Good Job, Brain! - 78: Too Cool for School

Episode Date: September 11, 2013

Prepare your face for some eyebrow-raising and completely bonkers trivia about school: the odd history behind the classic No. 2 yellow pencil (WHY IS IT NUMBER TWO? WHY IS IT YELLOW? THE WORLD MUST KNOW!), the surreal and the bedazzled things rival colleges fight for, celebrities who used to be teachers, and the impact Minnesota had on videogames. And where did the phrase "freshman fifteen" come from? And are *YOU* smarter than a 1895 eighth grader? ALSO: 1960's Jeopardy!, listener questions, prep school movie quiz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Chick-dy-chick, check, check, cherish, chummy champions. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and Opi trivia podcast. This is episode 78, and of course, I am your humble host, Karen, and we are your gregarious, grungy group grasping for gripping granules. I'm Colin. I'm Dana. And I'm Chris. And guess what, guys? It's time for our usual correction segment. Hoor. Um, actually. Yeah, Chris, you got an um, actually. I got an um, actually. Time to suck it up and, uh, admit defeat. Uh, listener Tom D.

wrote us a comment and pointed out a very astute observation. I, in our show about temperatures referred to degrees on the Kelvin scale, um, you know, because Kelvin is another way of measuring temperatures. The Kelvin scale, the unit of measurement, is called a Kelvin. It is not a degree Kelvin like on the other scales. So it is one Kelvin, two Kelvin's, three calvins, which would be super cold. Just like the cold ice burn delivered by Tom D. But I deserved it.

And it's a really important point because that'll probably come up on a trivia contest at some point. What is the unit of measurement called? It is a Kelvin. Now let's jump into our first usual general trivia segment, Pop Quiz Hotshot. It's me again. It's you again. That is because, again, on a previous episode, we discovered hidden in a flea market here in Berkeley, California, a brand new copy of Jeopardy, the board game from the 1960s. Brand new in the 60s.

We popped the shrink wrap open, and as it turns out, a lot of these Jeopardy category questions, we would not be able to. answer them today. I picked out two more categories out of 60s Jeopardy that I think we should be able to handle. Yeah, usually we just for Pop Quiz Hotchat, I just pick a random current Trivial Pursuit card. Which has a range of like

pop culture and sports, but this is all 1960. I think that we should do fine. All day, every day. Some of these questions, they may not want to pose these questions anymore on Jeopardy. The way that they're phrased. The time travel is part of it. Or the ways that the categories are phrased.

That's a different time. The first category is the mysterious east. Right. Yeah, they probably wouldn't say that anymore. Yeah, probably not. It's funny, it's mysterious, but most of the world's population is that. Mysterious people in the United States in the 1960s. For $100, the country which Marco Polo called Café.

Karen. What is? China. What is China? Animal used in Malaya to help harvest teak wood. Huh. Malaya? Like Malaysia?

Maybe. What is a water buffalo? No. Oh. Guessing. Karen? Dana. What is a yak? Not a yak.

Oh, I was going to guess what is a yak. Can you read Malaya? Malaya. It is an elephant. Oh. Okay. In Japan, sumo is one form of this sport. Colin.

What is wrestling? Indeed. China fought an 1839 war in an attempt to stop the import of this product. Karen. What is opium? What is opium, yes. $500 question. Japanese word for yes.

Karen. What is height? What is? What is? What is? In the... Oh, really? Questions.

Yes, what is high? Should be H. Hi. Yeah. Hi. Hi. Our double jeopardy category is mythology. Okay.

Well, at least that hasn't changed much since the 60s. That is correct. It's still cool to say mythology. In fact, now that we all read comic books, it should be, in fact, a lot easier. Oh, that's true. Isis and Osiris were used. deities to these people. Colin?

Who are the Egyptians? Yes. Who were the Egyptians? Who are the ancient Egyptians? Because of course there are no Egyptians anymore. According to this book says, who were the Egyptians. Who are the ancient Egyptians? Substance of wings which melted when Icarus flew too close to the sun.

Dana. What is wax? What is wax? What's his dad? name. It's Icarus and... Daedalus? Datalus. Is that right? Yeah. Yep.

Great Hall in Asgard, wherein Odin received souls of heroes. Great Hall. The Great Hall. The Great Hall in Asgard. Oh. So is that... What is Valhalla? What is Valhalla? Oh. Eurytese's boyfriend?

Oh. What's his name? Yes. It's, um... I don't know. Wait, wait. Does I begin with O? What is what? It's, um... He's not Lawrence Fishburn's character from the Matrix.

No, but it... Orpheus. Orpheus. Orpheus. Finally, the $1,000 question. Disappointed in love, she faded away till only her voice remained. Oh. Karen.

Echo. Echo. What is Echo? Who is Echo? Who is? Who is? Although she was a nymph, so maybe she's a what and not a who. I am very lax with my jeopardy.

And so, yes, I will accept that. Yay. All right. 60th Jeopardy. Good job, Brains. So we get a lot of questions about our podcast and... Like, what's wrong with you? Why are you so ugly?

So I figured I'd shared some from email, from Facebook, from Twitter, and we'll share a couple of these. First off, someone asked, how do you decide who does what bit? It's kind of just whoever grabs some reserves. Yeah, yeah. You stake your claim on whatever you want to talk about. Not a lot of people know this, but what we do is we set up a topic, which is really general. You know, like a couple of weeks ago is on hot things, and that can be interpreted as, you know, chili pepper hot or it can be heat and temperature.

And so it's a pretty broad topic. And then all of us find something within that topic to research about. We've given each other an idea of what we're doing, but we also try to not let on too much about what it is we're talking about. Because we're cheaters and we would research it so we can answer the question. Which is not about, it's just about trust or in this case not trusting you. And sometimes we show up on day of recording not knowing at all who's doing what. Before the show we'll kind of be like, well, I'm talking about something like this. Last week for numbers, Colin's like, I got a music quiz and I'm all, it's going to be number music quiz.

So I'm already thinking like what numbers are. Yeah, I was trying to be very circumspect and how I put it down because I don't want. want you to show up having already sort of, you know, not like cheating, but accidentally brainstormed. Accidentally researching the answers to it. We can't surprise each other either, totally, because we will both show up having researched the same thing if we don't. All four of us did Bombardier Beatles.

So what do we do now? Lastly, we have a question from Jonathan Barnett and Emily Murdoch, and they asked us, what did you guys study in school? What did I study? That was a long time ago. Japanese. I majored in Japanese. Are you fluent?

100%? No, no, no, no, no. No, I wouldn't say so. Dana, what did you study? So for undergrad, I did sociology, and I did social research for a while, and then I was like, I want to do something different. So I took a bunch of night school classes and engineering. I thought about being an engineer for a while, computer programmer.

And then I took a flash game making class, and I was like, oh, I want to make games. And so I went back to school, and I got a degree in learning, design, and technology. and I'm a game designer. That's what I do. I studied psychology and art history. That was just kind of just based on what interested me. And I don't necessarily know that I applied either one of those in my day-to-day working life. You know, the art a little bit.

Art and design definitely goes into it. I went to architecture school, like for architects to become an architect. And I got it. I was like, you know what? I like playing video games. So I'm not going to do architecture anymore. And this week, we're actually going to talk about school. It is September.

Many of you already started your first day of school, your first week of school, and we thought we dedicate this episode to weird, interesting, fun facts. So, classes in session. When I wake up in the morning and the long kids I don't think I'll ever make it on time. By the time I get my bullets and I give myself a look, I'm at the corner just in time and see the bus fly by. It's all right, because I'm safe on the bell. All right, guys, time for a quiz. Take out a sheet of paper and your number two pencils.

What's that? Will pins work? Yeah. What is this paper and pencil you speak? I don't think I've used a pencil in a... I don't think I've handwritten something. Oh, really long time. I don't remember what my handwriting looks like.

Just type. Yeah, I type everything. Even, yeah, in school, I hated writing everything. But we did a lot of the things. It had to be paper and pencil. The classic yellow number two. often a Dixon Ticcondaroga pencil, at least in America, it is seemingly ubiquitous. With the crappy erasers that kind of just fall out.

The little pink erasers, yeah, yeah. So there is so much just great, you know, kind of nerdy trivia wrapped up in this one object of the yellow number two pencil with the pencil lead and the eraser on the thing. So let's just unpack this a little bit. So right off the bat. Let's just get this out of the way. So why is it number two? What is what is? Oh, I don't know.

When you said, oh, Karen, I thought for sure, I was like, all right, out of the three of the guys. So, what is it number two pencil? What does it refer to? It's a measure of the softness of the graphite or the hardness of the graphite. Oh, right. Like, H2. So, Karen, the reason I thought you might know the number one is, so as Chris, you're absolutely right. The one through four are sort of the standard.

There's a one, a two, a two point five, a three, and a four. Are they all yellow? Well, so we'll get to that in a minute. We'll get to that in a minute. So this is just about the lead or the graphite, actually, on the inside. So the one are the really soft ones. And so, like, at either end of the extreme, they kind of tend to be specialized. So ones are really popular with artists and people who do a lot of drawing because they're

really soft, smooth lead. It kind of spreads easily. But it wears down really quickly because it's so soft. Right. So at the other end of the extreme, you get into your threes and your fours, it's a really hard lead. It predicts a really kind of a light line. Oh, I see. But it lasts longer.

So it's like the H scale and the B scale in drafting and drawing pencils. Yeah, yeah. You have a B2, H1, 82. A lot of the rest of the world, Europe and Asia in particular, use the HB scale. Right, where H is for hard, meaning like the fours, or the really rigid, and then the B is for black. Why does America have to have a weird measurement standard for everything? Well, you know what? Actually, the one through four measurement, the numbering system came from Europe.

The number, and it came into America and then sort of fell out of favor in Europe. I remember, you know, one of the first little bits of like, oh, trivia, fun. I learned as a kid, is like, oh, you know, it's not. It's not lead in the pencil. It's graphite, you know, even though we call it pencil lead. And they did actually use to use lead for writing. You know what I mean? Like PB lead.

Yes, like actual lead lead, yeah. What a bunch of dummies? When did they stop using lead? People started dying. They didn't stop using lead in pencils until around the 1500s. And this is a great story. They discovered graphite. All of it.

They kind of just, they didn't really know what graphite was. We were walking down the street one day. There is a story that goes that in England, in Cumberland, England, a gigantic tree uprooted. This is sometime in the 1500s, and attached to the roots of the tree and exposed by the roots of the tree were just these big globs of this dark, you know, heavy substance that people found really made good lines, really marked really well. They called it black lead or plumbago. It sounds like a delicious fruit, doesn't it? Like Plumbego. Think of like a Winnebago, but shaped like a giant plum on wheels.

Yeah, Plumbego meant like lead, lead ore, lead deposit. And they thought that this was another type of lead. I don't even know what graphite is carbon. It's like charcoal. It's like burned up wood or something, right? It's a different, no, it's not burned up, but it's just a different form of carbon. The way like diamonds is one form of carbon. Graphite is another form of carbon, right?

Just depend on how it's arranged. The name graphite didn't come along until 1789, actually. So for hundreds of years, they just called it black lead or plumbago, right? And graphite means writing stone because it was sort of named afterward, like this stone that we used for writing, let's give it a name. And it was coined by a guy who was basically trying to say, no, I don't think this is actually lead. I think it's something different. I think it's its own material. But as people still called it pencil lid after hundreds of years.

Oh, yeah. Well, it's just stuck. It's still called pencil lead. Yeah. I remember this is a dumb story. I remember when as a little kid, like if you got a cut and with the pencil, you're just messing around. the pencil and things happened and you got stab. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're like,

I'm going to get lead poisoning. But graphite, this was a huge deal. I mean, and basically from the discovery of graphite for the next hundred years, the best pencils came from the best graphite. And if you controlled the world's graphite supply, you

were just the, so not surprisingly the English for a long time were just, oh, all the best pencils come from Cumberland graphite, you know? And it was, they didn't really know where the great deposits of it were. Because nobody had been looking for it. No one had been looking for it.

They didn't even know it was a separate substance at first, right. England and France, they go to war occasionally. You know, if you know your history, you know, they've been at war many, many, many times. So during one of the many wars between England and France, there was a blockade. And one of the things that the English were like, no, France, you can't have any of our awesome Cumberland graphite. Yeah. Oh, my God. So there was.

They pencil blocked them. Yeah. They pencil blocked the French. They did. But, you know, like many other inventions, necessity drives great inventions. So a man named Nicholas Conte. Oh! Conte.

A drawing pencils in art supplies. One of my favorite, just as very quickly, one of my favorite bits of looking at the history of pencils is all the big names that we know today are the big names. Still. Today. Conte. Faber. Yes. Statelyer.

These are all of the... Staitler. Dixon. These are all the original big names. I like to school again. So basically, nobody has really disrupted the pencil industry in the manner. There's been no Steve Jobs of pencils lately. It's pencil and prosario's ruling.

So he was forced to come up as he couldn't have access to high quality graphite. And so what he came up with is really what is we still use today is the modern graphite making process for pencil leads, which is you take powdered graphite and it doesn't matter if it's high quality because what he did is he mixed it with water and clay. into kind of like a paste or a slurry and then extruded it into really long strips. I love extruded slurries. Fired them in a kiln, so they were, you know,

hardened and more durable. And this became just a breakthrough in the world of pencil making. It was a very top secret process. And this is still not in a wooden canister, like a pencil. This is just stick. They were at this point encasing them in wood in a few different ways. The basic process today is still pretty. pretty similar is you have two slats of wood, you lay a piece down in the middle, you put

another slat on top and you glue them together. They're glued together. Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever broken a pencil? Oh, it's... You can't, you see a seam on it. You can see the seam.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I thought they took a really long drill and drill like... Grill holes individually. Yeah. Well, it, that was an early procedure for doing it. Making pencils was tedious. All right.

Now, this is about to get serious. Yeah. Why are pencils yellow? Yes, that's my question. Why are they yellow? All right. So, like, so many other things we've talked about before, it's just a great marketing ploy that was successful and everyone copied in 1889 at the World Fair in Paris.

Always the place there. Yeah, yeah. The Coenore Hartmouth Pencil debuted. And now, remember I said that, you know, wherever the best graphite came from was the best pencils. So at this time, it was kind of like, oh, the best graphite is Chinese. It's the best graphite comes from there. So they, they, mysterious east, exotic east. So that was part of the marketing of the Coenor pencil.

And it was, it was built as the top, finest, best pencil in the world you can buy. And it was pricey. And they painted it yellow. There's a little dispute actually over exactly why yellow. But for whatever reason, they picked yellow. And the story went that customers were like, I want the yellow pencil. Oh, but give me that yellow one. And so that became the de facto color for high class, high quality pencils.

And that continues today. in the States. All right. Wow, a lot of history in that one little thing. It is amazing. China, huh? Mysterious. Mysterious.

Okay, I can't wait anymore. I got to share this with you guys. So one of the things before I went to college, you know, I hear about the freshman 15, the freshman 15. And of course, you guys know what I'm talking about, right? This is a very common term. Right. Freshman 15 is the, quote, phenomenon where,

the unexplained mystery where kids go to college in the freshman year and they would gain 15 pounds I'm actually interested if there are other sayings around the world they call it something else but in America we call it freshman 15 where does it come from and is it true it is not true it is a myth

it is a big old myth now is it not true like it doesn't happen at all or it's not true it's not really 15 pounds okay so there's yes for both. The Ohio State University did a study on average women and men probably gain around three pounds

but less than 10% of the freshman actually gains 15 or more. I mean there are a lot of factors, right? There could be because you're not having solid meals or stressed out from school. Your parents are not watching you eat anymore you're not eating with your parents. You can eat whenever you want. You might have... My partying

and drinking. You're drinking a lot more than you used to in high school. But you're also coming out of your teenage years. You're coming out of puberty. Right. So you're not, yeah, hormones and your metabolism is slowing down a little bit. Maybe you used to be an athlete in high school and you're not playing on sports teams anymore. Or vice versa.

And actually 25% a whole quarter of students actually lost weight in their first. I lost weight because I can walk everywhere. But where did it come from? Where did the saying come from? It came from a 1989 issue of 17 magazine. And on the cover, right on the cover, the headline is, Fighting the Freshman 15. It's just that recent?

In 1989. They're called the Freshman 15 because it's alliterative. It is because fighting freshman 15. Fighting the freshman 5 doesn't sound as a bigger draw. It doesn't sound as bad. Yeah, exactly. That sounds like a group of outlaws on campus, the freshman 5 in the last scene. Like, holy crap, 15 pounds, and it basically kind of caused panic.

I would have guessed it was like 50 years old, that saying. 1989, first written, first appeared, 17 magazine. Interesting. All right, I have a quiz for you guys. Great. It is about famous people who used to be teachers. People who are famous not for being a teacher, but who were a teacher at some point in their career. I'm starting to think of some already.

All right, let's see if they're on the list. He taught school for a few years before going to law school, and he was also the second president of the United States. John Adam Yes, John Adams I was like which one There's two This is what he said about the kids in his class While he decided to go to law school

And not be a teacher anymore He called them There's a large number of little rentlings Just capable of lisping ABC And troubling the master Is how he talked about his students Not a lot of empathy there It's good he moved on to them

I know maybe they should have gotten them out of pre-K This former elementary school music team composed the album, Come On, Come On, in the wake of her breakup from Owen Wilson. Yes, the actor. Who dated Owen Wilson? Who had an album, Come on, Come On. Oh, man. I do not.

I don't know. I don't know. Cheryl Crowe. Cheryl Crow? Oh, no way. Good job. Amazing. Good job, Ray.

He was a high school principal at the Mexican-American well-held in school in Kottila, Texas. He was also the 36th president of the United States and tied with Lincoln as the tallest president at 6-4. Oh, gosh. Who was a tall dude? 36. Oh. Is that Lyndon Johnson?

Yes. Oh, you got it for 36? Well, I was thinking later period I could figure out. Yeah, I can just count backwards. Well, that's not fair because Abraham Lincoln wore a top hat, so it makes him, you know, your perception of him is so much taller. He is six four without the hat. In the wild, that is the Lincoln's natural defense technique.

gets to make itself look bigger. Puma attack. This musician was teaching math in Connecticut when bridge over troubled water reached the top of the charts. Is it Art Garfunkel? Yes. He was a math teacher. He does.

He does. Yeah, you're right. He does. Hey, kids. He sits on a chair backwards in a cool way. Mr. Garfunkel. Yeah. Just call me Mr. Art.

But I'm not your art teacher. I'm your math teacher. what a fully realized vision that's amazing just with like tweed jacket and it's the Jewish afro and it comes with his acoustic guitar and he can start do do do do do

and here's to you Mrs. Algebra I think all of us had that was yeah yeah yeah that was the opening scene for the Chris Caller Art Girlfuckle

biopic This author and former schoolteacher was inspired to write Lord of the Flies after allowing a classroom of boys to debate freely. Whoa! William Golding? Yes, sir, William Golden. I can see that. I can see that.

He's just standing there like, this is chaotic. They're so cruel to each other. Then the first one dies. He's like, I'm going to write a book. Should I stop them or start writing? Like, that's just boys. being boys. I don't know. Human nature.

Last one. Who taught speech at the Boston School for deaf mutes and is also well known for creating a communication advice we use today? A communication advice. He taught... Alexander Graham Bell?

Yes. Oh, okay. He taught speech at the school. And he married a student from there. When she turned 19, she was 19. I thought that means they met, And of course, not that actually anyone uses a telephone anymore. Oh, you're right.

He didn't admit texting. I'm sorry. He did his Snapchat. Did archaeologists discover Noah's Ark? Is the rapture coming as soon as the Euphrates River dries up? Does the Bible condemn abortion? Don't you wish you had a trustworthy academic resource to help make sense of all of this? Well, I'm Dan.

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So as we record this podcast, we're very close to Silicon Valley, the Northern California hub of many of the technology companies. But did you know that in the 1950s and 1960s in America, one of the absolute hotbeds of computer technology companies was Minnesota. What? Yes. Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota was like, if things had gone slightly differently, we could. be referring to that as like as silicon valley ibn cray honeywell all the old you know the big computer companies they all had branch offices and such they were all doing a lot of research in minnesota weird right we might all be living in minnesota right now i might have never been

born i always confuse silicon valley and silicone no what's silicon valley like i think that's done in ell yeah that's for something else a convent. You know, I was growing up, I always mixed up to two. I thought it was the same thing. I think if you just spend a few minutes on Google, you'll see that it still gets mixed up quite a bit. Right, sure.

So the state of Minnesota, the state, the government of Minnesota, of course, realized a lot of what was going on, and they were actually a very early proponent of computers in education and sunk a lot of resources into getting computers into their schools. The government did. The Minnesota government did into, you know, universities and, like, mainframe computers and stuff like that, but even really early proponents of getting computers into, like, primary school, high schools, middle schools, stuff like that within the state of Minnesota. In the early 1970s, they were getting a lot of mainframe computers up and running that the schools could access. And so what they did that was really, like, forward thinking and really interesting was that various state governmental organizations in the state of Minnesota came together in our early 70s to create the Minnesota.

Educational Computing Consortium, or MECC. I know that. You've heard of that acronym, right? Yeah. Well, I'll tell you why you know it. So, like, when they started up in the early 70s, they had hired, one of their first hires was a young college graduate named Don Rowich. And he was, while he had been a student teacher a couple of years before, still getting

his degree in Minnesota and, like, going to schools, he was having trouble teaching some classes of kids. history. And so he had actually, with a couple of his fellow student teachers, created or started working on a board game that would teach the kids about the Western expansion of the United States, people going from the East Coast and traveling and covered wagons and such to the West Coast. These guys had been, you know, at their universities, like using the early computers. And so they did out this board game and they were like, wait a minute, we could do this as a computer game.

They called it first, Oregon, and eventually named it Oregon Trail. Yay! So, and when you buy Oregon, when you used to go and buy copies of Oregon Trail and stores, it was published by the MECC, the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. So Oregon Trail the game now is often,

it's a video game that is, that school kids still play. They've got versions on Facebook and, you know, then on iOS, too. And you can play, even adults like to play it now. And basically it is a, it's a very early simulation video game. You start as a family of people who want to move from the eastern United States and, like, forge a new life in the frontier of the West in the 1800s. And so it tells you who you are, are you a farmer, are you a banker, or are you a doctor, or whatever? And that determines kind of how much money you have.

And you have to buy supplies and you go out on the trail. bad things happen to you because it's the wilderness and people get bit by snakes and people get dysentery they die of it sometimes sometimes your family dies but the whole point was

it was to give you know kids an idea of like you know interactive idea of like this is what it was like and this is what you had to do the first rudimentary version of this was created on what was known as a time sharing computer they did not have personal computers in the early 1970s. I mean, basically, this was not something

that people had access to. Not a lot of people had access to computers in general. So the way that a lot of these computers worked back in the day was through timesharing. You had a computer terminal which you used to interact

with this computer, but then many, many people all sat in front of terminals and there was only one computer. There was no monitor. It was a teletype machine. So there was a role of paper. I mean, imagine a typewriter, basically,

but you type something on the typewriter, and then the typewriter typed back at you on the next line of paper what happened. There's one line at a time. So, I mean, really, it's like, you know, go west, and then the computer spits back at you, okay, I just went west, but like, it's on a piece of paper that's getting rolled

through this machine. And so, when you were done playing the game, you had a whole paper printout of the whole game that you had just played. And so that's how they played Oregon Trail. The only thing that was really, really remarkably different than the versions we play now and there were no graphics, but

to go hunting because there's segments in which you go hunting in Oregon Trail and it's actually a little action game you you go out and find animals and you shoot them in this one it just says okay you're hunting and you have to type bang with an exclamation point and if you type it fast enough remember that not a lot of students were like good touch typers back in those days if you typed it fast enough it was like great shot you got 100 pounds of food and if you didn't type it fast enough it was like you missed that's a good game right now that's a good mechanic As the 70s draw on, the MECC realizes, oh, personal computers are the big thing now. Like, we need to start getting actual, like, you know, self-contained personal computers into schools.

So they take bids from the big personal computer makers. And surprising everybody, the one they end up going with is the young upstart named Apple and the Apple 2. They did not go with an established name. Like Apple just submitted a little bit. and they were like, yeah, we'll go with these guys. So the state of Minnesota places a huge order for the Apple II computer. So Don Rowett, so then he gets hired by the MECC, and they're like, we need programs. It's like, oh, I've got Oregon.

And the state of Minnesota, and these guys start programming, including Oregon Trail, which is that is the version that I first played when I was a kid, looks like on Apple II. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I didn't live in Minnesota. Like, I lived in Connecticut. I lived in California. You lived in California, and your school probably had a lot of Apple twos with the Oregon Trail, right?

Reason for that is because of what happened in Minnesota, because the MECC bought all these Apple IIs. They got all these Apple II programs. They create all their own Apple II educational programs and send them for free to the schools in Minnesota. Other states were like, hey, can we have some of those? It's like a turnkey solution already to go. Right.

So they were like, yeah, well, I mean, all our programs are for Apple. So the states were like, okay, great, well, we'll buy a bunch of Apple twos. And then you guys license us all this piece is a software. Other states would pay Minnesota, and then Minnesota would send them video games. The MECC, eventually they spun it off as its own private company because it was doing so well it didn't need state funding anymore. And then it was bought by the Learning Company. Yeah. Carmen San Diego, which is now owned by Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, I think it's called the book company.

Publisher. Yeah, and so both the same company owns. I remember number munchers. The MECC, I mean, they just cranked out a lot of educational games. And for a long time, it was part of the government of Minnesota. Very cool. A couple of years ago, they found a test in Salina, Kansas from 1895 that people gave to eighth graders. Oh, okay.

And I have looked at this test, and it is, it's tricky. Well, eighth grade at that time was, like, graduated. Yeah, like a wife and kids. You weren't far away from your midlife crisis Off to law school So I pulled some questions from it And I'll ask you guys and we'll see how we do Are you smarter than a

Eighth grade? 85? No. Probably not, no. Give the nine rules for the use of capital letters. Oh my God. Did you know there were nine? So is it like at the beginning of a sentence?

Proper nouns. Holy. Abbreviations. abbreviations. Uh-huh. There's three. Wow. Chemical symbols.

Did they have chemicals in those days? Oh my God. Yeah. So like proper nouns, names, if that's part of, oh, yeah. Wow, we're at like four. Yeah, no. All right, okay. Capitalize the first word in a sentence.

Capitalize the pronoun I and the interjection O. Like, they used to say O more. Oh. Yeah. Capitalize the first word in a quotation. Capitalize the first word in a direct question falling within a sentence. capitalize all nouns referring to the deity and to the Bible and other sacred books. Use a capital letter for president and presidency when these refer to the office of the president of the United States.

Yeah, use a capital letter for official titles. It capitalized proper nouns and adjectives formed from proper nouns. Capitalize every word except conjunctions, articles, and short prepositions in the titles of words or works of literature, music, arts, books, etc. There's a lot of them. We understand all of them. Yeah, they're all right. You're like, oh, yeah, that's true. Oh, yeah, sure, of course you do.

Yeah, it's capital I. District number 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month and have $104 for incidences? Pass. Pass. I'll read their answer. I was like, oh, this is how you do valuations on school districts.

Like what? These are things any eighth grader needs to know, Dana. Sorry. Levy. Yeah. The cost of seven months of school equals $50 times seven, which is $104, therefore $454,000, mill levy is therefore $454 minus $35,000, which equals a .013 levy or $1.30 per $100 valuation of the district.

Wow. Okay, last one. Who are the following? Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Pinn, and Howe. So first, Morse. Samuel Morse. Samuel Morse. Morse Code.

Yep. Inventor of the Telegraph. Eli Whitney. Cotton gin. Fulton. Fulton. Is it the steam engine? Yeah, kind of.

Robert Fulton, the mentor of the first successful steam-powered paddle-wheel boat. Okay. I'll accept. I'll accept. I'll accept your rancher, Chris. You accept mine. I accept Colin. I feel like partial credit.

it. Bell. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of texting. And the vine. Lincoln. Never heard of. No. Inventor of the Lincoln log.

Inventor of the stope pipe hat. Correct. Moving on. Oh, no. Oh. Too soon. How about Penn? William Penn?

Yeah. Inventment. No, no. Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. Yeah, but what was his claim to fame? Didn't he say the railroad? No, wait, like, founded the Pennsylvania colony? Yeah.

Oh, okay. Yes. Yeah, okay. The colony of Pennsylvania in 1682. How about how? H-O-W-E. Oh, that sounds for me. H-O-W.

Cordy Howe, obviously. Winning as hockey players of all time. Yeah. I don't know. Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine. Yes. Oh, okay. As in, how am I going to get these pieces of fabric to say together?

Yeah. All right. So we learned a little bit. That was pretty cool. We're getting closer to eighth grader from 1895. It's a long, long hard death march to that. During the budget for a school district. Throughout history, royals across the world were notorious for incest. They married their own relatives in order to consolidate power and keep their blood blew. But they were oblivious to the havoc all this inbreeding was having on the health

of their offspring. From Egyptian pharaohs marrying their own sisters to the Habsburg's notoriously oversized lower jaws. I explore the most shocking incestuous relationships and tragically inbred individuals in royal history. And that's just episode one. On the History Tea Time podcast, I profile remarkable queens and LGBTQ plus royals, explore royal family trees, and delve into women's medical history and other fascinating topics. I'm Lindsay Holiday, and I'm spilling the tea on history. Join me every Tuesday for new episodes of the History Tea Time podcast, wherever fine podcasts are enjoyed. So last year, the Times Higher Education World Reputation rankings released a list of what they said are the...

This is the best party schools? No, this is, this may be the opposite. These are the globally recognized super brands among universities. What I mean superbrose? These are the best combination of reputation and prestige and academic prowess. And probably, I'm sure some of it is just how famous they are. So, well, so here. So there were six universities that they included in this list.

Is this within America or worldwide? No, well, this is worldwide. However, I will give you the break. Most of them, four of them are in America. Okay, all right. So there are six universities here. Would you guys like to guess how many? I bet you guys can guess all.

I guess the other two. Okay, well, so let's start from the top. All right, Harvard. Harvard is on the list. Yale is not on the list. Stanford? Stanford is on the list. Berkeley.

Berkeley is on the list. Yeah, go bears. Oxford? Oxford. Oxford is on the list. Cambridge. Cambridge is on the list. MIT.

MIT. I was like, what are all the schools my parents used to... So what I thought was really interesting looking at this list of six was Stanford University, California Berkeley, MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard, and Oxford and Cambridge, was, what do you guys notice about those schools that stands out? They're all, like, they're all not nice to each other.

They're all rivals. I thought that was really neat, that they were three sets of just die-hard collegiate university rivals. Intense rivals. Intense rivals. Intense rivals. Yeah. Now, to be fair, Harvard does also have the Yale rivalry. And a lot of schools have more than one rivalry. Say within the same state. Yeah, yeah. And they're all, you know, regionally close to each other. And so in keeping with the theme of back to school, part of coming back to school for every school year is, you know, just firing up, especially the new freshman or the incoming students with like, these are our rivals. And you must hate them. You know, I've never even heard of this other school. It's really intense. Yeah, it's weird. It is intense. So I wanted to talk just a little bit about some of just the crazy. world of college rivalries and university rivalries.

And, you know, a lot of it for perhaps not surprising reasons, we're off around sports, especially in America, the big thing is football. There's no doubt that college football is just the rivalry comparison for any two big schools. It's hard to beat Oxford and Cambridge for length of competition since they've been rivals since the 1200s. Oxford and Cambridge, of course, you guys probably know, has their boat race every year,

which is a big deal. It's a big deal. down the River Thames. They've been doing this since 1829. Cambridge leads to the all-time series, 81 to 76. Oh, close. It's really close. There was only one dead heat, apparently, in 1877. Too close to call. It's called it in time. In America, it is all about football, college football. So I want to just very quickly go over some good trivia and names, because we do get these at pub quiz. We'll say what two schools compete every year for the blank trophy. Oh, right, yeah. These two schools, schools have the oldest, blah, blah, blah. So I think even if you're not a sports fan or a football

fan in general, these will be some interesting things just to kind of file away. The longest running college football rivalry in America, University of Michigan, and University of Notre Dame. Oh, yes. So that is the longest running rivalry. They've been playing since 1887. This year's game set a record for the highest attendance ever at a college football game. Wow. Wow. With 115,119. people. That's a lot of blue whale. That is a lot. If we convert that to our standard blue whale unit. The blue knit. Yeah. We were calling on blueies, but blue knit is much better. So University of Oregon and Oregon State University each year, their name for their game is the Civil War.

You know, they all have these trumped up names to really make it important. They fight for the platypus trophy, all right, which as it sounds like, it's a statue of a little platypus. Do you guys... Like taxidermy? This is so surreal. It's a Civil War. for a platypus in Oregon? It's carved. I mean, it's a, it's a statue. Well, because one school is the ducks.

Yes, go on. And the other school is. The beavers. Yes. Wait, is that true? That is why it is. Oh, my goodness. When they first commissioned a trophy

between the two schools, they're like, let's come up with something that represents both animals. So we're like, well, the platypus has the duck bill and the beaver body. Yeah, and that is what they fight for. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool.

That's really nerdy and awesome. Yeah. USC, the University of Southern California and Notre Dame, they fight each year for the jeweled Shalala trophy, which, as it sounds like, is a Shalala, a big club, and each year after the victory, they'll put a new jewel on, representing, representing. I thought you say every time after the short they hit someone with them. That is a horrible tradition. The captain of the winning team is beaten with the jeweled Shillalee. Question pronouncing Shalelae. Shaleli. Shaleli. Shalelenei. Shannet.

Shannet. Shaleli. Shalelel. The jeweled shallelie. Yeah. Yes. And each year they stud it with a new decoration. Wow. Yeah.

It's a blingy. Yeah. And it is an amazingly bedazzled chenny. Yeah. The deal with these things is that the winning school gets to keep it that year. For a year. Yeah. And you put it on display in your trophy case.

Stanford and Berkeley, Cal Berkeley, do you guys remember what we fight for? The Axe. It's the Stanford Axe, which is that one goes back to an old pep rally, basically, at Stanford in 1890, where they were using it to decapitate like a straw man representing the Cal students, the Berkeley

students. So, they take it so far, you guys. The Berkeley-Stanford when we went to those schools, like, it is crazy. They set things on fire. They would make piatas of people I don't know. Every time you say the name, you have to hiss.

You have to like, yeah. I still do that. SMU, Southern Methodist University and TCU, Texas Christian. They fight for the iron skillet. And it is an actual iron skillet. It's not some oversized, you know, golden. It's like a normal skillet. It's an iron skill.

That's awesome. Victory breakfast. Yeah. Victory bacon. Victory bacon. Well, so the TCU mascot is the Hornfrogs, all right? The Texas Christian Hornfrogs. Wait, what are they going to do?

with the skillet. Well, the story, the story goes back to a game in the 40s that an SMU fan, I guess, was, you know, before the game was frying up some frog's legs in the skillet, kind of like, we're going to get you. The University of Louisville and University of Cincinnati. This one might be my favorite, just because it's the most

absurd. It's an empty can of nair. The empty can of nair. They fight for the keg of nails. Oh, you're so close. No, really, really close. Is it really a keg of like? It's a replica. now. It's a replica

now. Because I couldn't get under like a real... They actually... Every year someone had to jump in the keg of nails. The captain of the losing team. That's where they keep the victory beer in the keg of nails. Once

upon a time, it was in fact a keg of nails. Symbolizing the players are tough as nails. So those are just some of the fun rivalry game names and trophy names that I came into doing my research. Almost time for the final bell for our school episode And I'm going to end it with a quiz About lots of movies have been made

About prep schools, about boarding schools So here I have a pretty varied Quiz, some questions about movies that take place Or is about boarding schools or prep schools So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a quick one-line summary and buzz in and tell me the full title of the movie. Okay. Okay.

Harry Potter and the Sorcercer's Zone. They're all Harry Potter. Yeah, it's about seven movies. They're varied. I hate all of them. All right. We know you, Karen. That's our show, everyone.

Okay, well, let's get this out of the way. Kenneth Branagh plays charming but useless professor Gilderoy Lockhart in this boarding school movie. Full title, please. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Correct.

Who is? Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. All right. This movie, set in the fictional Welton Academy, featured two very famous movie quotes, Oh, Captain, My Captain, and Carpe Diem. Chris? The Dead Poets Society?

Correct. Brendan Fraser plays a Jewish high schooler who hides his religion to fit in with his posh prep school friends. Was this school ties? It is school ties. Very young Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. This is not a wacky comedy movie.

No, this is serious drama. Yeah. School ties. This British film franchise is based on a cartoon that started in the 1940s about a chaotic and uncontrollable all-girls prep school. British listeners will definitely get this one. and Dana. Yes. St. Trinians.

Correct. St. Trinians. I like your, yeah, British listeners and Dana. After winning the Junior Goodwill Games as Team USA, a band of eccentric but athletic kids try to adjust to prep school life as the new junior varsity team. Dana. Full title, please. Is this Mighty Ducks 2? Incorrect.

Am I on the right track? Yes. it is D3 colon The Mighty Ducks Which is When this movie came out It was kind of weird

But I was like Didn't they just win like At the Team USA? Yeah They did And now they're in This JV team for a school All right

This coming of age movie starring Chris O'Donnell It's so good It makes you want to say Whoa Oh uh scent of a woman Yes scent of a woman

Very awesome Al Pacino And a very young Philip Seymour Hoffman He was also in that movie Although he still looked 50 Chronologically young And last one

Charles and Eric started an academy To help train special young kids To develop their extraordinary talents Colin's excited The X-Men universe Or is correct X-Men first class Yes

Okay okay good job everybody and that is our show all about school stuff thank you guys for joining me and thank you guys listeners for listening in hope you learn a lot oh man learn a lot about pencils about Oregon trail about teachers about freshman 15 a whole bunch of stuff and uh you can find us on iTunes on Stitcher on SoundCloud and also on our website good jobbrain.com and also join us on Facebook and Twitter, and thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Audible. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye.

If you like this podcast, can we recommend another one? It's called Big Picture Science. You can hear it wherever you get your podcast, and it's named, tells part of the story. The big picture questions and the most interesting research in science. Seth and I are the host. Seth is a scientist. I am Molly and I'm a science journalist and we talk to people smarter than us and we have fun along the way. The show is called Big Picture Science and as Seth said, you can hear it wherever you get your podcast.