Ologies with Alie Ward - SUMMERSODE: Balmy Vibes & Seasonal Factoids with various Ologists

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

I NEEDED TO MAKE THIS, OKAY? I needed to get excited about summer wonders. So we toiled over the ultimate Summersode. Kick back for a compliation of snorkling tips, shark statistics, firefly safaris, constitutional law questions, the science of makeouts, appreciation for hornets, horniness for foraging, cabins, campfires, crevice checking, jellyfish tips, bear safety, the importance of handwritten memories and actual scientific advice on how to find joy amid difficult conditions. Your summer vibe has arrived. Just in time. Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's the mesh patio chair that leaves your thighs looking like snakeskin. Halliward. Back with a sticky, languid episode of oligies I had to make. I tried to not make this one. Many times I said, nah, it's too much work. Will anyone even care? But I wanted it. I wanted this episode.

I needed a collage of factoids, kind of like a vision board for the summer that's to come. Also what is summer? Well, years ago I made a mini-sode about it called Aesthetology, I think, and we learned then that the Earth's axis is a little wonky, it's a little tilted, so as we cruise around the sun, one hemisphere gets more direct sunlight and the other gets less for a bit. And the result is three months of us wearing jorts. And here in the Northern Hemisphere, where my actual rump is wearing jorts, summer just started.

Southern Hemisphere folks, feel free to listen if you have some winter blues going on. Maybe you want to transport yourself to the boiling, roiling conditions of America at the moment. What also included are some updates, I'm just what's happening in my very small corner of the world, family-wise, which I save for the secrets at the end because maybe only some of you care, my family's going through some stuff, I'm going through some stuff. It's at the end of the episode. Also if you care about the podcast, thank you for telling your friends or for joining

Patreon for a dollar or more a month, patreon.com, slashologies. And rating and leaving reviews, I read all of them and you have left so many sweet ones this week. But I did want to address a few that made me laugh. A little bit at you, and I'm sorry, I just want to help. So annoyed728 left a one-star review that said, really annoying that episodes will skip back. And annoyed728, we have covered this before, but apparently it just bears repeating. That is not how the episodes are edited.

That is not actually the episodes that's your spotty cell service or your bad Wi-Fi. And the whole episode before you listen, problem solved. While you're on the good Wi-Fi, feel free to edit your review and say, thanks for the hot tip, internet dad. Also, I'd like to help a reviewer by the name of tiredoffoulmouths, who objected to our occasional swear words and wrote, rated E and science-based should be safe to listen to, even with children. And tired of foulmouths, number one, we do have free G-rated Smologies episodes available

right in the made podcast feed. They're also up at alleyword.com slash Smologies. We make them just for that reason. We also offer full, free, bleeped episodes at alleyword.com slash oligies extras. Both are linked in the show notes for you and your children. But I just want to say tired of foulmouths, that the rated E that you mentioned, that means explicit. The E does not stand for educational or everyone.

The red E literally means don't listen with children. So not knowing this might be why you're so tired of foulmouths, tired of foulmouths. So I hope that helps. Are we good? Okay. Now, the other literal 99% of you who leave wonderful reviews and you understand that science is weird and hilarious and that grownups deserve the juicy parts. I appreciate every review.

It keeps the show in the top science podcast. Okay. Great talks. Yes. Sometimes I swear when I feel emotionally moved to, because this is free entertainment, I try to just show up as exactly the person I am for you all. On that note, oligies I feel is at its best when I'm making episodes that make me a little nauseated with joy.

Like this one to just help us get excited about and have context for all these summer wonders around us. So kickback for a compilation of snorkeling tips, shark statistics, firefly safaris, constitutional law questions, the science of makeouts, appreciation for hornets, horniness for foraging, cabins, fire, crevice checking, jellyfish tips, bear safety, the importance of handwritten memories, and actual scientific advice on how to find joy amid difficult conditions. Your summer vibe has arrived. So let's start with an oligist who studies the season themselves.

A researcher at the Page Museum at the Liberia Tarpits in Los Angeles, phenologist Dr. Libby Elwood. Okay, so first off, summer. Why is it? During the summer, a lot of things have settled down. So once the migratory birds have arrived, for example, they're there to breed. And so they do their thing all summer, they're hanging out, and then they will start their southern migration usually in the fall.

So that's another thing, too, that we have a lookout for, again, the lookout for. Also, that would be when the leaves start to change color and leaves fall. And then, you know, it's pretty quiet for the winter. What is a rundown of the function of each season? We did to think of summers like this feeding season and then kind of like a feast and a famine through winter. Does that do anything for plants, like to reset their cycles or did anything for animals? Oh, yeah, right.

So birds will often have, at least in the northern hemisphere, their breeding season is in the summer. So during the winter, they're fattening up, they're getting ready, they come back north and they're establishing their territories, building their nests and then making a family. And so there are those kinds of things with certain animals. And then for plants, too, plants have a chilling requirement in the northern hemisphere. So they'll need to actually be dormant for a certain amount of time to then recognize that it's getting warmer again and to know that they can start producing flowers and

leaves and that spring is here. But if they don't get that chilling requirement, if we were to have a really warm winter, for example, and doesn't get cold enough for them to meet their chilling requirement, then their spring phenology can be thrown off. So this time is the time when your underboobs weep with sweat and your hormones say, meet me at my nest and your brain dreams of bouncing out of town, like, bye. And maybe you are one of the lucky few who can dip your bot in some water or nap by a splashing sea.

And I asked marine biologist, policy expert and oceanology guest, Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, about how to enjoy the ocean. Do you listen to any ocean apps on your phone to chill out? Like ocean sounds? Like, yeah. No, I put earplugs in and just like zone all the way out. I wasn't sure if someone who studies the ocean and has dedicated their life to essentially saving the ocean would be like, I don't, I don't want to hear an app because it's just

a bad simulation or. Yeah, I'm a pretty light sleeper. Okay. So I like complete silence. And I think, yeah, as someone who is like 95% vegan and who never eats fake meat, it's maybe the same thing, right? Like I'm not going to go have like a soy hot dog and I'm not going to listen to like fake ocean sounds.

Do you do a lot of like diving? Did you have to do a lot of diving? I used to. Yeah. For my PhD research, I did three or 400 dives. Do you like being underwater? I know some people are like, it's so beautiful. It's like I'm flying and other people are like, it's so big.

It's terrifying. It's pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, some people think that if you don't scuba dive, you can't experience the ocean fully and I totally disagree with that. I think scuba diving is nice because I can't hold my breath for an hour. Yeah, neither can I. I only learned to dive when I realized that I needed to as a tool for my scientific research.

And it's pretty neat. I mean, to be able to, you know, be underwater long enough to really watch the behavior of an octopus or a parrotfish or whatever it is, is an amazing opportunity. But I think snorkeling is underrated. Yeah, I think more people should get like super into snorkeling because you can see so much just by, you know, diving down and taking a look and being in shallow water. So I hate the thought that people think if you're not scuba diving, then like, why bother? Because there's so much you can learn about the sea and just enjoy like the spectacular

creatures from the surface or from like a little shallow dive down with your mask on. You just got to learn that trick where you blow that water out when you surface, right? Yeah. Yeah. Is that hard to master? No, you can totally do it. Anyone can do it. OK.

Or sometimes when I like don't have enough air left in my lungs when I come up to the surface for whatever reason, I just take the mouthpiece out and just breathe air normally. You could do that too. There are definitely ways that anyone can figure this out. Can't get to an ocean. Can you just pick up a dusty shell from your aunt's guest bathroom? Let's ask actual shell expert, bio mineralogy episode guest and human delight, Rob Ulrich. OK, a lot of people, a lot of people wanted to know, can you hear the ocean in shells?

What makes them sound like the ocean? Elizabeth Ross says, I heard that the sound is created by blood moving in our own ears, being echoed by the shell. Do people ask this of you when you tell them you study shells? I feel like nobody ever asks me anything. I would love more questions about shells all the time. And I really want to say yes, because it sounds very magical, but the answer is no, unfortunately, and it's also not necessarily you hearing your own blood either.

It's just that like shells, and this is the reason why they're also have been used for instruments in the past, is just that shells are so efficient and effective at amplifying sound that whenever you put your ear up to the shell, it's really just amplifying the sound of the ambient noise and like air moving around. So flim flam busted, the noise that you hear from shells has a name. It's called seashell resonance, but that ambient amplification would also work with like an empty Starbucks cup. So I'm sorry to have just broken your heart.

Curious landmermaids, including Krista Scharder, Rachel Moore, Elizabeth Ross, Kate Rampe, Kelly Windsor, Tegan Andrews, Megan Youn, Sylvia Meyer and Delano Pelt. Somewhere between the turquoise shimmer of the Caribbean and a nautical display at a Michaels craft store, there is a place and it's called Florida. But it may hurt you like a real son of a beach. Why? Vance Alasha asks, why are Florida beaches covered in shells?

So many cuts in my feet. And then there's four exclamation points. Yeah, it's actually the the shape of Florida and like the surrounding bits of land or islands that causes that to happen. A lot of the islands run parallel to Florida. And so they're like aligned with the water currents running around Florida itself. However, beaches like Sanibel, I think that it starts with an S. It's actually perpendicular.

And so it sort of catches all of the shells that come out of that current. And that's why it has so many more shells than a lot of other beaches. Oh, OK. So do you think if you were to find a shell from someplace in Florida and there were a lot of them, it would be OK to take home? Or is it still like leave them on the beach? I think I think to be safe, leave them on the beach. But I'm sure if you take one, it's like fine, definitely not if they're alive

or but if they're like fully still like formed and like together, you probably should leave them. OK, not a beach person. I get it. If you happen to have found a small bucket of money buried in your backyard and you can use it for a quick summer break, maybe you want to head straight for the hills and get cozy around the smell of some melted pine sap. Or you can just stare at some hashtags and you can sketch up your own shack. Let's ask Minnesota based architect and real life

cabinologist, guest Dale Mulfinger. How do you feel that social media culture or Instagram culture has maybe changed the way we appreciate these remote buildings or structures or retreats? Well, one big difference is that we now can rent structures everywhere. And part of that is made accessible through social media. So we can now not just have our say our own cabin, but we can rent everybody and everybody else's cabin almost anywhere in the world. And I think that's really changed.

And then we can immediately share that experience with an innumerable number of people. So, you know, those are probably the big things that that have changed through the media as we understand it today. Are you OK? Are you OK with that? With with cabin sharing? And are you sure? Sure. Sure. And I absolutely. In fact, I think one of the phenomena about cabins is that we feel much more comfortable with sharing our cabin

with others than we say to our home. So we're less likely to offer up our home as a place for strangers to stay in. Whereas cabins traditionally were places where maybe we weren't we weren't accommodating strangers, but we were accommodating Uncle Harry Cousin Beth and and the colleague we work with, you know, so we've often shared our cabin with diverse people. Do you have any memories of being in a cabin that are some of your favorites? Well, I think snow falling and sitting quietly reading a book with a fire

crackling and my wife's good cooking smells in the background is probably one of my best experiences or looking out the window and seeing the five or six deer that are eating the corn just set out there. You know, those are some of the best. And I think then I've had an opportunity to gather larger family groups together not necessarily in my cabin because my cabin is a bit too small for that. But through the borrowing of friends, cabins or renting the friends, cabin, I've been able to gather, say, 16 of my wife's family members together.

That made for a special occasion. OK, quick aside, I made you a list of things you can do in a cabin this summer. You can play dominoes, you can read a book, you can gossip, you can ask older people important questions about their lives, you can carve spoons, you can learn to needlepoint, you can roast marshmallows, you can write a list of all the things you want to do in your life. You can make your friends all tell stories about how they met each other. You can enjoy a poem, you can make a pie, you can sip coffee out of one

of those metal enamel mugs that they sell in camping stores. You could write a short story, you could learn to fry a fish, you could nap, you can throw your phone into the lake, you can quit your job, you can disappear from the Internet, you can live off the land like that Walden Thoreau guy, hope you don't get arrested, you can wish on a shooting star. I also like playing Rummy Cube. OK, now let's say you want a taste of that cabin life, but maybe a little closer. You could fashion a garbant, which sounds like a portmanteau for garbage and bin,

but it's actually a cabin you fashion in the rafters above a garage, a garbant. Now, what about a straight up cabin in your backyard? Is that OK? I've certainly recorded cabins that occur in the backyard of somebody's home. Now, they might think of that cabin as a man cave to escape to or her writing in a place that she can retreat to for writing. We call that a scriptorium. Oh, I've heard it called a she shed.

Yes, and a she shed. So I think that's not uncommon. And I've recorded a few of those in books I've done and in articles I've written. Yeah, I guess a cabin is kind of like our childhood version of a fort, but realized and with plumbing. Yes, you know, and some not with plumbing or the outhouse or whatever. Nearby, but yeah, it might have some modicum of plumbing in it, some some way to heat it up, which maybe our little fort when we were a kid.

Either of those. So who forted? Maybe you, perhaps a summer. Maybe you have a patch of backyard or you have a generous friend with one and can make a tiny respite out of some recycled pallet wood and just get away from the world. Maybe you can listen to podcasts and say, hey, now, if you are somewhere, it's safe to do so.

You could bring some cabin vibes to your own patio with a little tiny campfire. If you missed the pyrotechnology episode with Yale pyrotechnology lab researcher and anthropologist Dr. Ellery Fram, we cover how our species interacts with those flickering dancing flames. Have researchers looked into like oxytocin levels at all? Well, you're looking at a campfire. Is there something that is comforting innately to us, even though fire is dangerous? I don't know about that specifically.

That's that's a really good question. But yeah, no, I'd agree. There is that kind of satisfaction of it as well. Is that something like inherently biological and controlled by hormones is a really good question? Or if it's if it's something we're essentially conditioned to do, you know, would a baby who hasn't been raised, you know, around campfires find this this comforting or terrifying? OK, so if you would like some science to explain why you love campfires,

I will point you toward the 2014 paper, hearth and campfire influences on arterial blood pressure, defraying the costs of the social brain through fireside relaxation, which explains, quote, fires involve flickering light, crackling sounds, warmth and a distinctive smell. For early humans, fire likely extended the day, provided heat, helped with hunting, warded off predators and insects, illuminated dark places and facilitated cooking.

Campfires also may have provided social nexus and relaxation effects. They could have enhanced pro-social behavior, end quote. So this study took 226 subjects and measured their blood pressure. And then they randomly put some people in front of a control image, while others got video of a campfire with the sound down and other subjects got the full pop and crackle treatment, too. So what happened? Researchers found consistent blood pressure decreases in the fire

with sound folks, particularly with a longer duration of gazing at the video. And on my website, I have linked to YouTube that offers 12 hours of free eulog action so you can relax without worrying about a forest fire or having your hair smell like beef jerky. What about the importance of cooking food and avoiding parasites? At some point, did we learn how to boil water or how has fire contributed to our actual living longer? Yeah, no, that's a great question that there is some evidence for boiling as

being in kind of like pits in the ground, being more of the first instance of cooking in like a pot, you know, over a campfire. Because again, that's a very recent innovation in terms of living longer. I mean, in a certain way, evolution doesn't care about it that much. They're like, you make babies or not? OK, get out of here. You're done. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, so for Neanderthal, you and I are, you know, of a good age.

Yeah. Oh, God. Oh, we're fossils. Can you imagine? They're like, what? Yeah, I hair. What is it? Yeah, I did have to explain this like just to my students a week or two ago when I showed them replica Neanderthal bones from an old man who was probably around, you know, 45, right? Yeah, exactly. So so on a certain on a certain way, it doesn't matter on in terms of living longer.

But even in terms of like, you know, pest control or something like that in a cave, if you're trying to avoid like getting bit by a bat, you could potentially use fire as a way to clear out bats and mice or something like that from from a cave or something like that. So there certainly are potential health aspects that deep in the past that using fire as a tool could could have assisted with. Do I think that humans figured out like if you boil water, it gets rid of the germs? No, I don't I don't think that was at all on anyone's minds.

Over all of your research, do people ever ask you what is the best way to construct a fire? Is it leaning everything together in a triangle shape? Or is it like stacking like a log cabin? Yeah, see, everyone everyone expects me at the party to be like the fire tender, right? Oh, like I keep an eye on the fire pit. And naturally, I just usually like pass it off to my kids like, yeah, just poke at it a bit. Dr. Fire. Yeah, yeah, an apprentice. Yeah, yeah, or or I'll occasionally say like, you know, I should really have,

you know, some sort of really cool firing pit in the backyard or something like that. And my wife will be like, why don't you let's get the house painted first? Yeah, finish that finish that job before you start building a kiln in the backyard or something like that. Can I fire away with a lot of questions from a lighting round? Yes, please. From listeners. OK, oh, we have so many questions. OK, and just to follow up, what kind of fire you make depends on what you're doing. For long lasting campfires, the log cabin method might be the best.

But for cooking on skewers, roasting stuff on a stick, you might want to lean logs into each other. But either way, make sure you're observing forest ranger cautions and that you are extinguishing things well before you leave. So listen to the fire ecology episodes for more on that. You want to fire ecology episode sample? I thought so. OK, so Dr. Gavin Jones studies fire in the landscape. And I asked him how many wildfires are because of apes like us?

A lot of the ignitions are human ignitions. You know, people accidentally starting fires, machinery getting too hot, people driving over dry grass and things like that. So Gavin says that 80 to 90 percent of all wildfires are human caused ignitions. Half of California's largest fires in the last century happened in the past five years. By the way, a complex fire means a cluster of related fires in one area. But what's the difference between a wildfire and a forest fire?

We talk about wildfires typically when we're talking about wildfires. Those are unplanned. So fires that we as people don't don't plan so you can kind of juxtapose that with a prescribed fire or a cultural fire. So prescribed fire is often fire that is purposely set. And then managed by teams to achieve some type of objective. Maybe they're trying to restore some area, restore fire. You know, you probably hear a lot about, you know, people burning prairies

and things like that. It's the same thing in forests. They go in and do prescribed burns. And then there's also a really important component of cultural burning. So indigenous communities using wildfire for their purposes, which until, you know, about 100, 200 years ago made up the overwhelming majority of the fire activity that was happening in a lot of these areas. For, you know, the last 10,000 years or so, indigenous peoples have been

using fire in a really important cultural way. And that has really changed in the past couple of centuries with colonization. But that is an increasingly important part of the solution to sort of this modern wildfire problem. And obviously, indigenous cultures and just the planet at large saw the benefit of prescribed burns. So what good do fires do either in prescribed burns or just in nature? Yeah, that's such a good question.

I mean, fires are a critical piece of ecosystems around the world. Every square inch of land that has vegetation has some type of fire regime. It has some sort of natural fire cycle and fire is kind of a restorative process. There's many benefits of fire from we can think about it from a human perspective. We can think about it from a sort of an ecosystem perspective. You know, from the human perspective, you know, fires create more resilient forests when they burn the right way, when we have sort of a natural kind of lower intensity fire in some systems, like in the Sierra Nevada,

where I've spent a lot of my time, that reinforces healthy water supplies. It reduces erosion. Side note, a fire regime sounds like Satan's cabinet members farting flames in a Haiti's boardroom, but it's actually just a gentle term. A fire regime describes a pattern of fire, how frequent, how intense, what kind of fuel it gobbles. And maybe me just calling it Satan's cabinet members farting in Haiti's. Maybe that's part of the root of European's fear of fire and thus this

historical fire suppression by colonists. Don't you kind of wish I had talked to an Indigenous fire ecologist too? Oh, shit, yes, I did. Now, if you haven't heard, here's a clip from the Indigenous fire ecology episode with Dr. Amy Christensen, who also co-hosts a podcast called Good Fire. And can you describe a little bit about prescribed fires and Indigenous fire stewardship versus cultural burns?

I think a lot of people maybe want to lump them in together, but can you describe a little bit about how they work or what they are? Yeah, so there's a bit of a danger of that. This whole thing now where we're seeing prescribed fire and just kind of throwing cultural burning into that. So prescribed fire is, you know, generally what agencies do. So where they're setting fire on the landscape, but in many cases, they're setting, you know, high severity fires.

And they want to burn a lot of land in a little bit of time. So we see like lots of aerial ignition of fires. We see them using, you know, basically like helicopter ignition. And in Canada, like lots of times people put that together as, you know, being a crown fire, being these big, bad kind of out of control fires that are burning up, you know, mountainsides. That's generally the media that we see in Canada about prescribed fire. But it really differs from cultural burning because cultural burning

is more about achieving a cultural objective around the forest, around where you live. So you don't really want to have these big, large, standard-placing fires that go through and can kill everything in a prescribed fire event that sometimes is what happens in Canada. Yeah. So for cultural fire, too, the thing is that most fires are actually pretty low intensity. In Australia, they call them like slow burns or cool burns. And they generally move through the understory and they're done it certain times of year where the potential fire behavior is very low risk.

So, you know, where you're not getting, you know, potential of crown fire, there's lots of natural fuel breaks around the fire. In Canada, that's usually snow still on the ground. For Indigenous people, cultural burning, too, is like a family, a community activity. So like when I'm doing burns and things like I take my my daughters, my mom was on the last one that we did. There's a great photo that's run in a few news articles about Amy's work. And she's standing in a golden, grassy field.

It's hazy with smoke as a cultural burn grass fire. She's overseeing lurches behind her. And there's a husky, wolfy dog sitting to her right, staring off. And Amy's wearing black leggings and a red flannel shirt and is pregnant with what would be her second daughter. So the mood is very calm, unlike what most people's experience of land on fire might be. Lots of times, you know, we don't wear personal protective equipment, you know, like the kind of no mix that you usually see firefighters wearing

because usually the fires are honestly just so slow. And most people find find them, I think, a bit boring, too, because it can take a really long time to burn a really small piece of land. And so for agencies, it doesn't really work well, right? Because that for them means that more staffing dollars and other things to achieve, like, you know, a smaller area burned. At what point did you decide to spread the word about good fire? And the term good fire, too, is something that I kind of just learned, too.

But can you can you talk a little bit about what good fire is? Sure. So good fire, I think, comes just from the idea that, you know, it's very obvious that we can have good fires on the landscape. You know, that fire is something that is helpful to the environment and to people. And so I think indigenous people, lots of times, see fire almost in a dichotomy. So kind of, you know, these bad fires and then the good fire that we can use as a tool before colonization. Indigenous people would use fire on the landscape in good ways.

But then also we did have lightning fires, obviously, back then, right? But they would come across the landscape and kind of enter into this mosaic landscape that these indigenous burns and other lightning cause fires. Like, and so as they would enter them, then the fire behavior would change. So as, you know, it entered a meadow, the fire intensity might decrease. And then it would go back into the forest and maybe increase. And then it would hit like a deciduous stand of trees and go down again. And so this mosaic or patchwork on the landscape was actually really helpful

for fire to kind of decrease the intensity of these fire events. But what we're seeing right now is because we've been suppressing those fire events, there's just so much fuel in the forest that we're seeing these bad fires. So even like I'm thinking like the Dixie fire in California right now, or we have like multiple fires in Canada at the moment, too, that are bad fires. Like lots of times, you know, we look at and say, Oh, fire is natural. There's good ecological benefits. But for me, there's nothing good about these current fires happening right now.

So at this point, our FaceTime call cut out because of spotty internet. So Amy recorded a clip answering a few more questions because she is the best and knew that we only had a few days until this one up and she's once again the best. I also just wanted to mention the importance of Indigenous people in fire in Canada, but also in other countries. You know, we often think about Indigenous people and fire management as something that happened in the past, but we have a lot of amazing Indigenous firefighters in Canada, Indigenous fire managers and other people

who are really, you know, on the front lines trying to bring back good fire and Indigenous fire stewardship and really out there every summer, kind of protecting our communities from these bad fires. And especially in Canada, lots of times we don't give enough attention, I think, to those Indigenous firefighters. Lots of times they're kept kind of from progressing in their careers because they might not have the appropriate Western education level. You know, a degree or a diploma or something, but they have, you know,

might have 20, 30, 40 years experience of being on the fire and so knowledgeable and incredible. And I think, you know, lots of times we need to look at where Western science as well got some of its ideas. Like I've spoken to many elders who've told me about drip torches and how they would use tree limbs and sap to create their own drip torches. That's what their ancestors did and how they would spread fire across the landscape was in doing that.

So now, you know, it's a metal canister with fuel in it. But it's kind of the same idea that Indigenous peoples had about how to use fire properly on the land. And just this incredible knowledge base and people in the communities, you know, had roles in Canada. Some nations actually had families that were fire keepers. There were many people who knew about fire and had knowledge about fire activity. So a whole episode on that awaits if you haven't heard it.

And of course, all these episodes mentioned will be linked on this episode's page at alleyward.com slash allergies slash somersault. Now, what if part of taking care of the land is eating the weeds? So this clip from the foraging ecology episode is for you. And it's also for anyone who DMs or emails me asking me to have Black forager Alexis Nelson on allergies who has missed that she has been on. And it was so good. So here is some wisdom from the foraging ecology episode with her

on how to eat your neighbor's bushes. When it comes to where you forage, how do you do it differently in the city versus if you're out on a hike? And what kind of stuff do you find in each place? Yeah, so in the city, it's going to be a lot more of the kind of classic quintessential weeds, the plants that like taking advantage of disturbed ground, where they don't have to, you know, outcompete any of our other native species.

So right now in the cities, I'm seeing a lot of Queen Anne's lace already putting up their new sets of leaves for the year. Ton of dandelions, a lot of clover, white clover, red clover and now sweet clover is starting to show up to hang out a ton of mugwort. I passed a couple of very healthy stands of mugwort while I was on a walk around the neighborhood today that I little be visiting this weekend

because I'm in the mood for mugwort roasted potatoes. So what does mugwort look like? OK, I had to look it up. It's a member of the Daisy family. So its leaves look like Daisy leaves and it has clusters of these drooped bell buds at the tip of a stock. And mugwort can grow meters and meters high. And while scientists call it Artemisia vulgaris,

close friends call it Riverside Wormwood, Felon Herb, Old Uncle Henry and Naughty Man. And I feel like I have to buy mugwort a beer to hear how it got those nicknames. But mugwort just means marsh root, and it's best to pick the leaves and buds between July to September. And you can season some meat with it. You can make a mochi dessert or look into its medicinal purposes.

And Indigenous people in North America used mugwort for a wide variety of ills, like pit stank to colds and flus, rousing folks from comas and even inducing labor. So ethno-pharmacology episode, anyone? Yes. But yes, when this was recorded a few weeks ago, Alexis was planning to gather some mugwort and roast potatoes with it. So just a lot of the friends who you see enjoying spaces that maybe have been modified for something else.

We have a couple empty lots in our neighborhood in which the ground was turned over before the winter. And now that ground is just covered in weeds. Oh, wow. Whereas if I'm in the forests right now or out in the woods, oh, gosh, it's almost a completely different biome. We're still in the middle of spring ephemeral seasons. I'm seeing trout lilies, trilliums, ramps,

cutleaf tooth or Virginia bluebells. I'm starting to see pheasant back mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, morels, of course. And then you have a lot of the trees whose early leaves are edible, starting to leave out like your maples. You have pines, spruces and furs putting out their new growth. And their needles are very soft right now and great to incorporate into meals too. So it's it's a fun game kind of having to change the mindset

of what you're looking for depending on where you are. And I'm lucky that where I live here in Ohio, while I very much live in the city, Columbus proper, I do not have to go very far. To not feel like I'm in the city anymore. OK, how can you make sure that you don't accidentally die, though? You know, Hope says, and maybe this is of some flim flam you could bust, Hope says, I've been told that you can test for berries being poisonous

by rubbing them on your hand and seeing if it tingles or numbs. And then if it doesn't, doing the same with your cheek. And if nothing there, either you might be able to eat it. Is that true at all? Is it flim flam? Is it reliable? For a lot of us, especially who grew up being very outdoorsy, that was kind of the way that we were told to deal with the situation. If we like found ourselves stranded in the middle of the woods.

The way that I always heard it was, you know, you'd rub it on the inside of your ankle, you pretty much just travel to more sensitive pieces of skin and wait a few hours to see if it reacts because I am a cautious being. And because not every hazardous plant behaves the same way or possesses the same toxins, I'm just going to go ahead and say that unless you are dying, probably not the best rule of thumb to go by. And even if you are dying, probably not the best rule of thumb to go by. Also, if you are looking for berries, I can say with confidence,

if you are in North America, we don't have any poisonous compound berries. So if it looks like a raspberry, you're good to go. OK, so compound or aggregate berries include the dewberry, the blackberry, the raspberry. So that should help, Rebecca, Rachel Sorter, Mandy Smith, Donnello Neal and Megan Burnett Taraskowitz. Just a PS from 2022. I texted Alexis last week to ask if serviceberry season has ended. And she told me that in the northern U.S., you could still go out and grab them.

But now, like right now, and just a quick follow up question. I'm sorry, what is a serviceberry? Oh, on that topic, this is a very, very good question. Emma Keiley is a first time question asker and their greatest love is for serviceberries. Is a serviceberry like a raspberry? Oh, my God, serviceberries. I'm so glad someone brought serviceberries up because I always want to just shoehorn them into the conversation, but I never know if people are going to know

what I'm talking about. So serviceberries, which are the Amalanchia genus, there are a couple of different species that fall under it, but we call them all serviceberries or Juneberries or Saskatoon berries. In southern Ohio, sometimes they just call them Sarvis or Sarvis berries. They actually look a lot more like blueberries. They are crowned berries. So, you know, they have the little little points sticking out of them,

the little last signs of their flowers. They they might they might be my favorite. I love pawpaws just from like a purely ethnobotanical history standpoint. But serviceberries might be my favorite thing to forage. They taste like apples and blueberries mixed together. Oh, man. Can you make a cobbler? Can you get enough to make like a cobbler out of them? Or is it like if you get three of them, you've had the best day of your life?

Oh, no. So last year, just from the soul tree closest to my house, I gathered enough berries while still leaving all the ones that I couldn't reach, which was most of them for the birds, I gathered enough to make like 10 hand pies. Last year, for whatever reason, I gathered like one big jar of serviceberries and was like, you know what? I'm tired. And by the time I wasn't tired, I need more serviceberries.

So this year, I'm going to stock up all of my energy and my strength. And we're going to go ham on serviceberries. My neighborhood loves planting them as ornamentals. So they are everywhere. Oh, man. That's going to be in like apartment listings. What is around you that you could eat? Yeah. I honestly think that people need to start listing it because if someone told me

that a house that I was maybe going to move into has a serviceberry tree out, I'd be like, oh, I'm done. So, you know, you don't have a washer or dryer, but you have a serviceberry tree. Who cares? I'll wash my clothes in the sink. That's better for the environment. OK, but what if you belly up to the berry bar to find that it's berry in other ways? So we did back-to-back or sonology episodes that are so good all about bears. And I asked Dr. Lana Chairnello, who's a wildlife consultant and conservationist

who studies human-bear interactions. I asked her your questions about this. OK, so Hannah asks, a tax aside, what are the best ways to prevent a bear encounter? So Hannah, this is really kind of dependent on whether you're going to go in camping or whether you're hiking or whether you're asking me about what are the best ways to prevent an encounter around your home, like removing your bird feeder. So I'm going to answer it like you're going hiking. So one of the best ways to prevent a bear encounter is first to know where you're going,

what time of year you're going there and where you're most likely going to encounter that bear. So if you're going to hike, for example, in berry season through a berry patch, that might not be the best way to go. So you want to avoid their critical habitats or avoid places where those bears are most likely to be. Another way we can prevent encounters is to really be aware of our surroundings. So rather than unplugging and plugging in things like earbuds and listening to music, you want to have your ears open, have your eyes open, have your nose open.

So you want to make sure there's no really bad smells like a dead animal somewhere that might be attracting a bear or you want to make sure that you're looking all around you and know what's going on. Is there any bear sign? Is there scat? Do you see scat is bear poop? By the way, that's what we call it. Is there scat on the trail? Do you see a bunch of birds that could indicate maybe a carcass ahead?

Those kind of things. Then when we're hiking ourselves, you ask, does singing loudly work? Absolutely. I highly recommend using your voice. Your voice identifies you as humans and the vast majority of bears know humans and human beings. So singing loudly definitely works. Clapping your hands absolutely works.

You've asked here about bear bells. I don't recommend bear bells. I don't recommend bear bells because they don't identify you as human. They've been shown to be in the same decibel range as birds. Bears are curious, so we don't want to actually attract them. So I actually don't recommend bear bells. Another thing you want to do, Hannah, is know your line of sight. So if you're coming up to a blind corner, you certainly want to be

using your voice and clapping your hands or singing loudly. As you say, before you're going to come around that corner, warning the bear that you're coming. We don't want surprise encounters. So we want a really good line of sight around us. We want to keep our eyes open. We want to keep our ears open and our nose open in bear country. Avoid those surprise encounters and let bears know we're coming.

Also, we never, ever, ever feed bears or provide food for them. So bears can find their own food, do not provide human food for them. It really is true that a fed bear becomes a dead bear. Another thing that we want to keep in mind in preventing a bear encounter is the direction of the wind. So is the wind blowing towards you? Is it carrying your scent down the trail so that the bear can get your scent before it's there?

So if you're using your voice and then it picks up your scent and the wind bears have an excellent sense of smell. So if they can get that scent, bears really do their best to coexist with us. And a lot of times they'll just move right off that trail, be silent as they can and allow you to pass by. And you might not even know they're there. So wind direction is really important. Wind direction is also important because I highly recommend

that if you're going into bear country, you carry bear spray. Bear spray is an excellent, excellent tool. Should you ever need it? We'd ever want a negative encounter with a bear, but should we have one? We want to be prepared for it. You're also really going to want to know your wind direction then, because the last thing you want is to dispense that spray and get it back all over you, because it really does debilitate you,

sort of incapacitates you for quite a while. Wes has studied bears all over the world and has not gotten killed one time. So let's hear his advice. OK, Lucy asked, I've heard mixed reviews on tools like bear bells and bear bangers and a first hand scene that bear spray does basically nothing. What are the best tools for people to have with them when they head out into bear country? Well, Lucy, I'm going to have to disagree with you on the bear spray thing.

I've also seen it firsthand a lot of times and I've seen it work almost every time I've seen it deployed, whether that's in person or in videos or anything. My mentor was kind of the guy that wrote the paper on bear spray and it's been proven to be really, really effective, much more effective than firearms even. So bear spray is definitely the number one tool I would recommend people take with them into bear country, especially if you're going to be around brown bears.

The bear bells don't really work. Sometimes we actually joke around and call those dinner bells. There's just nothing. There's no real biological significance to that noise for bears. It doesn't really register for them. It's not something that they necessarily pay attention to bear bangers, which are like the little flares or the little pop gun kind of blast that you can shoot at them or like cracker shells or anything like that.

All of that stuff works really well. They don't like flares flying at them. They don't like loud noises. Those all work for me. I carry bear spray and then I have, you know, sometimes a firearm as a backup. And that was Grizz Kid, a.k.a. Wes Larson, who is another great bear expert that you should be following. But one bloodthirsty threat that you should not shoot at is a tick in your butt crack.

So how do you make sure that no one is eating and living rent free in your crotch? Let's ask acrologist and tick expert Dr. Nita Pardinani, shall we? What's the best way to not get bitten by one? Is it repellent? Is it wearing just a wet suit? What is the suit of armor? Yeah.

So unfortunately, in, you know, the 40 years since Lyme disease was first described, you know, right here in the state of Connecticut, we, you know, haven't really done a super job at getting people to prevent disease. In fact, the number of cases in the nation has been growing rather than rather than subsiding. But what we do know from from many research studies is that there are some things that may be protective against Lyme disease specifically. So, for example, we know that in a couple of studies, performing bodily

tick checks frequently can be protective against Lyme disease. So that is inspecting your body and that includes your entire body. So particularly the cracks and the crevices and the, you know, armpas, yeah, well, right. So because the tick will crawl up, right? So it'll crawl, it'll find its host. It'll be waiting on the vegetation for a host to walk by. And so it may, you may encounter it at your leg, but if there's no skin

showing there, it will keep walking up until it finds some skin. So that might mean it will crawl under your shirt and into your armpit or up into your hair behind ears. We find a lot of them at places that are, you know, constricted by, say, a bra strap or, you know, underwear, waistbands, those kinds of things. And so performing a tick check is a good idea. And actually performing one daily is a great idea because the Lyme causing tick, the blacklinged tick is unlikely to transmit the bacteria that causes

Lyme if it's been attached less than 24 hours. Oh, OK. So this is amazing news. There is a magical window, an almost biological grace period in which you are less likely to have one of these tiny bastards drool a disease into your blood. So take a moment to just feel yourself all around. Get comfy with a hand mirror. Also, you can do this one thing that people on the bus might appreciate as well.

Yeah. So the other thing you can do, and there's a couple of studies that support this is take a bath or shower shortly after coming inside from being outside. So that could work in a couple of ways. So you could be washing off ticks that haven't yet attached. If the tick is attached, you know, it's not going to wash off. Unfortunately, it will stay there. The water will not do anything to deter it. But if you haven't, it hasn't attached, you could maybe wash it off.

You're also removing the clothes that you're wearing. They may have ticks crawling upon them. And another thing you can do, and this is all this sort of personal protective measures you can take, you can take your clothing after you've been outside and put it right in the dryer. And there was a study that showed that if you put the clothes directly into the dryer and dry them on high heat for 10 minutes, it should kill the ticks that are crawling upon them.

So, kiddos, like we always say here on allergies, check your crevices. We even have check your crevices merch at allergiesmerch.com if you need it. I'm just saying. And for more on all of this, you can see the acrology episode and the Lyme disease and tick-borne disease ecology episode with Dr. Andrea Sway, which will also link on this episode page on my website, because tick-borne infection, not something you want to be writing home about. Speaking and writing of which, did you know that delteology is the study

of collecting postcards? I did because I interviewed Donna Brayden, who is a museum curator at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, who, for a job, has been a postcard conservator and enthusiast. Do you think that postcards back in the day were the equivalent of a text message, whereas a letter was an email? That's a great, I think you could have something there, because particularly because the back was divided in half.

And one side, you had to put the address on. So you were left with one half of a postcard to write the message. And I have messages on some of them where, you know, people used up the space because they wrote too big and then they're like writing all around the edges on the top. But I don't think you were supposed to. The post office did not like it if you ran over into the side with the address. Right.

Because that was like the rule, the address, the stamp, and only the side is for the right. So that's a great point. You were forced to write almost like a post-it note size message on there. And that's why when we studied messages on the back of postcards for an exhibit, we did called Americans on Vacation. It was fascinating not only to see what people wrote, but also there were certain formulaic ways that people wrote things. I love this.

I love that because you had to write in phrases and there were certain things people commented on repeatedly, the weather. Yeah, heartbreaking down. They're like one of the kids poked the other's eye out. We're getting a divorce. See you soon. But interestingly, we also found that there was a lot of we're not sure how far they stretched it, but people tended to want to make their vacation sound really good.

Oh, my God, that's what they do on Instagram. And Facebook, I mean, it's a bragging thing, right? So like we are here and you are not. Yes. Therefore, we're going to make it sound as good as possible. And there's the classic having a wonderful time. Wish you were here showed up repeatedly. I mean, it's not made up.

It was always that kind of we're having a great time and you're not, you know, you're not kind of a little bit of one-offsmanship. No one's ever like, the wife got salmonella from the shrimp buffet. I don't hear that a lot on a put maybe a letter. Yeah, you know, maybe a letter. But where people have a little more time to play that out, certainly journals that we've read sort of trip diaries where they don't expect anyone to ever read them. Oh, yeah, I have a lot myself on those.

But postcards, no, it's very short and sweet and it's mostly highlights. And like social media now, it is kind of like that. You know, get a picture and a little bit of impression, mostly positive. So now the Americans on vacation collection you put together, where did you get those postcards and what was it like reading all those little messages and like seeing the handwriting and the postcard? Was that just was that mind blowing for you? We I can't even remember how we came up with the idea to do

a presentation in the exhibit on the messages in postcards. I think as we read about vacations, we realized that everybody is familiar with the pictures on the front, but not a lot of people are familiar with what people say on the back. Nobody's written anything about that. It was a new idea. So when we started reading them, they went, this is rich. And we thought, all right, we need to start collecting.

We need to start accumulating a collection of postcards with interesting messages. How do we do that? So we went to antique shows and there was a one nearby here that was every month. And so my colleague I was working with and I went there for the specific goal of looking at postcards with messages. And there were a few dealers we knew that had postcards and they were all organized by state or topic. And they were freaked out by what we were doing.

They're like, well, what topic are you looking for? I can help you. And we're like, no, not really looking for a topic. We're just reading the backs. And eventually they just gave up and threw up their hands and said, OK, you're on your own. And they let us stay for like, I don't know, an hour or two hours at a time because they didn't organize anything that way.

No one ever bought postcards that way. And we just had the best time reading all of them. And we made a pile of some of the more interesting good and bad messages. And that became this media presentation in the exhibit. So this Americans on Vacation exhibit appropriately toured the country and it featured these chronological looks at types of recreating. We did back in the day and it had this audio visual component of actors reading the backs of vintage postcards, kind of giving life to these

long gone moments and voices to people who would never know that their road trip or steamer cruise memories would be in the hands of postcard collectors and in the ears of future strangers. And I tried so hard to find audio of this, but we're just going to have to imagine. I'm imagining and it's super cool. OK. Like maybe someone this summer will send a postcard that reads, dear grandpa, I'm having such a good time this summer with my friends, even though one of them wouldn't let me pee on them.

Toxinologist Anna Klompin explains. And what happened if you get stung by jellyfish? I was in Hawaii, someone in our group got stung by jellyfish. I was like, what's going to happen? Who's going to pee on him? What do we do? What happens? Please don't pee on them. Nobody should pee. Yeah, that's a very common flimflam. I guess you say for that.

So let me start from so when you're stung by a jellyfish, what's happening is that you've either touched the tentacles or something and hundreds to maybe thousands of stinging cells have now kind of punctured and are sticking to you and injecting venom into your through your skin. I am in no position to give medical advice. I want to say that right away, but I can definitely tell you things you should not do. So you definitely should not pee on it. And in the same same vein, you should not put fresh water on it.

So I actually use fresh water to discharge stinging cells in the lab. So so if you and your urine is basically fresh water, at the same time, actually peeing on someone, the pressure from peeing on them will make them fire. No, it's like throwing kerosene on a fire. Only it's pee and it's venom filled cells firing into a skin inferno. Now, if you have ever had the insult of pee being added to the entry of a sting, I am so sorry for the emotions that this is bringing up in you.

So other than see a therapist later, what should you do? So the one of the best things that you can do is to try and get if there's any pieces of tentacle, which is very possible, you want to get that off and you want to try and get as many of the stinging cells off as possible. And the one of the better ways to do that, if you have tweezers, you can try and pick them up with tweezers. Tweezers aren't always available.

So going back into the ocean, wherever you were and got stung and using saltwater, so saltwater will not activate the stinging cell to fire anymore. And you very gently, as much as you can, try and use saltwater to wash away the tentacle and any of the stinging cells in that area. Oh, smart. OK, so go back to the scene of the crime. Yeah, but be careful. You're not like there's not more jellyfish or whatnot. So Anna says that Dr.

Angel Yanagahara of the University of Minoa does amazing work in venoms as well. And she got into the field after sustaining a near fatal sting during a morning ocean swim decades ago. But her 2017 study showed that seawater could worsen the stings if the pressure of the rinse is too hard, like it would be with a robust stream of pee. Then the next best thing. So it now kind of varies. A lot of places recommend vinegar.

So vinegar will actually prevent more. If there are stinging cells, less will prevent them from firing. So it kind of deactivates them. But there's some controversy that for some species, it might make them fire more. But for box jellyfish, I should say box jellyfish in places where you know there's box jellyfish vinegar definitely helps. OK. Like a good citizen, before you go out into the ocean, check if it's jellyfish season and what jellyfish will be there. Oh, you can do that?

There is a jellyfish forecast. Yeah, my family will go to South Carolina fairly often. So they do have reports on when jellyfish season is, which is normally the warmer months, but it varies again between species. And they will have the most up to date for that area kind of precaution. So do some googling. Should you worry about sharks, though? Well, you can listen to the Salaca morphology episode with Dr. Chris Low or the follow up a lasmo brancology episode, which includes safety

stats and pop culture clips from various shark scientists from Miss Alasmo. And the miss stands for minorities in shark science. And this is a great time to toss some money their way. Thank you to sponsors of the show. Missalasmo.org is a nonprofit and they provide a community and funding opportunities for gender minorities of color who wish to enter the field of shark science. And they have tons of really great programs. You can actually join them shark tagging.

You can see missalasmo.org to donate to them, which I think you should, and to learn more. And thank you to sponsors of the show for making our donation possible. OK, where were we? Yes. Alasmo brancology facts from Jasmine Graham. My pronouns are she, her, and I am the president and CEO of minorities in shark sciences, also known as Miss. Any favorite or least favorite pop cultural sharks?

My favorite shark movie is Deep Blue Sea because it's so ridiculous. The science is so ridiculous that it's hilarious. And it is genetically modified sharks, which I think is a very interesting take on things. So I liked that in the movie, they talk about how, you know, the natural order of sharks, they're not aggressive. They're not doing all these things. And so they set the stage and say, we're going to make this movie,

but we're going to acknowledge that sharks aren't actually like this. This is a very special situation where someone has really messed with these sharks. And that's why they're acting like that. And it's one of those movies that really makes you root for the shark because they have been done wrong. And I relate also the greatest scene ever where Samuel Jackson is giving an impassioned speech. We're going to pull together and we're going to find a way to get out of here.

And then gets eaten by a shark is hilarious. And the greatest moment in cinematic history, in my opinion. So, yeah, that's kind of what I have to say about sharks. What about minorities in shark science? We are an organization dedicated to supporting women of color interested in shark science, and we want everyone to get an appreciation for sharks. There is a misconception that sharks are these man eating, mindless, killing machines, and that is not true.

Sharks are extremely intelligent. They're actually more discerning in what they want to eat than we give them credit for in movies and things like that. They're not aggressive. They're actually more afraid of us than we are of them, which they should be because we killed millions of sharks a year and only one or two people a year is killed by sharks. It's true. The 2020 Shark Chomp Report is a real snooze, to be honest.

Not a lot going on. So these facts are like sleepy at best. Thirty three people in the US got bitten by sharks last year, three fatally. Only 10 fatalities worldwide from sharks. What? So how many sharks die by human hands each year? Well, the journal Marine Policy estimates one hundred million. So in this scenario, definitely the sharks have a bigger reason to be afraid of us.

So that's really what I want people to take away from all the outreach and education that I do is that sharks are just like any other animals. They're just out here trying to survive and they need our help because we are killing them at an alarming rate. Some of them are endangered. Many of them are threatened. And it's important that we think about what it would mean for the ecosystem if we were to take out these apex and meso predators out of our systems.

So that is why I study sharks. And that is why Jasmine and Miss is amazing. And just as long as we're confronting some of your summer anxieties, let's check in with spexology guest Eric Eaton, who wants to make wasps not your summer enemy. They're just trying to make a living. First time question asker, Xero Piachoki wants to know how is it that wasps and bees are so similar,

looks are similar, but wasps have evolved to consume meat. Well, bees are content just to rub their butts in flour dust. Why do some wasps eat meat? I know when I used to be a caterer, when there were yellow jackets, they'd be like, just throw a piece of ham over there to divert them. What's up with that? Well, again, you know, the adult wasps are not consuming protein matter. They're taking it back for their offspring.

Amazing. And so, yeah, so they'll I've watched a yellow jacket cut a piece out of my turkey sandwich and fly off with it. It's like, you know, the one by the way, one thing I want to caution all your listeners about is serving beverages outdoors. Do not serve them in cans or opaque bottles or glassware. You can get a yellow jacket crawling in there. And if you get stung on your tongue, you know, even if you're not allergic,

that can be a life-threatening experience. You know, serve your beverages in clear glasses. So about a million people go to the ER every year for insect stings. But most are just fine, but about 60 to 70 people die every year from allergic reactions to stinging bugs. So just look for symptoms like tingling sensations, dizziness, hives, the skin kind, swelling of your lips or tongue. Maybe having a hard time breathing or wheezing or if someone just straight up

passes out, no matter why, you should probably go to the ER for that last one. Anyway, but one of Eric's pals, he says, you may have heard of him. Justin Schmidt, the king of sting. He's he's called to it created the Schmidt pain index of insect stings. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. He occasionally will self-inflict sting upon himself and and then then describe it and rate it on a scale of one to four, four being the worst thing. And one, you know, being the barely detectable, basically.

A honeybee is a number two on his scale, by the way. But he found out that tarantula hawks, which they need their venom to paralyze their tarantula prey. I mean, you've got to have a pretty wicked sting, I would think, to paralyze a tarantula anyway. Yeah. But it turns out that it's absolutely excruciatingly painful if you get stung by one of those things, but in about three minutes,

you're fine and it doesn't do any damage. Oh, it's totally tailored to the prey item thereafter. And that's for for solitary wasps. That's the deal. They're telling their venom to a specific host. They're not worried about self-defense. So for solitary wasps, their venom is really prey specific. Now, what about the city wasps?

The ones who live in big paper buildings on the side of your house or underground with thousands of other ones, and they just love love the hustle, bustle of the nest life. But for social wasps, that's another story. I mean, there that is the purpose of their sting is, you know, get the hell away from our nest. We got babies in there, get out and they will, you know, they can route a bear out of their nest.

So what's the highest on the Schmidt index you've ever been stung? Oh, wow. Somewhere around a three, probably a paper wasp got me once, and that was pretty painful. Yeah. Mayor McCollochist Terry McGlynn talked to me about his bullet ant. Yeah. Bite did not feel good, a sting.

Oof. Will Eric ever be sticking his face into a nest for YouTube clout? My feeling about myself is that if it ever becomes about me, I need to find another line of work because I want it to be about the message. And my message is that, you know, these things deserve, you know, an appreciation and respect that we're not giving them right now. So sure, they may have knives on their butts, but that's just how they have elucidated. Not all of us can have an ass that's a disco like Fireflies,

which are out right now in many parts of North America and the world. And this nextologist, Dr. Sarah Lewis is one of the world authorities on Fireflies. And in a surprise twist, instead of the more expected Limpuridology title, she insisted, as a matter of record, that she is a sparkle botologist. That is theology. She's about to make you turn off the TV and go sit on the porch,

just blinking into the grassy abyss on the hunt for magic. And what about you? Are you a night person? How much of your work involves these really long nights? Yeah, it's crazy. You know, I don't know what people who live in the tropics where firefly season is all year round. I don't know how they survive because, you know, in the temperate zone,

you have a kind of a short firefly season that might go from, I don't know, like May until September or maybe just June, July, August. And during the firefly season, my students and I basically we work day and night. We get so strung out. It's ridiculous. We can't even think straight. People hate us. Our partners like leave us. Our dog, you know, walks out. It's really bad. You can do it for a few years and then you have to take a break.

But, you know, we're usually out in the field at night. And then we are often doing lab experiments with fireflies that we've collected from the field and then put on a reverse like light cycle so that they think it's nighttime when it's actually daytime. And so during the day, we work in a dark room on fireflies that think it's night. So you can get kind of strung out on that for for after a while. But, you know, it's it's all worth it. Yeah, it's fabulous to be able to bring some of the, you know,

magic of these creatures to light and to let people know, you know, that they're real and they're really, really kind of amazing. They're real and they're spectacular. And you mentioned the tropics and the temperate zones. Does that mean that they don't inhabit like arid climates as much? Why don't we have them in California? Yeah. So another myth that I am actually really glad to, well, happy to be able to debunk is that a lot of people think

that there aren't any fireflies in the Western United States. And that's not true. So happy, you should be happy because there are. So there's at least three different kinds of fireflies. There's the daytime fireflies. They fly during the daytime. The adults don't light up even though the larvae do. They're still in the same firefly family.

There's lots of those in California and in the West. There are also glowworm fireflies where the females typically while the females glow, typically they are worm like as in they don't fly. And there is really, really cool glowworm fireflies on the West Coast, including you. You got to Google this, the California pink glowworm. Oh, my God, they're so beautiful. They are really beautiful and they're all over California. And I don't know why people don't recognize those as fireflies.

The males don't light up, but the females do. They glow for hours to attract these flying unlit males. And they're really, really cool. OK, hold the phone. Boy, howdy, hot damn. What? OK, so I'm a lifelong Californian, absolute sniveling simp for bugs. And yet this is the first I'm hearing ever of the pink glowworm. Alias, the firefly beetle, microphotos angustis. Now, the ladies stay kind of babylike in a larva ish form

and they just cruise the leaf litter kind of like salmon colored, segmented, tiny hot dogs. And then their soulmates are dude beetles who fly around, not glowing, but just looking out for butts. Now, I have spent my life jealous of New Jersey and ignoring all of these horny, babylike sparkle butts under my California nose. But as long as we're getting regional, I covered this ages ago in a mini sewage. You probably never heard, but do you call them you personally?

Do you call them fireflies or lightning bugs? Take a moment, vote aloud while you're layering up a lasagna or welding something or brushing a chinchilla. Lightning bugs. OK, I hope one of you said Peony Wallies because a University of Cambridge linguistics professor by the name of Bert Vo also needed to know firefly or lightning bug. So he asked 10,000 Americans what they call sparkle butts. 40 percent of you go either way, firefly, lightning bug, you don't care.

30 percent of us are exclusively Team Firefly. Hello, West Coast. Hi, Massachusetts. And about another 30 percent say, yeah, no, it's lightning bug. The South greetings to you. But to my delight and probably Professor Vos, the Fuddleman, point, oh, two percent of those people he polled call these glowing summer cuties Peony Wallies.

So that's two people in a study of 10,000. And if they are not already friends, oh, I hope they find each other. I want them to hold hands and just stare into the summer dusk. So my point is we need not be a nation divided on the topic of Peony Wallies, especially now because. And the other exciting news, and this is something that we're really just actually this is really, really recent, that we have begun to realize that there are flashing fireflies in the Western United States.

So there's actually there's a Western Firefly Project that's run out of the Natural History Museum of Utah. And they've been mapping flashing fireflies in Utah, Nevada, nearby states for since 2014. There is a new project called the New Mexico Firefly Project. There's flashing fireflies in New Mexico in Colorado. I heard a rumor there might be flashing fireflies in Oregon. So a lot of this is very, very recent.

And a lot of it is based on citizen science, like community science observations, just people going out into the night looking for fireflies in different places where there are certain characteristics like moisture, like darkness and food for the Firefly larvae. So, yeah, it's really exciting. There are Western fireflies. That's a myth that it just gives me great pleasure to be able to say no, not true. You do have them and they're really, really beautiful.

So, yeah. So if you've been asking fireflies, where have you been all my life? The answer is perhaps closer than you thought right here, literally with a flashing butt. You just didn't notice. OK, super exciting 2022 update. I saw a Peony Wally at last in California. OK, so it was last week. It was a little glow worm.

It was segmented, kind of the color of raw tuna with an LED posterior. And I posted some photos on my Instagram at Ali Ward. And after the first night, I saw her and lost my mind. It was here in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada's in Northern California. I went back to the same spot the next night to show my young niece and nephew. And sure enough, there she was. And that second night, a moth blew up to her. And I was like, oh, shit, that's not a moth.

That's a male. They're doing the nasty. And I had to tell my niece and nephew, like, let's give them a little privacy. They only have a very small window for this. And, hey, wow, let's check out that rock over there. What a great rock. So I hope those two make many sparkly babies this summer. And as long as we're on the topic of flashes of light in the night,

let's address the bombs bursting in air here in America. If, like me, you have a pup that has diarrhea as explosive as your neighbor's fireworks, did you know what you can ask your vet for Xanax at a time? But the only caveat is that it's just for the dog, not for you, no matter how much many Americans need a sedative right now. And speaking of July 4th and the not feeling very United States of America, you can celebrate this ragged democracy by listening to the 2019 nomology episode with Dr.

Fernita Tolson, who is the vice dean of USC's law school. She's a constitutional scholar who let me ask her an absolute barrel full of questions that many of us have, such as, what is happening and why? Where does she think our constitution stacks up globally in terms of other governments? It's one of the oldest, I think, right? I think, I don't know if it's the oldest, but it's definitely top five oldest. The interesting thing about the world is, especially as I've really learned to appreciate other societies, this is not the only way to do this.

Our constitution is so old and, you know, we kind of hold it up as a model. I think that politicians love to call America the light on the shining hill or whatever the term is. I looked up this term and it's been said a few different ways over the centuries, many times in presidential speeches, but remixes include that light on the hill, that shining city on the hill, the shining city, and a city upon a hill. And it's said to come from Puritan colonist John Winthrop's speech as a bunch of folks were boarding a ship to set sail to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

And Winthrop said that the new settlement would be, as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us, which meant, don't screw this up, don't wild out. It's a spring break, OK? Everyone's watching, so keep your holy bits and your breaches and like try not to kill too many people, paraphrasing. But this is not the only way to do this. And so comparatively, I don't know how it stacks up because I've never lived on any other system, but I also welcome suggestions from other types of government

because from other forms of government, because I recognize that this is not the only way to do it. It's not perfect and we're still working on it, right? It really is a question of how much work are we willing to put in in order to build a society where everyone can feel included? We, the people of the United States. And that might require looking at other constitutions and looking at other countries and seeing how they do it.

And how about this? Two senators for every state situation? Like, can we just go in there with a little little racer? And is that going to, do you think that that will continue? Or was that what they had in mind when they wrote it? That's what they had in mind. It's part of the compromise. Yeah.

The House of Representatives is based on population and every state gets two senators. I don't see that changing anytime soon. I know that people have strong feelings about it, right? It seems weird that Wyoming and New York state and California and North Dakota all have the same representation. Yes. And then the Senate rules make them make the Senate, especially non-democratic, right, and non-Republican in some sense as well.

But I don't see that changing anytime soon. That would actually require a constitutional amendment. So just to side note, after this interview, I realized I forgot to ask Franita about the Electoral College. So I emailed her and was like, what's the deal with the Electoral College? Is it fair? Is it unfair? Is it going anywhere?

And she wrote me right back and said, quote, Unfortunately, the Electoral College is not going anywhere without a constitutional amendment. However, some states have taken steps to neutralize its effects by joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, where participants pledge their electoral votes to the candidate that wins the popular vote. And so far, 16 states have joined the compact. There's more information available at nationalpopularvote.com. It's like, what?

So I went and looked it up. And those 16 states that have pledged their electoral votes to the candidate with a popular vote include California, Colorado, Connecticut, DC, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. If you're like, hmm, my state was not listed. How might I get myself some of that legislative action? Go to nationalpopularvote.com.

Now, remember, amendments can take a little bit longer than state to state legislation. And as I pointed out, we haven't amended the Constitution since 1992. And because we have depended on the court so much, I don't even think there are people in this generation that understand the political sort of capital and the political cost and the political mobility that will be required in order to change the Constitution. Like constitutional change comes as a result of movements, right? Political movements.

And so we have political movements now, but I don't think they're the same as the political movements of the 1960s, for example, right? But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. Or the political movements of the progressive era, which also led to some constitutional changes, right? And so I just don't think that people alive today, no offense millennials, right? No offense. But I don't think my generation included have a clear sense of what will be required

in order for us to actually amend the Constitution. What would be required? What kind of what kind of revolution or uprising? Gosh, you know, I don't I don't even know, right? Because I think that the progressive era, they were really concerned about corruption in government. OK, so side note, I did not know when the progressive era was. So I Googled it and it was in the 1890s to around 1920.

And according to a glossary on the George Washington University page, the early progressives rejected social Darwinism. They believed that poverty, violence, greed, racism, class warfare could best be addressed by providing things like a good education and a safe environment and a good workplace. And they encouraged Americans to register to vote and to fight political corruption. Now, the progressive era came to an end after World War One. This glossary says when the evils of humankind were exposed.

But by the 1960s, we had the civil rights movement. And Farnita rightly calls that one of the biggest political movements in history. That kind of action and engagement and sacrifice is what gets amendments made. People were really politically active. People were paying attention. They were focused. They would have to be like that across many states and for a longer period of time. And given the fact that we live in the social media, Twitter, Facebook,

what's going on today, world, will people pay attention that long? I don't know. Yeah. There's what we could always try. All right. We could try. I am an advocate of trying. I have nothing against using Article Five.

So Article Five was on the original Constitution. So this is not to be confused with the Fifth Amendment on the Bill of Rights. So Article Five on the original Parchment Constitution says that to make an amendment, you need two-thirds of the House and Senate or two-thirds of all the states calling a convention. So who ends up in the House and Senate? Matters. And in fact, I think that constitutional amendment is important because even if you are able to go to the Supreme Court and get them to interpret the Constitution in a way that

you agree with, it's only good for as long as that coalition is on the court. Right now we have justices like Justice Thomas who don't believe and be that the court should really adhere to precedent. Right? So if others adopt his view and precedent has no value, then there's nothing keeping the next coalition of justices from overturning an interpretation of the Constitution. And so I think given the direction that the court is headed in, Article Five will probably be more important.

But in order for Article Five to really work, people have to pay attention. And if you have been meaning to read the Constitution in its entirety, I did it for us. Part Two of Nomology is every word of the United States Constitution, with a few clarifying asides here and there, just for your hammock swing and pleasure. You can nap to it. You could take notes. You could change your whole life, apply to law school,

or you can just soak your lows maybe with a margarita. Hey, how do you make a cocktail that doesn't suck? Glad you asked. I asked world-renowned cocktail chef and mixology guest Matthew Biencanello. And it's some of the easiest math you're ever going to do. Okay, now listen up, because this may be the most useful mixology lesson you can ever learn. You can never make a bland or syrupy, gross drink again if you know this. How did you dive in to try to understand the craft of cocktails?

I mean, it sounds like you started looking into daiquiris and realizing, okay, there's a formula. There's like a math here. And it's plug-in and player, right? What are the basic ratios of that? Because I know that you don't really follow by ratios. Yes, very simple. So it was always two ounces of spirit, and then three-quarter lime,

three-quarter gavi. If you were just doing it on its own, you would up the lime to one. So an easy way to remember this is the golden ratio, roughly two to one to one. Two-part spirit, one-part sweet, like a liqueur or some kind of simple syrup, and one-part tart, like lemon, lime, or grapefruit, two to one to one. You can make almost any cocktail a good one at home for almost three. And then when you go to fancy speakeasies like L.A.'s Varnish or New York's Deathing Company, you'll be able to nod at the mixologist in a way that says,

I know your tricks, you're a math nerd. Remember one time this guy got me like the specs for the Varnish, you know what I mean? Like all of their classes. And I looked at it and it was like, okay, I can see what they're doing. I can see some patterns or I can see what they do when they do a straight thing. So it was like, that just kind of strengthened it. In terms of technique, I still feel like I don't really have technique.

Yeah, I think it's this. Yeah, I still think I lack that if I'm being honest. And I think like, like I said, I think it's not that I don't have some technique, but I think what's interesting about where I'm at right now is there's still so much to learn. And I remember just like, you would just, and I think it was also Dale de Graff's book. I think it was called The Essential Cocktail. So I ended up getting that book and I got to read why he did certain things and the stirring and the shaking and all that.

So I adapted that stuff. But I remember like no one taught me. So there I am like trying to stir and I couldn't do it with the spoon. So I had to bend it into a C shape. I took the spoon, the metal spoon and bent it so much that it was easy for me to stir. So it also got to the point when I started doing some consulting and I tell people like, you know what, you don't need to worry about that right now. Let's just get a metal chopstick and it's the same thing.

Just do that. Just get used to stirring it. So I got into, I got sympathetic and interested in teaching people that knew nothing. It was more interesting to me than someone who had technique already. But I still feel like I don't really have a strong technique. That's funny that you say that because I think you're widely regarded as probably one of the best cocktail chefs in the country. Easy, hands down.

Your name is just like, you're just at the top of the pyramid for sure. How do you feel about cocktail culture and the buttoned vest, sneery faced suspender clad? Well, I personally feel, listen, I think I understood where it started from and all that. And I just, I don't know. I just, I think what, and I'm not even referring to the vest because I think it's nice that, you know, people will look nice. I understand all that. But I really do think that as time went by, I think a lot of the attitudes that people had

in the kind of feeling, what's the superior? It kind of killed the culture a lot. And I really feel like, you know, when drinks started escalating and people like, ugh, you know, they're more like that about it. You know what I mean? And I feel like some of that really kind of destroyed some of the culture of cocktails and how they should be regarded, I guess, you know, people would tell me stories like, they go into a bar and they'd ask for this drink and, you know, they'd make the drink

and they didn't really like it. And the bartender would be like, that drink is perfect. You know? Yeah. And the thing is, is how that's the opposite of how I operate because I operate on, I am going to make this drink for you until you tell me it's great. If you don't like it, I would horrify people where I'd make a drink and be like, I could see it in their face.

I would grab it out of their hand and dump it. They didn't understand that. They didn't understand how I would take a drink because like, that's booze. I'm like, I don't think of it. That's booze. Yeah. And I would dump it. So, yeah, it's, you know, there's a lot of layers in that.

And for me, the biggest challenge for me was to just stay true to who I was, even though some of the times it was like, fuck, you know, difficult, you know. And I never wavered from what I did. That was always important to me is I never wavered from what I was doing. If you are drinking, your balance and judgment may waver. Just a little PSA here, designated driver. There's just a lot wrong in the world right now. The last thing we need is an accident.

This is why I'm your dad. Please be safe. I love you. Also, just in buttoning up this episode, I thought maybe we could revisit summer makeouts as a person who had a hookup in July with a guy nine years younger than me and then married his ass a decade later. What? He's now your pod mom, Jared.

I'm just a big fan of sweaty night romances, right, babe? We're huge fans. They're gross. Why do you think humans slobber on each other? This is almost the big evolutionary question that remains unanswered. It's not full clear. There are various suggestions one can make. One is it's clearly very kind of erotic, if you like.

It's very arousing. And the lips have a lot of brain tissue devoted to them. Sensory brain tissue is devoted to the lips disproportionately. So put it this way. Monkeys and apes are very tactile. They do a lot of cuddling and stroking and if you like, all those kind of things we do. And a lot of this sort of social grooming and social grooming triggers the release

of endorphins in the brain, which kind of make you feel very relaxed and happy, contented with the world. It's very 1960s hippie age. Endless sun, chill vibes, hot bodies. The world is a beautiful place and very trusting of the person you're doing this with or who's doing it too. And these involve a very special set of neurons which only respond to light, slow stroking of the skin.

And we have those neurons too. They're known as the C-tactile neurons. They don't do anything else. They're not involved in pain or sensing pain or anything like that. We respond exactly the same way. That's why in our closer relationships, we're very tactile. It's an awful lot of cuddling and petting. And I don't mean this in a kind of social context.

I mean, just when you're talking to your good friends, there's a tap on the shoulder and the arm around the shoulder and all this kind of thing that goes on. We're very tactile in that sense, even though we don't really think about it. But on the other hand, because it's a very intimate thing, as it is in monkeys' names, you don't do it with everybody. When you're caught in a crowded lift, you feel very uncomfortable because all these people in very close physical contact with you. And normally, you'd only allow your nearest and dearest family and friends to be in that

close physical contact with you. So we are very ambivalent about it for the very reason that touch is very kind of indicative of both close relationships and also spilling over from that, quickly gets exploited in courtship and sexual relationships between partners. So the lips clearly play a major role in that. But that said, one of the other things that happens during kissing in particular is the exchange of huge quantities of bacteria. Right.

A 10-minute kiss, I forget the exact amount, but it results in the exchange of something like 10 million bacteria from one body to the next. So a 2014 study out of Amsterdam revealed that one 10-second French kiss can transfer 80 million microbes into your partner's mouth. That is the entire population of New York City cramming into your mouth every second of a kiss. That's love, baby. If he was interested in me, he'd want my germs. He'd just crave my germs.

No. Now, this is quite useful because actually it tells an awful lot about the other person. So you've both got bacteria, the microbiotic elements from the other person being exchanged, but also you're getting a lot of the, in the saliva and stuff, a lot of the enzymes and other bits and pieces that the body produces, in particularly immune systems. So your personal smell, I hate to raise this tricky issue at this juncture, but your personal smell and taste are directly determined by the same genes, same set of genes that determine your immune system.

Really? So we're using our tongues and our snoots to gather intimate intel about a person's immune system. You thought Google was sneaky. The nose is sneaky here. So is the tongue. So you're just doing research, okay? Let your brain suss things out.

You're doing great. If you're like, make out, scam fires, ocean visits, whatever, I just want to be happy in a world that feels weird. Let's end this summer, so with some science on how to stack your mental deck on the side of happiness with eudomonology guest and happiness researcher, legit Dr. Laurie Santos. Ben DeWerst says, I'm just finishing up my MBA and in one of my classes, they talked about how optimism is actually an attribute of emotional intelligence and can be learned as an optimist myself.

I'd always considered it more of a part of my personality, like extroverted or introverted and unteachable. So how would someone go about learning and training to be an optimist? And what's the relationship there? Also, is there a relationship between happiness and emotional or just like IQ intelligence? I feel like there's some badge of like, if you're unhappy, it must mean that you know more and therefore you're smarter. That's interesting.

I don't know of any data that have looked specifically at IQ and happiness. My guess is there's probably not the relationship that you're looking at. But there is definitely a relationship between happiness and optimism, obviously. I think optimism is sort of part of our general happy life. And the good news, based on this question, is you can in fact learn these kinds of things. The fastest thing to do is really try to just train your brain to pay attention to good things out there. Our minds are naturally tuned to negative things, the yucky stuff out there, the griping.

But we can tune our minds towards positive things. You can focus on what you're grateful for. Another practice that I've been into lately, which I talk about on the podcast, is focusing on delights. Sometimes gratitude can feel sort of cheesy, but you can just focus on things that are delightful out there, like the sunshine, that's delightful. The fact that coffee exists, that's delightful. Some funny video on the internet, that's delightful, right?

Like training your brain towards things that you really enjoy that kind of cause delight. Okay. So if the term gratitude journaling conjures up visions of sickly, sweet and chamomile tea, just opt for the term delights, which is just like a straightforward, good cup of coffee. Actually, for years, my husband, Jared, has cited a short tally of favorite things. His are lavender soap, coffee, and sandwiches. And he says, just thinking of those three things and letting his mind wander to more, helped him during a really deep depression.

So gratitude journaling, delights, whatever you want to call it. Jared calls his, his do not kill yourself list, which is kind of like the Miami Cola bang energy drink of a gratitude practice branding. Would you agree? That's my favorite bang flavor. Is it really? Miami Cola? That's on the list.

Again, your brain is going to focus on whatever you give it data for. So if you give it data about things that you're feeling really grateful about, or that are really delightful, that's what your brain is going to start noticing. I love that you just are, you're constantly filling evidence folders for like, things are shitty and things are good. It's like, what are you putting in your evidence folder pretty much? And, and, and it's not just like, you know, what you're picking. It's like you're, you're training your brain to look for that stuff.

In my podcast, I interview this fantastic guest, Ross Gay, who's a poet and an essayist who is this book called The Book of Delights. And he decided that for every day for a year after his birthday, he would write an essay about something that delighted him. And he talks about how at first he was like really worried, like am I really going to find things that really delight me. And he said that, you know, even just a week in, like he'd kind of tuned his mind to find these things.

You know, as a walking down the street, you'd be like, oh, that dude's t-shirt is delightful. I'm like, oh, that like cat on the street is delightful. Like he just, he just kind of shifted his perception and tuned his mind more towards the good things than the bad things. Our brains evolutionarily are naturally tuned towards the bad things. Makes sense. You want to see the tiger that's going to jump out at you. Yeah.

But we can control that tuning. And just by, you know, like taking some explicit work to pay attention to the things we're grateful for to the things that delight us to the good stuff out there. So yes, Ross Gay, The Book of Delights. And again, check out Neil has reached his work and his awesomeology episode. Another fun project, start a private Twitter just for yourself and chronicle delights of your own or a private Instagram account or something. Also, I should note that in recording this episode, the internet dropped out a few times.

So I had to email Dr. Santos a new link during it. And she has an auto reply message explaining that she may not write back and it explains that she gets more than 100 emails a day. And it reads in part, quote, keeping up with that many questions slash requests meant that I was hurting my own time affluence and having less time for the important projects I really should be prioritizing. And so I am currently trying my own personal well-being experiment. I'm going to try to practice what I preach and reduce the amount of time I usually spend on

email. Thanks for your understanding as I try not to overcommit and protect myself from burning out. Oh, I love her. Totally solid major props for walking her talk. She is the best. So ask smart people, not smart questions. And don't be afraid to seek out happiness where you can find it. You absolutely deserve it.

And without self-care and managing mental health wellness, we can't help others where fight the good fights. So that is a reminder to you also to me. Summer is far from over too. It's not too late for me to hustle. I can still cover Batology, which did you know is the study of brambles to learn the intricacies of raspberries and blackberries. Man, I love a bramble.

We're also really overdue for a hydrology episode about water. And you know what? Why don't I know jack shit about heliology? Because we've never done an episode on the sun and we need it, which also brings us to melanology, which is an actual science of skin pigment. I want to hear everything. I want to do that one too. So perhaps this summer I can deliver a few of those to you.

We'll see what we can do. And thank you for hanging out with me on your vacations or just your regular weekday, work days. Thank you to every patron at patreon.com. Slash allergies for supporting the show. Thank you to Aaron Talbert, who admins the Allergies Podcast Facebook group. With this is from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltas of the Comedy Podcast. You are that.

Hello to the Allergies folks on Reddit. Thank you to Susan Hale, who handles allergiesmerch.com and so much else. And while Dilworth does our scheduling, Emily White of the Wordery makes professional transcripts, Caleb Patton bleeps episodes. So if you hate bad words, you can listen with them bleeped via alleyword.com. We also have 13 episodes so far that have been trimmed of filth and truncated for little attention spans. And those are called smallergies.

Those are in your feed. They're also all available at alleyword.com. Slash smallergies. Thank you, Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas, for heading that up with a assist from Mercedes Maitland and Stephen Ray Morris. Kelly R. Dwyer does website design. She can do yours too. She's linked to the show notes.

Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music and huge thanks to Mercedes Maitland and your sleeper, both of Mindjam Media, for pulling all these clips for me. As I had this dream of a balmy compilation, I married to only one of those two people, but you're both wonderful. If you stick around to the end of the episode, you know I tell you a secret lately. Y'all have been tuning in to hear how my dad is doing just to catch you up. He has a blood cancer called multiple myeloma. You can listen to the 2018 hematology episode about it.

And that led to more cancers, including lung tumors. And we found out he had a malignant brain tumor in April. And after fighting for nine years, his oncologist decided it's time to stop treatment. So we're with him now during his hospice. Jared and I have relocated to a mattress in my sister's hallway the last few months. We're by his side with him and my mom and my family just to soak up time and help him with what he needs. Yeah, it's been beautiful.

It's also been hardest time of our lives. Hospice has ups and downs, but we're lucky right now. He's feeling really present. He's getting up by himself in the middle of the night. Without ringing his bell for help, despite our begging him to. We had a really good father's day. We made him his favorite rhubarb pie. Only rhubarb, no strawberries allowed in grandpa's rhubarb pie.

And we give him a pomegranate tree. It's his favorite fruit for some sentimental reasons. Story for another episode, but it's been a really rough week for me personally in America for any people who do not want religion-based minoritarian rule in their highest courts. And I speak from my own past experience. Just when I say it can be a lot easier to chant for hours at a protest than it can be to stand up to blood relatives

and tell them how their votes oppress people that they will never meet. So if you'll shout it at a march or you'll repost it on Instagram, then consider dropping some facts in the fam chat. If you have a mixed political family like I do, I'm kind of the blue sheep in a red family, if I'm being honest. Um, it's pretty fucked up time. Um, just all around. My voice is hoarse from crying and maybe from COVID,

as my sister just tested positive after hanging out with us and my parents. So, um, a little stressed, but we're getting through it day by day. Another secret, if you want one, is that when it comes to mango, I like it real crunchy. Just, I like my fruit crisp and I like it underripe, even a little tannic. And my favorite part of a pineapple, if you must know, is the, that fibery core that everyone throws away. Give it to me.

Let me gnaw on it like a rope dipped in sugar. It's weird. I don't care. Those, that's all my secrets, you guys. Take care. Good day. Bye-bye. I'm Summer.

Summer.