to your local 7-Eleven on this day, between the hours of 11 a.m. To 7 p.m., you can get a free small slurpee. Oh, that's coming up. Yep, that's coming up.

Mark your calendars. Slurpee even has their own website. It's not even 7-Eleven's website. It's slurpee.com. And they have, like, a guy in golden shorts who's doing dance videos. And he wants you to go celebrate. Is he doing the slurp? It's random.

There's like unicorns and lasers and there's like a motivational chinchilla on the website. Okay, so it's the internet, basically. Yeah. So go check that out. We're not sponsored by So 11 nor Slurpee or the icy company. We're talking about possibly setting up a slip and slide in our backyard for a Fourth of July party. But now I'm not so sure, having read a little bit more about slip and slides and who should use them and who should not. I don't really know what it is.

What it is? Let me tell you all about it. Yeah. So it all goes back to one hot summer day in the 1960s. Yeah, basically, sort of, but not really. Okay. So imagine that you're in Lakewood, California, in the 1960s, and that you are a guy named Robert Carrier. And he is an upholsterer. And one hot summer day, he saw that his 10-year-old son and his friend had taken the garden hose and had taken the garden hose and put it at the top of their house's massive painted driveway.

And that these foolish children were now, they run from the garage and then dive onto the cement of the painted cement and slide down the driveway. And at that point, Robert Carrier did not think I've got the next million dollar idea. He thought, how can I stop my children from breaking their necks? How can I make this activity? Because they're just going to keep doing this more safe. Being an upholsterer, he had access to things that the average human being did not, such as 50-foot roll. of Nogahide that he could just take home with him. It's a synthetic fabric.

It's like, it's a fabric that has plastic or vinyl on top of it. And so he brought back a huge roll of it and he put that on the driveway. And he said, okay, kids, at least slide down this fabric. So you're not potentially going to scrape yourself up on concrete. So then he thought, okay, well, what if this longst of Nogahide had a tube on the, on the side of it, sewn to the side of it that you could connect the hose to? So now water could run down the tube. Oh, the hallway.

And you poke holes, yeah, he poke holes in the tube. And so now it's sprinkling the whole piece of Nogahide all the way from the top to the bottom. So it stays wet. So the whole thing stays wet and uniformly. Now he knew he had a cool summer toy because now he had something patentable. It wasn't just a piece of fabric with water running down it because it had this sort of tube apparatus and sprinklers. So he filed a patent in the year 1960, and by the next year he had sold it to WAMO, makers of childhood plastic toys.

And it was on shelves as the slip-ins. slide by the summer of 1961. It was the hot toy that year. And that is pretty much it. It was pretty much just a guy going, I think I'll invent the slip and slide today. The Consumer Product Safety Commission says that the slip and slide should be used by children, not teenagers, not adults.

The two markets for slip and slide, as we know, are one, small children, two intoxicated adults. Yeah, yeah. And that latter group probably should. be doing this because you're too tall and heavy and your momentum is too much you're throwing yourself into the ground and you're slamming into the ground and these thin plastic of the slip and slide is not going to break the fall and it's not going to you're not just going to start sliding along you might compress your spinal cord because your body is moving forward but then

your head stops and your body keeps going like you really you really don't want to do that stopper at the end um yeah so they now have slip insides that have pools at the end Which collect the water and stop you. Is it fun? It is totally fun. It is so much fun. It's fun until you're bleeding and then you're just like... But what isn't, really?

It's true. It's true. It's true. I'm sorry. This is Jen and Jenny from Ancient History Fan Girl and we're here to tell you about Jenny's scorching historical romantasy based on Alarica of the Biscogh's enemy of my dreams. Amanda Bouchet, bestselling 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. Okay, when you think of summer, what fruit comes to mind instantaneously? Watermelon. Of course. Watermelon, yes, the fruit of the summer, although you can get it all year round. For some reason, it is a summer fruit.

True or false, a watermelon is a fruit. Whoa. Well, you can buzz in order. I'll say true. I say false. It is part of, okay, no, no, no, because I remember one state, I think Ohio, Oklahoma, it's their state vegetable because watermelon is in the same family as cucumbers, but technically cucumbers are not vegetables, they're fruit. So they're fruit. It is both a fruit and a vegetable.

It depends on a trick question. So if you're talking botanically, it's defined as a fruit because it's the enlarged oom of whatever, comes from a flower. There's all sorts of reasons. But then it's also a vegetable because it's in the same family as a cucumber and a pumpkin and a squash. They're all cousins to each other. They're related.

And those terms are a little fuzzy as well. They are. They're more culinary than biological, I think. So I have two stories for you guys. This is the folk story. In the Balkans, if you didn't take care of your watermelon right away, if you didn't cut it up and eat it right away, it would get these red spots on it. And this might happen to pumpkins, too.

And the red spots mean that they have become vampires. You've left them out at night. And if you leave out inanimate objects at night, sometimes it become vampires. And then they roll around and attack people. I saw this on Wikipedia. I was like, what? And then I was Googling around. And it's kind of a controversial folktale, actually.

Apparently. So Terry Pratchett wrote about vampire watermelons in one of his stories. And so people were saying, oh, Wikipedia is being exploited by people who are Terry Pratchett fans and they're just putting it on there and pretending it's real. This ethnographer in the 50s published a study where he'd collected all sorts of folktales from the nomadic Roma peoples in the Balkans. They roll around and they make a noise and it looked, it was like BRRL. And I was like, brr like, what is the noise that these vampiric watermelons are making as a lot. they roll after you in the night. I'm so perplexed by this story. I know. So that's one story. Now, this one is totally true, but is also crazy. There is a thing called watermelon snow. And it is pink snow that you find in the California, Sierra, Nevada area.

And it smells like watermelons. What? I know. Where does it come from? Where does it come from? So it took people have known about this for hundreds of. years and they did not know where it came from. They were like, they would bring it back with them in bottles and it would turn bright red and they're like, it's magic. It's from the iron in the

mountains. We don't know. And apparently there's a type of algae that thrives in cold weather. And so when it's really cold, it's hibernating. It hibernates. And then when it warms up over summer, it starts to blossom and it becomes red in the snow. And so, and it smells like watermelons. It smells like watermelons, but you should not eat this algae. You should not hear it. Because it has a laxative effect. Or you could eat it if you wanted to. I think it's painful laxative. Oh, no.

Like you will get... Not gentle release. Oh, not... Yeah, okay. Tenacious diarrhea. Oh, okay. All right, okay. Okay.

I just Google image search watermelon stope. It is. It's pink. Wow. I thought it was crazy that it even smelled like watermelons. It's not just pink. It also smells sweet and fruity and kind of fresh. I admit, I want to try it.

Yeah. She's trying to trick you. The lesson, as always, nature is out to get you. Man, nature. Nature is weird. Well, one of my favorite things about summer is the nice long summer days. Me too. I'm going to stay light so late.

And, of course... Tell me more, tell me more. I will, in fact, tell you more, Karen. Oh, yeah. Okay. Thank you. You know, the long days and long days. nights are even amplified by the fact that we are in daylight saving time. Let me ask you

guys a question. Why do we have daylight saving time? I will answer my own question. Go on. Hold on. I have a guess. I have a guess. They set up daylight savings time so that the farmers had more sunlight for their plants. But the plants will always get the same amount of sunlight. Right, right. Well, it was more for the people. Working on the field. Yeah, yeah. In fact, farmers as a group are one of the most opposed to daylight saving time out of various groups. Interesting. Yes. And we'll get to this in a second. Huh. So very quickly, a little bit of science here.

The days are longer in the summer, mainly to do with the tilt of the Earth axis. Okay. We have more hours of daylight over summer than we do have hours of daylight over winter. Okay. True. True. Yes. Not everywhere on the planet, of course.

If you're at the equator, your days are 12 hours sunlight, 12 hours dark. This is one reason why most equatorial countries don't have daylight saving time. They have no need for it. That's right. So there really is no clear answer to what the, reason for daylight saving time is, but we can all agree on what it does. What it does is because the days are longer, it shifts an hour of time from the mornings when many people are asleep. It shifts that hour of time toward the end of the day. That much we can all agree on. Now, the reason why we decided to do this as a culture, it's muddled. The answer that a lot of people give today for why we have daylight saving time in summer is, well, it saves energy, meaning that if we can get people to use less electricity, at night, that will save energy. Another reason is simply just to encourage later activity. If we move that extra hour of daylight to the end of the day, people can go out and do things and do more.

So when did it start, though? It was proposed as far back as the time of Benjamin Franklin. No way. Yes, he is, he is by most accounts considered to be the first person to really go on record with the idea of shifting our days. That in the summertime, we have so much more daylight, we need to be more productive with it. There's, of course, the famous quote attributed Benjamin Franklin, early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise, or woman as well. And his original motivation for proposing an idea of shifting time was, essentially, he thought people were being kind of lazy. So while he was an envoy to France, you know, he noticed that a lot of people during the summer weren't getting up until 11 or 12 and then

staying up super late, carousing at night. And in Benjamin Franklin's mind, he's like, this is really inefficient. He's like, we have all this hours of daylight at the beginning of the day that you people are sleeping. And then late at night, we're tongue in cheek, he said this, but it is true, we're burning candles and oil and using all these resources. So his proposal was essentially, let's shift the day later in the summer. Or efficiency.

Right. But not by actually changing clocks the way we do. His proposal was pretty simple. It was just get up earlier in the summer, guys. You know, he's like, he's like, it's not that. Yeah. And it really, he really did mean early to bed, early to rise, meaning rise when the sun comes up, go to sleep when it's dark. Boo, Benjamin, Franklin, boo.

This never really went anywhere. It wasn't a serious proposal. But the idea is pretty good. In terms of the modern implementation of daylight saving. Oh, and just as a quick aside here, just so we avoid any letters coming in, there are people who are very, very much sticklers about that. It's daylight saving. No plural. Not savings?

It is the time that saves daylight, is the reasoning. There's another man named William Willett of London. And in the early 1900s, he really got it in his head that this is something that's good for society. The story goes that he was sort of inspired the same way that Benjamin Franklin was. He was out one day early. He was a very industrious, get up early with the sun kind of guy. And couldn't believe how many people were still in bed asleep while it's bright out. Now, there's another part of the story goes that...

Just let people sleep. Gosh, get out of my business. Come on. He made a proposal to Parliament, actually. And he pushed this for the next 10 years until he died. Sadly, he never got to see it enacted in his time. So right around 1915, 16, there was a fairly major event that's about to bubble up in the world called World War I. And this is really where it gets to people taking more seriously the idea of energy savings.

Oh, okay. So there's always been sort of the moral aspect of, get up early, you lazy. know. But it wasn't until Germany in 1916 in an effort to save coal and ration coal efforts, let's move time later in the day. People will use less coal. There's more available for the war effort. It worked really well. It did essentially what it tried to do. After the war was over, a lot of countries abandon it. They're like, okay, well, that's done. We don't need to save the energy for the war effort anymore, and they reverted back. Yeah. And they brought it back again in World War II for the same reason, although this time there was a much bigger emphasis on

electricity. Going back to what I said at the top, the reason farmers don't like it is because farmers are like, you know, we're on the animal schedule. You know, it doesn't matter what time the clock says. We get up when the rooster crows and we go to milk the cows and we reap our crops, you're messing with our schedule because everyone that we have to interface now is messing with their time schedule. So there are a few really interesting, real and imagined controversies centered around daylight saving time that I found in the course of my research. So when they first started proposing this as the law of the lands, you know, one of the arguments that people brought forth was, well, this could infect inheritance. Say I have twins and one of them is born 10 minutes before the time change goes.

And then we set the clocks back an hour. The other twin then comes out. So technically on their birth certificate, twin number two is listed as being older. This could be a big deal in terms of inheritance rights and things like that. There is a story. There is a story, a verified story, of a man who was able to defer his draft status for the army by saying, no, no, no, I was born on this day due to daylight savings, which meant that he was in a lottery for a different day. There are some interesting stories about, you know, things that are originally time controlled, like trains, for instance. So Amtrak, this is really funny.

When Amtrak in the middle of the changeover, they will stop the trains on the tracks. They just stop in their spot, wait an hour, and then resume, yes, yes, yes, and then resume their trip. All those people sitting the train have to sit there for an hour. Yeah, yeah. Don't write on a day where the time changes. On the day when the crossover is. I mean, the other side of that is that it's at, you know, 2 a.m. So, odds are you're going to be asleep.

It is, yeah. That is so weird. That is really weird. All right. So that's all for our summer, fun in the sun talk, and I have one non-topic quiz. for all of you guys. It's going to be a quick little jaunty quiz, and this is actually inspired by listener, fan, Pete,

and he wanted to dedicate this quiz to his wife, Lucy, Lucy Molinaro. We heard that Lucy really likes Internet and Animals. So that inspired me to write a Internet Computer Company Animal Mascot Quiz. Very specific and a little bit tough. I'm going to tell you the animal mascot, and you tell me what company, internet company, or computer company that that animal is the mascot for. Okay. Okay. So, for example, if I say a bird and a whale, you would say Twitter, Twitter, the bird and the fail whale.

Here we go. You can go by quick. Red panda. Firefox. Correct. Firefox logo. is actually not a fox. It is a red panda specifically.

Wow. All right. The sock puppet dog. Chris. Pets.com. Pets.com. voiced by. Oh.

Gilbert Godfrey. No. Dave Foley. Michael Ian Black. Oh, really? He was the voice of the sock puppet dog. I was in the area. Right.

Blinged out cat. Oh, is that the Groupon cat? Yes, Groupon. Groupon has a cat mascot. His name, or its name, is Groupon, the cat. Okay. And he wears a, like... Wonder how he got that name.

A Groupon giant gold necklace. I like that cat. Puffer fish. Oh, gosh, I buzzed in too soon. Is that... It wasn't Alta Vista or Lycos? No. I was thinking of babblefish.

I was thinking of, never mind. Puffer fish. talked about this on the show but we talked about this site on the show before for all you internet savvy people Bittley Bittley has a puffer fish

I'm not sure why but it's there oh maybe it's because I'm just totally winging it here maybe it's because they can expand like maybe like the URL shortening oh

yeah okay probably why let's go with that if that's not it should be like oh is it because it's poison When people dies All right

American Bulldog Dana Zinga Yes Zinga It's actually named Zinga But spelled differently Yeah Z-I-N-GA All right

Tucks the Penguin Chris Linux Correct This one's more For the digital marketers Out there Freddy the ape

Freddy the ape Uh, well, is... Name of the company's right there. Is it MailChimp? Yes, male chimp. Very cute. Kind of looks like Curious George. He is really cute.

He's a little male man. All right. This is for all you nerds and geeks. Timmy the monkey. Oh, I know that. Yes. You know this. Oh, it's a think geek.

Yes. Oh, okay. Retailer of cool, nerdy stuff. Timmy's always dressed up and different things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Last one. Not technically an animal, but here we go.

A red-eyed alien. Oh. Is it Reddit? Yes. Oh. No name. Just the alien. The Reddit alien.

And I looked at the guidelines for branding. His eyes or its eyes always have to be read. And that's our show. Thank you guys for joining me. And thank you guys, listeners, for listening in. Hope you learn a lot. There was a lot in the show from food like watermelon. Oh, vampire watermelon.

and ice cream cones, slurpees, to summer jams, summer movies, to long summer days. And you can find us on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, and also on our website, good job, brain.com. And join us on Twitter and Facebook. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye. What does Sputnik have to do with student loans?

How did a set of trembling hands end the Soviet Union? How did inflation kill moon bases? And how did a former president decide to run for a second non-consecutive term? These are among the topics we deal with on the My History Can Beat Up Your Politics Podcast. We tell stories of history that relate to today's news events. Give a listen. My history can beat up your politics wherever you get podcasts.