Good Job, Brain! - 86: The Life Aquatic

Episode Date: November 13, 2013

Strap on your floaties because we're going out to sea. Marinate on these marvelous marine morsels of trivia: the history of the first ever submarine and its very silly name, what exactly made Disney's The Little Mermaid a complete hit and turning point for the studio, handy/horrible mnemonics for memorizing bodies of water, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Anchors aweigh in a nautical term quiz, and find out what happens to aquariums when abandoned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, enlightened, light-fast, light-hearted light bulbs. This is good job, brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. Today's show is episode 86. And of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your blog, Rock rockers who squawk and talk about socks and rocks. I'm Colin. I'm Dana.

And I'm Chris. We've covered socks and rocks, probably. Rocks definitely. Rocks definitely. Sox maybe not. All right. Put it down on the list. All right.

Sox. Let's jump into our first general trivia segment. Pop Quiz Hot Shot. All right, you guys have your Barnard buzzers ready. Indeed. And I picked a random card from the box, a random trivia pursuit card from the box. Here we go, Blue Wedge for geography. In the Lord of the Rings movies, what country stands in for Middle Earth?

Oh, Dana, the expert. New Zealand. Yes. Oh, I get it. I didn't understand the question. I didn't either. Me neither. I don't understand.

It's a poorly worded question. I thought it meant like it's a symbol of what kind of like Middle East is like England. Right. Pink Wedge for pop culture. Which of these was not an enemy of the Enterprise on Star Trek? Okay, was not an enemy. Okay. There's three choices.

All right. The salt vampire. Uh-huh. The Goa-Uld or Tribbles. Oh. Chris. The Goa-Wool. Yeah.

Okay. I'd heard of the salt vampire, as funny as that is. I didn't know if triples were their enemy. I guess they were an enemy. They're more of a nuisance than an enemy. Yeah. The Goa-Uld, and they are evil parasitic creatures in the Star Games. series. Oh, okay.

Trick. All right. Yellow Wedge. In 2000, what family values Republican married his third wife, a congressional aide, with whom he'd allegedly had an affair? Was that Newt Gingrich? Correct. Purple Wedge. What architect

designed the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and the Experience Music Project? Oh. Father of modern architecture. That is Frank Gehry. Correct. Lots of shiny, squiggly thing.

Yes. If you think of architecture, it's shiny and it's squiggly, it's probably going to be frank. The Walt Disney Concert Hall was pretty shiny and squiggly, for sure, yeah. Story checks out. All right. Greenwich for science, giant pandas, Hua May, and Mae Sheng were born at what zoo? College. Is that the National Zoo in Washington?

Incorrect. I think that's Taishen and some of us. Another big zoo. San Diego? Correct. All right. Right. Last question.

Orange Wedge. What culinary school dropout made the 2008 Forbes list of top celebrity chefs? 2008. 2008. Oh, I actually didn't buzz. I don't think. I'm happy to guess. Anthony Bourdain?

Incorrect. Gordon Ramsey. Incorrect. 2008. Emerald Lagasseh. Incorrect. It's funny that it's Orange Wedge. It is Mario Battali.

Who wears orange clocks All right, good job, Brains So in previous episodes We've taken you underground We've taken you up in the air And we've touched upon some stuff But we never did a whole episode Dedicated to Water

Really? So you talked about it a lot I mean Chris you talked about the mechanics of drowning Oh yeah You talked about how mermaids Or how I thought mermaids would mate But never dedicated a whole episode to it So this week, we're going to talk about the Life Aquatic.

Somewhere beyond the sea, somewhere waiting for me, my lover stands on golden sands and watches the ships that go save. All right, well, you guys can smell the salt in the air. I have a nautical quiz I've put together for you here So as you guys know We get these in public quiz These nautical terms

And this is one of those realms I think where we all think we know What these terms are But you press a little bit And then I don't know At least speaking for myself Right Well let's probe here

Let's see, let's see Let us probe Let's talk about the parts of a ship So I mean you guys know What the front and the back Part of a ship are called I think so fore and aft.

It's true in terms of direction. I'm talking about the bow and the stern. So the bow is the front of the ship, and the stern is the back of the ship. I did not know that. The bow is the front. Yes. Maybe because it's arched like a bow. Maybe you can remember that way, like the bow, the bow.

Generally. Stern like ass. Yeah, it's like a stern butt, an angry. Not just going to like that. Yeah, the SS angry butt. Good first pass at these nemont. Yeah. Maronairn.

We're already off the rails. But if you ever heard the expression from stem to stern? You ever heard that before? No, yes. Talk about something in its entirety, from stem to stern. And that's a nautical expression. And so what's the stem? So the stem is the very, very front part of the bow, kind of the curved part.

Like, you especially see it on like old wooden ships. There's that one sort of beam that kind of curves up around the front. Is that where the naked lady sometimes he's at? She would be attached in that vicinity, yes. You know those pirate ships has those naked ladies. Right. So the stem, the very front part, all the way to the back, the stern. So the whole ship, stem to stern.

Okay. All right. Yeah. So good. We got that down. Do you guys, you guys might know, uh, what are the terms for left and right? When you're aboard a ship, when you're aboard and starboard. Yeah.

Port and starboard. Yeah. What's what? Well, I didn't tell us there, Chris and Dan. Which is which, which is which is which. Port is left and starboard is right. That's correct. Okay.

Port is left. And you can just remember the way I always remember, port is just four letters. left four letters. Do you know why Starbird? Do you know where we get the word? It's Starboard. It is a fun word. Starbird.

Starburst. Okay. Port and Starburst. Starburst. It sounds like a kind of a lowbrow mixed with highbrow dessert. Like some port and a starburst. Do you know where that comes from? I do not.

Looking at the stars. I think I always thought it was something, yeah, like navigating by the stars. I mean, so port is pretty straightforward. That's the side on which the ship affixes to port. The port, you know, it's on the left side of the ship. Why? It's just always like that. Well, it's funny.

It's connected to starboard. So the word actually comes from an old English word stairboard, S-T-E-O-R, meaning steering. The same route is steering. This is the steering side of the ship. Okay. In older ships, the rudder would be just off the right side of the ship. It wasn't directly in line with the back of the boat. And the person would just steer the rudder, you know, and since most people were right-handed, they would stick the rudder, the theory goes.

The rudder was on the right side of the ship. So since the rudder's out there, you almost by necessity have to pull into port on the left side of the ship. So you can't damage the steering mechanism. Wow. Okay. You know, up until, well until the 1800s, then they would use the term larboard for port for the left side. So starboard and larboard. Okay.

And you can ask a cop-show. That's a cop-show. That can get a little confusing, especially if you're in, you know, the heat of battle or something like that. Oh, sure. Yeah, so eventually the Royal Navy, the British Royal Navy adopted Port and Starbird is, and those sort of became the de facto. Because you yell, you're like, all you hear is our board. Yeah, which way am I turning? It's natural selection, really.

What unit of measure do we use to measure how fast a ship is going? Where's my buzzer? Go ahead, buzzer. Karen. Not. Yes. It is a knot. K-N-O-T and so here's a little tip just to note it's not knots per hour if you say a ship is traveling

30 knots per hour that's that's incorrect a knot is a unit of measurement it already has time in it distance distance in time right right a knot is one nautical mile per hour so a ship traveling 30 knots is traveling 30 nautical miles per hour got it and a nautical miles yeah what is a nautical it's a little bit longer than a standard mile um why um because old times That was not just short for nautical mile. No. So this is where it's knots. This is one of those great, great direct from its original use meaning words.

So in the old days before they had speedometers and GPS and fancy ways of tracking speed of ship, they would have what was called a chip log. And what a chip log originally was an actual log, but more commonly it was a board, it was a wooden board that you would tie a rope to, you would toss the log or the board overboard. has a rope attached to it and tied into the rope at regular intervals are knots. And as the ship is moving, the log or the board stays relatively stationary. It kind of catches the water. And then the operators, you kind of catch, you count how many knots are running out through your hands over a given span of time.

So you got one guy's, you know, he's like, go and counts off 30 seconds. And you're like, okay, 20 knots. I counted out 20 knots, you know, in this time here. Right. All right. last one here. What is the meaning of the phrase, anchors away? If I say to you, anchors away, what does that kind of note? Well, I know it's not A-W-A-Y. Right? Because that's what most people think is, like, throw your anchors away. A-W-E-I-G-A. That's right. And it's like we're leaving

now. Like we're pulling up the anchors and taking off. It's really connected to pulling up the anchors. When you say the anchors away, what that specific meaning is is the anchor is hanging on the line, on the chain. It's not connected to the bottom of the seabed or the floor bed. It's not fully back on the ship yet. And it kind of makes sense because it's sort of before you get going, you have to weigh anchor, pull them up, right, yeah. So weigh anchor is pulling it up, drop anchor, is dropping it to the bottom.

Yep, yep. You guys know that classic, classic anchor shape, you know, traditional shape. It's got the sort of the crossbar and the main stem and then the two curved hook parts on the bottom. Those are called flukes. This classic, classic anchor shape is called the Admiralty pattern. Oh. And I learned in the course of doing some research, there are many, many, many different patterns and shapes and styles of anchors.

Okay. And this just classic, classic one dates back. Yeah, just really just visually has become sort of the, the shorthand for anchor. Admiral letter T or like the state of Admiral. Yeah, like Admiralty, right. Oh, Admiralty. Admiralty. Oh, like Mr. T.

Yeah, yeah, not like Model T. Not like Mr. T joined the Navy. And now commands a whole fleet of ships. All right. Well, hopefully that leaves us a little better prepared for our next nautical quiz. So you know the book, 10,000 leagues under the sea? Yes. When they say 10,000 leagues under the sea, the league is a unit of measurement.

Right. Most people assume that means we started at sea level and then went down for 10,000 leagues. And this is what we found 10,000 leagues. It's not that. It's not that. No, it's we went under the sea and then we traveled for 10,000. thousand leagues horizontally while we were underneath the sea because can you go that deep into the ocean you cannot you would die yeah so it really should be 10,000 leagues

comma while we were under while under the sea yeah yeah yeah so when you find the book in your local library remember to write a comma right out of sharp yeah comma and just tell them you're doing them a favor as they drag you away I also have more things to put in our trivia ammo prepping for pub trivia we got a lot of geography questions and definitely bodies of water show up so I'm going to share

with all of you guys some mnemonics I myself made up I won't say that they're super good but it's just how I remember it so you can use it or not or you can be like that's horrible but you know what it helps me remember some these are free mnemonics people stop pointing

where else do you have free mnemonics. Yeah. Three mnemonics. Get your free mnemonics. All right. So the first one are the longest rivers. Okay.

The three longest rivers. How I remember is, nay, these rivers are the longest. N-A-Y, Nile, Amazon. Y-S-E-S-E-S-E. Yes. Okay. I believe these are the longest rivers. Ney.

These rivers are the longest. These rivers are the longest. That's in order from longest to Niles the longest. Niles, the longest. Top three. Top three. I agree. Great. Okay, which, we've talked about this before.

Which ocean is the saltiest? Oh, that's right. You did talk about it's because one, some of the, it evaporates, the Pacific. Dana's right. It's Atlantic. And this is not a very good naponic, but hey, it helps you remember. I remember it by Salty Alti Altie. Oh, okay. That's good.

Atlantic, almost. Yeah, almost. But Salty Altie Altie. Salty Alt. It's kind of like a nickname. Salti Altie. All right. One of the things I have the most trouble with is identifying which one's Black Sea and which one's Red Sea.

So the Black Sea is located above the country Turkey. And I was like, oh, okay, well, Turkey's bodies are mostly black. Oh, really? That is the Black Sea. Oh, yeah. And Red Sea is where Somalia and the Gulf of Aden is where all the Somalian pirates are. So that's the Red Sea because there's violence there. Oh, geez.

A little dark. A little dark. But black sea, turkeys, yeah. This showed up on Pudtrivia a couple times. It is the body of water that's north of the French and Spanish coast. It's called the Bay of Biscay. And I remember as the Bay of Biscuits. Yeah.

French cookies, biscuits, I don't know. And the largest sea. Do you guys know what the largest sea is? The largest sea. The largest sea. Caribbean? Caribbean is number two, I believe. Largest C is South China C.

Really? Yes. And largest C, S-E-A, think of it as a letter C, a big C, China, South China C. So then here's the top four largest lakes in the world. Okay. And this is how I remember it. Some very huge mill ponds. Some very huge mill ponds like a little pond by the other.

Superior. Superior, Vancouver, is that a place? It's the largest in Africa. Oh, Victoria. Oh, Victoria. Oh, Victoria. H. Huron?

Correct. Oh. And the last one. Michigan? Lake Michigan. Okay. So it's some very huge mill ponds. Superior, Victoria, Huron, and Michigan.

So Victoria is the largest lake in Africa. Michigan is the largest lake within one country. Oh. All of it is in one country. Like Superior in Huron that borders with Canada. Yeah. But Michigan is entirely. in one country.

So that's something interesting, I remember. So there you go. There are some mnemonics. You have salty alti. You have nay. That's good. The rumors are the longest. Black turkeys and red pirates.

Maybe that's the weakest of all the way. Biscuits, not that great either. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, pay of biscuits is also competing. And some very huge millpons, large slakes. Some very huge milpons. Some very huge millpons. How do you spell Biscane?

Is it B-I-S-C-A-Y-N-E? B-S-C-A-A. A. Y. Biscay. Oh, Biscay. Yeah. It's almost, it sounds French and Spanish. Yeah.

Biscay. Like, oh, but like as they say it in French. Yeah. You want a Biscay? I don't speak French, by the way. I'm just a talented word guesser. I'm a talented word guesser. I would say is my greatest strength.

Put that on your press. Put that on my LinkedIn. Maim, I just wanted to know if you wanted fries with that. I don't want to be in the French freeze. I didn't say I was accurate. I just said I'm good at guessing. Yeah, I can generate a lot of guesses. I really can't.

So I found out something interesting about our oceans. There's a thing called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, aka the Pacific Trash Vortex. What? Trash vortex. This is where the garbage pale kids come from? From the Trash Gorphic. There's a massive area in the Pacific. And the reason why I'm being vague about and saying massive is because we're not really sure how big it is exactly.

It is a massive collection of the world's garbage floating around in the ocean. Okay. Infused throughout the water in this area. They're all kind of clusters. There's this thing called the North Pacific Subtropical Geyer, which is basically the ocean current swirling where they kind of converge. It swirls around. And plastic, a lot of plastic. ends up over there.

And so anything that ends up in the ocean at some point, the currents just sort of carry it to one centralized. Yeah. It gets to there and it just swirls around and it just hangs out. The water over there is full of plastic pieces because plastic, a lot of plastic doesn't biodegrade. It won't reg down into smaller compounds. It just gets smaller.

So it's photo degrading. This becomes like confetti in the water, the whole water. You can't actually see this garbage patch from satellite because it's just the whole water is full of plastic pieces. They call them nerdles or mermaid tears. Oh, sad. We've had a nerdle

on this show as like a little bit of something, right? Like that's what it is. Like you put a nerdle of toothpaste on your toothbrush, right? Yes, but they call them also in mermaid tears. And I watched this documentary where people went diving in there and they came out and they were covered and it looked like glitter, but

it was all just little pieces of plastic all over their body. So it's like a swirling column of trash? Yes, confetti trash The graded plastic Voto degraded nerds Yeah, mermaid tears Like roughly how big

Like across are we talking Like is this So I've seen things that were like It's as big as Texas It's twice as big as Texas It's you know like It's really hard to measure How big it is

Because you can't see where the borders are It's just Okay, all right But it's not like It's like all of this water Is garbage water Like things Very few things can live here

I think I was picturing something like the size of a backyard swimming pool or something, but not the size of a state. That is... That's so sad. The mermaids cried there. Well, I have a happier story about mermaids. I figured if we were going under the sea, we should certainly talk about... Wink, Wink. The Little Mermaid, the famous 1989.

Disney film, The Little Mermaid. So originally it was a fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson. Yes, writer of such other fairy tales as Thumbolina. You wrote it in 1837. It's been a little recap. So it's actually pretty close. She is a mermaid princess. She has a bunch of sisters.

She does surface above the water and she sees a prince and the prince gets into a shipwreck and she rescues him and she gets him back to shore and she goes back to the sea and she meets up with the sea witch who trades her her voice, her beautiful singing voice. for a pair of legs. Now it starts splitting off a little bit because it's a little bit more at stake. So in the Hans Christian Anderson story, walking on her legs feels like walking on broken glass,

he describes it as. And the prince loves to see her dance. And so she dances for that even though it hurts even worse than walking. He just likes the look on her face, really. That's so messed up. Curse basically is still the same. She does not get a, if she doesn't get a kiss from the prince, she doesn't get her voice back, et cetera.

But also, if he marries another woman, she will die. Mm. Whoa. So, guess what? Prince marries another woman. And her sisters show up with a magical knife that they got from the Sea Witch, and they said, it's all good. Take this knife and murder him in his sleep before the next day dawns, and you won't die.

Oh. So she's like, yeah, sounds good. So she takes the knife in, and she has to kill the prince. and his wife, but she backs out and decides she can't do it. And she throws herself into the sea as dawn breaks and she turns into sea foam and dies. And the end of the story is she gets to go to heaven. So do you guys know in what decade the Walt Disney company first started working on the Little Mermaid? Just by the way you asked that.

I know it's going to be old. 1970. Earlier. Whoa. 50s. Earlier. Was Disney himself still alive? It was the end of the 19th century.

30s, right after they finished Snow White, they started shopping The Little Mermaid and other Hans Christian Anderson's stories. And they did concept artwork and stuff, and then it just sort of, they didn't really do it and they just worked on other stuff instead. But they had batted around

Little Mermaid. End of the 30s. I'm going to see the 1930s. Into the early 40s. Wow, yeah. 50 years in the making, well, kind of. When they started up in the 1980s, they picked up the idea again.

The people working at Disney at that time didn't know that Disney had, like, done some preliminary work in the 30s, but they found it in the archives. There was a Disney illustrator named Kay Nielsen, whose work had been used for the, for the Ave Maria and the Night on Bald Mountain sections of Fantasia, really striking visual work. You seem to know something about Kay Nielsen. His stuff is beautiful.

I have a ton of his books. I didn't know that he worked on the Little Mermaid. Yeah, so he had done some concept art for Little Mermaid, and this was inspirational to the 80s crew, and he actually got a posthumous crest. credit in The Little Mermaid for visual development artist. There is, and I was really interested to find this out because I know this movie, there is another 1980s mermaid movie whose existence had an impact on how the Little Mermaid shook out. Oh, it is Splash.

Starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah. That was also formative. Eugene Levy and John Candy. Do you know what's interesting about that movie, like what famous first splash is? famous. Was that, oh, was that the first Ron Howard directed film? It wasn't the first Ron Howard directed film. It was the first film released by

Touchstone Pictures, which was Disney's brand. Disney nearly did not make The Little Mermaid because they had a big hit with Splash and they felt it was maybe too similar. And so that's why it kind of got put off in the

early 80s, but then by the late 80s they were ready to come back to it. Anyway, Ariel from the Little Mermaid was made a Redhead, so she would not look too much like blonde, long hair to Darryl. Madison. They looked at the astronaut Sally Ride's hair in space as a way of figuring out

how to draw her hair under water. Oh, I thought they modeled her after Sally Ride. They modeled after Sally Ride. No, they did model her after Alyssa Milano. At the time was the child actress on Who's the boss? Yeah, they drew her like Alyssa Milano. What Disney ended up

doing, the pivotal decision that they made is they hired Howard Ashman, was a playwright and lyricist who came along with his, you know, working partner, Alan Mencken, the musician. Now, do you know what these two guys did right before Little Mermaid, what they worked on together? They were on a Broadway musical, right? Oh, man. It was a 1980s. It was a Broadway musical that had a very successful film version in the middle of the 80s. That Ashman and Mankin worked on.

Oh, newsies! It's not newsies. That was later, and that was not a success. No, it was a little shop of horrors. Ashman and Mencken were a little shop of horrors. And so they bring in Howard Ashman, and he didn't just, like, write the lyrics to the songs. Like, he came in as like a sort of, he was a producer on Little Mermaid, and came in and was like, let's structure this movie like a Broadway musical. That was the creative reboot for them.

It was like, let's structure this like a Broadway musical and like, you know, have the songs be the sort of major. the story needs, you know, yep, yep, yep. So here's some other bits of trivia that explain, you know, more elements of how did they get it turned around. Well, there's something else that I can definitely mention, which is. So the woman who was the speaking and singing voice of Ariel was an actor's named Jody Benson. Yes. Yeah. And she, and I mean, obviously she was fantastic, but there is actually somebody else that we can credit for bringing Ariel to life.

Her name is Sherry Lynn Stoner. She was a member of the Groundlings, the improv comedy group in L.A., which also included Paul Rubens, Sherry O'Terry, Pat Marita, Mr. Miyagi, was in the groundlings. Really? Really? Yeah. Disney, with The Little Mermaid, went back to something that they used to do back when they did movies like Snow White. They shot live action reference footage.

So basically, they'd take actors and bring them in and have them act out all the scenes. And so Sherry Lynn Stoner was the actress that did Ariel. But if you go back and you look at this footage, which is on, I think, the more recent, like, Blu-ray that they did, she is improvving all the mannerisms of Ariel that made it into the movie when Ariel blows her hair out of her eyes all of her really quirky physical mannerisms is it's all being acted out by Sherry Stoner's actress

so like that's why that character is so kind of human yeah and one final thing the Little Mermaid was the first of the Disney movies to use Pixar technology There was one scene at the very end of Little Mermaid When they sail off together, Ariel and the Prince, there's a transparent rainbow. Yeah.

That is done with computers. But you might have been thinking, Karen, is that Beauty and the Beast actually used a computer rendered... I thought it was... I thought the first one was Aladdin with the magic carpet. Oh, no. I thought that was the first time, like, a computer animated thing showed on screen.

No, Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom. The ballroom when they're dancing, that ballroom is... CG, the whole thing. The animation and the perspective is just perfect when they're, yeah. You think of mermaids poop, it would be like fish poop, like it's like a string. It would have to be, yeah. Like shrimp veins.

It's so gross. Ariel looks different. Right, right, right. All right, let's take a quick ad break. A word from our sponsor. Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you? no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus,

IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget. After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. 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. First Five Orders. Shop now at no-frails.ca. And we're back. You're listening to Good Job Brain,

and this week we're talking about things under the sea or ocean or water in general. So I'm not a big, in general, a really big naval history guy or military buff, but I've always, always been fascinated by submarines. It fascinates me because it's this self-contained world. I think it's why I was always interested in spaceships, too. I feel like submarines are more like spaceships. ships than, you know, regularly. Okay, okay, sure, sure, because you can't just get out.

Yeah, you can't just, you can't just get out. You've got to be the self-contained world. Just surrounded by danger. Yeah, I mean, and just all the crazy engineering challenges that you have to solve to have a viable submarine. I mean, it's water pressure and people have to be able to breathe and it can't, you know, it's got to be able to steer around under water. I don't know.

We were lucky enough to have a friend who worked aboard the Pampanito, which is the World War II era submarine that they have docked here in San Francisco and Fisherman's Wharf. The first thing that struck me is just, it is so claustrophobic in there. It is so tight in there. And, I mean, granted, this is World War II era. They're a little bit bigger and more spacious now, but a submarine is not a spacious place. It is, you really need to be comfortable in close quarters, not just contained in, but packed in with other people. So suspicions confirmed.

I mean, they have, you know, they call, do you guys know what a hot bunk is? Have you heard that term before? It sounds like a mean thing you do to your little brother or sister. I got a hot bunk to sleepaway camp. A hot box. No, a hot bunk is like on submarines. The space is so tight that the crew works and shifts and they don't have beds that are empty. They don't have room on a sub.

So when they change shifts, that's when you go to sleep. And so when I'm going to bed, there's some other guy who's just gotten up before me because he's on shift now and I'm coming off shift. So I get in the bunk. It's already warm. It's hot. It's a hot bunk. It doesn't. settling. It's like when you sit in a

toilet seat and it's warm. It's like, this is nice, but at the same time, it's like, I know where this came from. Yeah. Yeah. The history of subs, it's interesting because you have to start talking about the difference between submersibles and submarines. You know, so there are a lot of things in history that are sort of like diving

bells, glorified diving bells, basically, where it's, you can sort of get below the surface of the water and look around and you have a limited amount of air, but you can't drive it around. It's not really self-sufficient. It can't last anyway, kind of like a bell or a bowl almost, that you would get a person inside in there and you lower it very carefully below the water, and it maintains a pocket of air.

Or lower it not carefully at all, if you like them. You know, there's sort of some criteria that make a true submarine. Like, it's basically... You have to stay alive, but you're in it. That's, you know what? I mean, it's funny to say that, but that's number one. Part of it is it needs to have some degree of self-sufficiency in terms of... I'll send you down as far as you want under the other...

Some degree of self-sufficiency, some amount of oxygen, some, some way of controlling buoyancy is really important, that you can control how far below the water you go, and whether it's weights or pumped air, pumped water, and then the ability to navigate underwater. Like, these are sort of the hallmarks of a real sub. I mean, this is not going to surprise you that military goals really push along sub-development. That's like, oh, wait, we can use this in warfare. We can use this to battle. And it was the American Revolutionary War, where the first modern, workable submarine.

Wait, really? Yeah. 1776. 1776. It was used in the war? It was used in the war effort. And this is amazing. Yes, it is the turtle.

Nicknamed the turtle. It's not very heroic. Well, you know, I mean, it was more descriptive. It was actually, they say, I mean, it looked more like a clam than a turtle. But it was sort of named after it's after what it looked like. It was tiny, first of all, it was made to hold one person. And it was like two, two wooden kind of clam shell halves fused together. It was constructed, you know, not unlike a barrel.

I mean, it was staves of wood. Lots of tar, steel bands, hold it together, make it watertight. Now, was this used by the British against the rebellious colonies? No, this was used by the good guys. This was used by the... We draw a line in the sand. I guess so. We don't take a lot of sides here, college.

No, it was invented by a guy named David Bushnell, who was a freshman at Yale when he started developing this. It really kind of puts me to shame. I was thinking what I was doing my freshman year at college. I was not developing submarines, that's for sure. He made a barrel. He was working on two things sort of simultaneously. He was working on underwater explosives, and then he also developed the turtle, and they got General George Washington to agree to use the turtle in an actual battle.

So now, again, like, when I say submarine, you might be thinking of like hunt for Red October, all right? Now, this thing was, it was like 10 feet by six feet by three feet. Like, it was one person, it was all hand crank powered, like the propulsion, the valves, the pumps, everything was hand-powered. It only had enough oxygen in there for about 30 minutes underwater. So, yeah, this is, you know, it was an early era. But nobody was expecting it. That's right.

Nobody was looking for the turtle. As you can imagine, like we talked about, you got to be able to breathe, right? You got to be able to drive the thing. It was hand-powered. What's the other thing you need to be able to do when you're in a dark vessel underneath the water? See? You need to be able to see.

Yes. All right. So they didn't have electric lamps down there that you can't be burning candles, obviously, because it's going to burn up your oxygen. Yep. They used foxfire. Do you know what this is? This is bioluminescent fungus.

Yes. From the forest and stuff. This was the sorts of lighting and the turtle, the submarine. They had a chunk of cork, basically, that was covered with foxfire. And that was what lit the inside of the turtle was this greenish, this greenish, this greenish-bluest bioluminescent fungus. Now I love it. This is awesome.

It's like a game of thrones thing. It's like it's like made by a badger. That's good. But yeah, you can imagine this in a movie or like in biology. Yeah, it is very. Mr. Toad's wild ride. That's his submarine. Yeah, exactly.

Really just kind of creepy light. So by 1776, George Washington was like, yep, we're ready to use this. So they were using it in defense of New York Harbor. And the plan was to send it to a. attack the HMS Eagle, and so they towed it in as close as they could get it. Like, it wasn't fast. Like, I remember his handcrank operating. Yeah, it went like three miles an hour. There's only 30 minutes of air. 30 minutes of air. So they would tow it out and then get as close as they could before it would submerge and go, you know, sneak up and attack. So I mentioned

that David Bushnell was working on underwater explosives, right? So the plan was the turtle was go underwater, sneak up to the ships, attach a time bomb, essentially. It's like a barnacle. Yeah, yeah. Secret barnacle. Like with an elaborate clockwork mechanism that could continue to work underwater with Bushnell's water safe explosives. And then it would like swim away. Right. As far away as it could.

And then it would blow up. Yeah. So it was sent to attack the HMS Eagle, volunteer from the Army. He made a couple attempts to attach it. He just, he was not successful. And it's a little unclear why. He just, he couldn't get it stuck onto the hall. He may have encountered like iron plates.

So he had to flee. And as he was fleeing, you know, he reported that he was. spotted. So he kind of, he detached the explosive and just kind of just flat away. And he's thinking was like, oh, maybe they'll take the explosive in and it'll blow up on board the ship. It didn't. It exploded in the harbor. Apparently it was quite

spectacular by all accounts. Oh, so it works. It didn't take the ship down. So it was technically an unsuccessful attack. Yes, the explosion did go off. They did run the turtle on at least another mission or two. It never did succeed in sinking a ship directly.

Wow. So, yeah, I encourage you to go look up pictures of the turtle. The first sort of modern submarine. It does. It looks like an acorn. It's like an underwater acorn. It does. Yeah, that's a really good description. It does look like an acorn. Wow. Neat idea. So for this episode, I wanted to explore aquariums. Like, you know, we have like a fish tanks and stuff like that. And it kind of took me to a very strange world. So I want to tell you guys a story. Half of it is hypothetical. Half of it is based on true events. And so this is kind of based on a TV show segment I watched from a TV show called Life After People, which used to be on the history channel.

I don't think it's, I mean, I guess now it's on the internet. Fantastic show, basically the premise of the show is what happens when all of a sudden, just all of a sudden, every human person just disappears. What will happen to our world, the world that we would leave behind? One of the things that they talked about in the show is what will happen to aquariums if humans are not involved in maintaining it and what will happen to all those animals and to the whole facility and the whole system. As we know, like in a lot of the big aquariums or research institutes, it's very heavily monitored by humans, right? So I'm just going to run you through hypothetical situation. This is what will probably happen. And it's a little bit dark, but stay with me.

Okay. So, first of all, no humans means probably the first thing to go is electricity. So no electricity. Most aquariums will have an emergency generator that will last a week. No electricity means that the pipes in the system will stop piping in oxygen, will probably stop removing the waste. And basically, all of your water will be filled with ammonium, which is from fish poo. And fish pee. And so the fish in the water, ammonium poison water, will start taking in ammonium and they'll die because it's poisonous to their bodies. The next thing is, the temperature

is going to rise up because there's no AC. There's no one controlling the actual air that's in the facility. So it's going to get really, really hot. And then the water is going to get really, really hot and you have more fish dying. And even though I'm describing a hypothetical situation, this segment on the on the show, Life After People, is kind of based on what actually happened to an aquarium in America. This is when Hurricane Katrina attacked. This is what happened to the Audubon Aquarium of Americas in New Orleans. Massive, massive storm that happened in the States eight years ago, right?

Eight years ago. And what happened was people. People were being evacuated. Actually, some heroes, I would call them heroes, who worked at the aquarium, stayed, stayed inside the aquarium. And they actually had a lot of police officers who kind of set up camp and helped feed the animals, help maintain the animals during this horrific storm. At one point, they all had to evacuate. They all had to evacuate. So the aquarium was left for four days with no human involvement.

The staff came back after four days. And there was still no electricity. And the first thing they said when they walked in was it smelled like dead fish. It was dark. Only four days, the surface of the water was already covered with dead fish, dead animals, from little fish to like sharks. And the temperature of the water was warm. And water was so cloudy. They had flashlights.

The flashlight could only penetrate like an inch. Oh, my God. Just a four days. animals did survive this and they're all animals who breathed air who would come up to the surface so there's the the tarpin which is a fish that would come up in the surface and gulp air and then go back in the water so a lot of the birds a lot of otters penguins alligators they all survived and they actually were airlifted to other aquariums as a safe house or other facilities throughout the nation so they're airlifted and help these animals and it's kind of

Oh, that's once they got back in there. Yeah. And it's kind of sad because a lot of the animals that died were either really rare species or, I mean, it's a conservation center. It's very heartbreaking. Another hypothetical situation, if this happened for a whole year. Yeah. This is only four days. If this happened for a year, only one animal would survive.

And that would be the alligator. Really? Yeah, because the alligator can reduce its heart rate. Yeah. It reduces its metabolism to one. to two beats per minutes. Wow. Wow. That is amazing. Yeah, but I mean

after a year, like that eventually. Yeah. That's a long time without food. Dang. It's a crazy alligator. So yeah. On the happier note, the aquarium had to restock a lot of the animals and a lot of other aquariums in the nation donated.

So like the Tennessee Aquarium, Chattanooga donated catfish, like shark pubs. I'm imagining like a big barrel, you know, Like, animal life drive, like to throw some otters in. Oh, I've got some spare catfish. We'll put them in the barrel. Four days.

Just four days. Long-bendy Twizzlers candy keeps the fun going. Keep the fun going. One more quiz segment, Dana, are you graced us with a la quiz, lequeze? As they say it. As I guess they say. In French, right?

All right. So this is just a random grab bag of sea and sea-related trivia. Get your buzzers ready. Yeah. So we'll kick it off with our good old friend SpongeBob Square Pants. Yeah, man. He lives under the sea. Where under the sea does he make his home?

What a toll? I believe it's bikini bottom. Yes, the bikini atoll, and he's at the bottom of the bikini. It's the bikini bottom, yes. All right, so the bikini... That's edgy. Yeah. That's kind of edgy for a kids show.

It's funny. The bikini atoll is part of what island group? God, we talked about this, too. Oh, yeah, we have. Yeah. Because it was where they, they nuked. They did some nuclear testing. Yeah, that's right.

It was part of, like, it was only part of France. Yeah. No, no, what's the island group? Island group. I can't retrieve it. It's the Marshall Island. Yes, yes. Yes.

So SpongeBob's best friend is the starfish? What's the average lifespan of starfish? Is it one year, five year, 35 years or 50 years? Chris? 50 years. No. Dang. It is 35 years.

That's still pretty long. Yeah. In Lewis Carroll's poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter, the Walrus and the Carpenter, What type of sea life to walk along the beach with them. Everybody. Oysters. Pointers. Bonus.

Who recited the poem to Alice and through the looking glass? Karen? The caterpillar. No. Was it the mock turtle? Nope. The dodo bird? No, it was Tweedledy and Tweedledo.

Oh, yes. That's right. Oh, geez. Whoa. Whoa. Yeah. No, I moved my barnyard buzzer. So, since.

Was the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song written by Disney or not Disney? Oh, Karen. Oh, the original Yoho, Yoho, written by Disney. Yes. Yeah. It was written for the ride, but it was based on a shanty

by Robert Louis Stevenson. Oh, isn't he a writer? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Treasure, not treasure planet. Treasure Island. Planet Island, it's all the same thing. Yes. What three-word idiom is used as a euphemism

for the bottom of the ocean? Is that Davy Jones Locker? Yes. Oh, that's what it means? Not just the squid guy's treasure? No, that's right. Send you down to Davy Jones Locker. You don't want to go there.

That makes so much more sense now. St. Elmo's Fire was named for St. Erasmus, the patron saint of sailors. Okay. What is St. Elmo's Fire? Isn't it natural occurrence? Isn't it related to, it's like some sort of off-gassing or something, right? Right, that produced bile luminescent. Oh, really?

It's a weather phenomenon. So the technical way you would say is it's a weather phenomenon in which luminous plasma is created by coronal discharge from a sharp or pointed object in a strong electrical field in the atmosphere. Basically, it looks like there's a glowing ball of light around like a lightning rod or a ship's mast or something like that. So sailors would be out in a thunderstorm and the top of their masts would have this big ball of light. Oh, huh. They would be like, oh, it's St. Elmo's fire. He's blessing us. What is Baleen?

Baylene. I know you've heard this word before. It has to do with whales. The Bailene. Yeah, Baleen whales. Yeah. Is it the filter that the whales used to filter out? It's the filter.

Yes. Good job. Yeah. The brushy thing. The brushy stuff. Like the car wash. Yes. Good job.

Whales got car wash mouth? Yeah. This is a highly technical term. All right. Last question. This is kind of funny. According to 10,000 boat names.com, as of today, they actually had 26,000 boat names. What is the most popular cellboat name? And I'll give you a hint. It's a pun. It's a pun. I hope it's not like breaking wind or something. No, but that would be fine. Life's a breeze. Oh, that's good. That's good. It's not bad. What is it? Second wind. So Second Wind is the most popular sailboat name. Wow. That's kind of cheesy.

Yeah. Well, awesome. And that's our underwater show. We didn't tape it underwater. That's really weird. In our homemade. That would be cool. Have you seen them been making a hotel that's underwater and your room is like in a tube, a glass tube?

I will freak out. No, thank you. I was like, that sounds amazing. I would stay there. I think that sounds cool. I would check it out. Instagram some stuff and then go up on the surface. Okay, here's your room.

You have 30 minutes of oxygen and good night. We call it the turtle. I'm sorry, where's the light switch? Oh, here's your foxfire. Yeah, I know. Good night. Complementary. Complementary fox fart.

Double tree gives me cookies. Well, thank you guys for joining me and thank you guys listeners for listening in. Hope you learn a lot about turtle, submarines, little mermaid, baleen, mnemonics, and you can find us on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, and also on our website, goodjobbrain.com, and check out our sponsor at audiblepodcast.com slash good job, and we'll see you guys next week. Bye. And Jenny from Ancient History Fan Girl, and we're here to tell you about Jenny's scorching historical

Romantasy based on Alaric of the Bissigoths, enemy of my dreams. Amanda Boucher, best-selling author of The Kingmaker Chronicle, says, quote, this book has everything, high stakes action, grit, ferocity, and 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.