Ologies with Alie Ward - MINISODE: Aestaology (SUMMER) should be a word

Episode Date: June 26, 2018

Melons. Fire. Waterfights. It's finally summer and Alie's into it. So with this solo mini-ep, learn about a few ologies that are not real but should be such as aestaology (summer) & hydropolemology (waterfights). Also discussed: a few ologies that are in fact real, like cucurbitology (melons), pyrotechnology (humans chillin' and grillin' around a fire) and lampyridology (fireflies.) Just a little buffet o' facts to get you excited about summer.More episode sources & linksBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Hey, it's your old wizened, leathery lifeguard, Allie Ward, dozing under an umbrella while I should be making sure you're not drowning, and I'm here for a little slice of a mini-soad for your oligies' appetite this week. Why, Ward? Why? Well, this is a shorty around the longest day of the year, for a few reasons. Number one, I'm working on a two-part Mars episode for next week that's just gonna blow your rocket boosters right off.

And number two, this is a little crazy and exciting, but I'm shooting a brand new science show for a very cool network, and I'm shooting like 16-hour days, like I wake up at 5 a.m., rush to set, get home at 8 p.m., rush to bed. I have been wearing mismatched socks for two weeks, just plucked from my clean, lonely socks bag, and I'm pretty much like snorting whey protein instead of having dinner because there's just not time. So I'm putting this together to give myself a little bit more time to work on next week's episode because it's gonna be so good.

And also because, y'all, I love summer. I love it so much. We just had the longest day of the year, it's officially summer, and even as a summer goth in head-to-toe black second-hand wool garments as a teen, I loved summer. I loved it. Cobalt twilight at 9 p.m., iced tea sweating on a porch, barbecue smoke, family reunions, and bonus points for getting out of California to see weird bugs and to hear charming accents. I just always loved it.

So this week's mini-sode is all about some obscure summer disciplines. And if there are any that pique your interest, tell me, tweet me, whatever, and maybe I can hunt down an ologist to go further into one of these topics. But think of this episode like a variety sampler pack, like little cereals, and all the weight you're hollering, and maybe we can make one or two happen if you really love them. Now before we dive in, just a really big thanks to all the patrons for making the show possible. I pay the wonderful Stephen Ray Morris to edit it. I couldn't do it without him or you.

And thank you to everyone who decks themselves out in ologies' wares from ologiesmerch.com. You can get yourself a dang tank top for summer or like a $20 t-shirt in any color. Maybe a dad hat to keep the broiling sun off of your face. Now it supports the podcast, and also it helps you find other oligites in the wild, maybe for a summer romance. You can also spread the word about the podcast just by tweeting or gramming or you can rate a review. Make sure you're subscribed because sometimes iTunes just will unsubscribe you from things

that happens to me all the time. And also, as you know, I'm a giant sappy creep, and I love reading your very sweet reviews. And you know, I didn't know you could review via Stitcher until like yesterday. So for this mini-sode, I'm going to shout out so, so, so many Sarasas who wrote, if Lynn Manuel's Twitter feed was a science podcast, this podcast, which features interviews with ologists in a wide variety of fields, is a bright spot in a world that can be a bit cynical about expertise and knowledge. It's highly informative, a great resource for finding out more about all kinds of fields

and inspires me to work hard, learn more, and not be afraid to start by asking a dumb question. Thank you so much. What a comparison, dude. So thank you for leaving those reviews. I read them and they make me so happy on days when I'm tired and I have not washed my hair, which is a lot of the days. Okay. Aestheology.

Is this a real word? No, it's not. It's an entirely fictitious word I just made up using the Latin aesta, meaning summer. The study of summer. It doesn't exist. So straight out of the gate, I just served you up a big heaping bag of horseshit, and I'm sorry. Another word I considered fabricating that doesn't exist, and I looked it up, is hydro

polymology. That would be a great word for this episode because it would mean the study of water fighting. Okay. Just in trying to find out if that was a real word, it led me down this rabbit hole. Is there a study of water fights? Please say there is. There's not. But I did find out that in Poland, they have a tradition called Wet Monday, and it involves

soaking each other just mercilessly. Now, according to Wikipedia, boys throw water over girls, and then they spank them with pussy willows, or they sneak into girls' homes at daybreak and throw containers of water over them while they're still in bed. And then the screaming girls would often be dragged to a nearby river or pond for another drenching. Sometimes a girl would be carried out still in her bed before bed and girl were thrown into the water.

Particularly attractive girls could be expected to be soaked repeatedly during the day. This somewhat horrific and very soggy tradition is known as smiggas dingus. And evidently, and thankfully, it seems to have evolved into a more omnisexual affair involving little boys and girls soaking each other. And according to my getting sucked into a YouTube vortex of adults running from other adults sloshing buckets in the street, and children armed like tiny hydro militias super soaking the fuck out of each other, it's a pretty popular thing. So I was looking at YouTube videos of all these weird Polish waterfights, and then it

led me to remember if a hydro polemologist was a job, I have interviewed literally the top master of this field, and I totally forgot about it. So this season on Innovation Nation for CBS, I flew to Atlanta to meet a guy named Lonnie Johnson. He is a mechanical and nuclear engineer. He worked for the Air Force and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He worked on the Galileo mission to Jupiter, the Saturn Cassini mission, the Mars Observer project.

He's like a serial inventor, total genius. He has been since his youth. But among his creations, the super soaker. He invented the super soaker. So one day in the early 80s, he thought, I wonder if my daughter could just smoke these neighborhood jabronis in a water fight. And when your dad is a rocket scientist, what results is a PVC pipe water gun with an empty Pepsi two liter as a fuel tank?

He tried it in his bathroom. It shot across the room and he was like, well dang. I believe I've invented something very legendary. And so a few patents and like decades later, the dude has made very minimum 73 million dollars off of this invention. How many patents do you have? Over 100 patents. Over 100.

So this is just a tiny fraction of them. There was some engineering involved in putting this whole thing together. But you know, compared to a spacecraft, it's pretty simple. So if hydropolymology were a thing, Lonnie Johnson would have another honorary degree. So says Dad Ward von Podcast. Okay. So that concludes the portion on fictitious oligies involving the summer onto some actual summer oligies.

As discussed in the phologies episode in October, a cucurbitologist knows all kinds of secret shit about pumpkins, but also about melons. Were you to encounter a melon specialist like perhaps Zulinge, one of Shanghai's top professional watermelon experts? You could say, cucurbitologist, tell me your melon thumping secrets. So apparently one thing to look for when you're picking a watermelon, I'm going to dish out some watermelon secrets. Okay.

Are you ready? Okay. You have to look for the patch on the underbelly of the melon. This is the light patch where it's been in contact with the ground. The patch should be creamy yellow in color. The lighter and whiter it is, it means it's not quite ripe yet. I didn't know that. Also it should feel heavy for its size.

And you know when you thump a melon in the store and you do it just to look cool before you make off with it to the check stand and you're like, I don't know why I did that. I don't even know what I'm listening for. I don't know what I'm doing. Okay. According to cucurbitologists, it should have a dull, really hollow sound. Now another thing you can do is just buy from a farmer's market and say, Hey, you're a farmer. Just pick me a good melon.

Also seedless watermelons were invented by a Midwestern plant specialist named Ori O.J. Eigstie and nobody wanted them for decades. He was like, I invented a seedless watermelon with you ghouls. Enjoy spitting seeds at each other? The fuck. These seedless melons are a fat folks, idiots. They kept peddling them and peddling them. And then finally they began taking off in like the 1980s.

And according to an interview with him in the Chicago Tribune, which was conducted in his 90s, he saw seedless watermelons flourishing in a supermarket and he said to himself, after all these years, it feels pretty good. And there's something in my soul that's like so happy that the seedless watermelon specialist got to see his invention really take off because it was decades of him being like, how can you not want to seedless watermelon? What's wrong with you? We all want them.

Also don't toss those rinds, folks, according to watermelon.org, which is a website. You can cut them up and then you can add them to stir fries and eat them. You can also pickle the rinds. So at your next barbecue, just walk around with an empty pillowcase and start loading up on everyone's chewed up cast decides and be like, Hmm, yeah, I'm going to bring this up and dine on it in several months. You have my blessings. Speaking of barbecues, let's talk pyrotechnology.

Wait, pyrotechnics, isn't that fireworks? God, I hope so. When I started researching this episode, I was like, what if I had a pyrotechnologist on to talk about the bombs bursting in air in the fourth of July displays and baseball games and skybooms and such. But I found out that fireworks people are technically pyrotechnicians, not pyrotechnologists. So firework talk will be limited to Uncle Ali telling you, don't blow your goddamn hands off this summer.

Okay. Just be careful. And if you're drunk, let someone else explode stuff. Just sit back and watch. Don't say I never helped you pyrotechnologists are actually anthropologists who study chilling and grilling barbecues, cooking with fire. But wait, what is a barbecue and why can't I spell it right? Well, it comes from the Spanish for barbacoa, which is derived from a Caribbean word, meaning

a rack made of sticks. Those were used for either sleeping on like a cot or for smoking meat or fish above a fire. There you go. I think Americans added the Q U at the end and you can spell it either way, but let's be honest, all caps, bbq, it's easiest. No one wants to fuck around with that. Is there a C and also a Q in it?

Just spell it bbq. I don't care. Also, there is a heated fiery debate on the etymology of barbecue. The first time it was recorded in English was in 1661 by Edmund Hickeringill, who was a British churchman with a shady history, who was describing cannibalism in Jamaica. He wrote, Somos Lane and the flesh fall with barbecued and eat. But barbecue historian, and yes, that is a job, Andrew Warniz wrote a whole book on the colonist and racist origins of the word and says that Hickeringill was full of shit

and he was making up tales. And the barbecue is one of America's oldest and most beloved traditions. So going back in time a bit, humans first started to learn about fire control maybe as far back as 1.7 million years ago, but they were really getting good at it about 125,000 years ago. There's the hotly talked about cooking hypothesis. Now this is the hypothesis that credits charring otherwise inedible starchy food with humans' ability to grow these bigger glucose hogs known as our brains.

I mean, when was the last time you ate a raw potato and slayed it, word with friends? Like never think about it. Now another thing to mull over while waiting for your melon rinds to pickle is why historically have women been expected to cook but men handle the outdoor grilling? What the fuck? I'm going to look for an answer and I found that a cultural anthropologist, Richard Swater, has written such a book about many psychological societal mysteries on different continents. This book is aptly titled, Why Do Men Barbecue?

I found this after googling the phrase, why do men barbecue? And if I ever read that book, I'll report back, but the consensus on the web and I did look it up is because much of outdoor grilling just involves standing around looking busy while other people are inside fussing over jello and macaroni salad and icing down fruit platters. And also, you only have to do it for one season out of the year, so you're like, sure, I'll be a grill master. If you were to ask Yale researchers about pyrotechnology, not only would the archaeologists

talk about cooking relics, but they would also point you to periods of time when we really started to make firework for us. We were glazing vessels, we were hardening weaponry, we were doing metallurgy things. So pyrotechnology, so many directions to go. So when you're outside the summer, gazing into a campfire, just think, there are people who have been indoors writing books about your hairy, scared relatives gazing into a campfire. One last ology on the topic of fiery summer evenings. Lampiridology, what the hell is that word?

It's the study of fireflies, which are not flies at all. They're rather beetles with super magic butts. Do you call them fireflies or lightning bugs? You probably just all muttered aloud on the subway or jogging path or into your knitting fireflies. Lightning bugs. Lightning bugs. Peony wallies.

Okay, what? One researcher, Burt Vox, who's a linguistics professor at the University of Cambridge, polled 10,000 Americans and found that around 40% say both words interchangeably, 30% just say firefly, and almost 30% say lightning bug. Meanwhile, .02%. This is only two people in a whole study of 10,000. Call these glowing summer cuties, peony wallies. I did not know that was a term, but next time I see one, I do know that it will be formally

addressed as your honor, Captain Peony Wally. Now growing up in California, I didn't encounter a peony wally until I visited the east coast of my 20s and I freaked out. I jumped around a lawn. I was chasing them like I was four. So apparently the west coast and oddly just Massachusetts says firefly. The south says lightning bugs, but I want to find team peony wally and see if those two people know each other.

They must, right? So a few fun, Limpiridology tidbits. Firefly larva. Love to eat snails. Love them. It's weird. It's French. So how do they make their butts glow?

Well, they have a light organ in their lower half. Think of it like a glow crotch and oxygen combines with calcium and ATP, which carries energy to cells plus this luminescent chemical. It's called luciferin. Also luciferin sounds evil as hell, literally. And that's because it means light bringer, which the biblical Lucifer was named for. And I guess how Lucifer became Satan biblically may have been because of a translation error with the Hebrew word meaning howl.

But honestly, I just spent 15 minutes on so many websites trying to figure this out. So biblical scholars correct me on this. I don't know why Satan is called Lucifer, but luciferin, it's not evil. It's just a raver crotch on a horny beetle flashing it to say, hey, are you my species? Because let's get it on and make snail eating babies. But I guess in a kind of evil fact, some female fireflies mimic the mating flashes of another species and then they lure Randy Beetle dudes and they eat them. They're like, oh my God, we should totally get together.

I would love to date you. And then they just eat them with their faces. Now according to Wikipedia, the species is referred to as the femme fatale of fireflies, which seems a little overly dramatic, but I'll take it. So with that, it doesn't take a psychologist who is a person who studies the muscular and fleshy parts of the body to tell you to go put on some spandex underpants and engage in hydro polemological warfare, then maybe cool off with a cucurbitilogical snack before you feast on pyro technologically prepared cuisine.

It's summer. You deserve it. So let me know if you want to hear more about any of these topics. I'll see who I can track down. And thank you for having a mini listen to this Eenie Peenie Wally of an episode. And I'll be back next week with tons of Martian gossip. Thank you Stephen Ray Morris for tossing this together just hours before it goes up to Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lippo for being incredible admins to the jolly group of very curious

folks on the Allergies Podcast Facebook group. Get yourself some summer gear if you want at olergiesmerch.com. Get olergiesmerch in your online posts so I can repost you on Merch Mondays. And thank you, Shannon Feltas and Bonnie Dutch for running that merch site. Thank you as always to the beloved summer mustachioed Stephen Ray Morris for editing. The theme song was written and performed by Nick Thorburn of the very vacation-y named band Islands. And please remember to ask all kinds of smart people, all kinds of seemingly stupid questions

because they secretly love it. If you're at a barbecue with someone, talk to them about beetle butts. Also speaking of secrets, I can proudly say this is like a little bit of a humble brag that I've never peed in a pool. I was utterly shocked. I did an informal poll among friends and most people seemed to pee in pools. Even hot tubs. I was like, really?

Really, you guys? I love you, but can we not pee in them? I don't know. Apparently, it's not that bad for you, but also, like, times are tough out there, guys. Let's be kind to each other. Let's not pee in the water that goes in each other's mouths unless it's consensual, okay? Either way, I love you lots. Ask smart people some questions.

Goodbye. Bye-bye.