Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Color Green

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedians/podcasters Adam Tod Brown (‘Unpopular Opinion’ podcast network) and Jeff May (‘Jeff Has Cool Friends’ podcast, 'Bullsh*t' on Netflix) for a look at why the color green is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

The Color Green. Known for being nice. Famous for being plants. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why The Color Green is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Adam Todd Brown and Jeff May are my guests this week. Adam Todd Brown is the creator, host, proprietor, all-knowing, all-seeing leader of the Unpopular Opinion Podcast Network. Jeff May, also on this episode right here, he is a frequent guest and sometimes host on the Unpopular Opinion Network. He has his own podcast titled Jeff Has Cool Friends, and he recently had a run on a Netflix game show. It's called Bullshit. It's

hosted by Howie Mandel. Watch Bullshit on Netflix to see Jeff May on Netflix right there. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Acknowledge Adam recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and Keech peoples. Acknowledge Jeff recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and Keech and Chumash and Fernandinho-Taraviam peoples, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode.

And today's episode is about the color green, which is a patron-chosen topic. Thank you very much to Erica Salazar for supporting this show and for that wonderful suggestion. Also, thanks to a bunch of other patrons for cheerleading it in the polls. It's straightforward, it's fun, and here we go. Please sit back or continue to be a Martian because they're green sometimes and stuff. Either way, here's this episode

of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Adam Todd Brown and Jeff May. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. And Jeff, it's so good to have you back. And of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Either we can start and I don't know if we touched on it in other color shows, but how do you feel about the color green?

I'm envious of it. On theme, yes. I don't get it. He's doing it. That was very on theme face. Yes, correct. Beware of the green-eyed monster. I think I look all right in green, but I don't wear it that much because I don't – not a color I work into my wardrobe that often.

I honestly feel like Meet the Parents is my biggest reference for green. Oh. Because there's that scene where Robert De Niro tells Ben Stiller that a genius chooses green, and you didn't choose green, did you, Greg? And that, for some reason reason has always stuck with me the same reason yellow is my favorite color because of that book quote i i green just because of the suggestion that a genius would pick green and then i very rarely ever pick green in any circumstances when given a choice i i had to go to a wedding and i recently had lost a bunch of weight so all my old dresses look like i was in all my old suit no no no no your old dresses don't fit go on my my old dress fits me pretty well i did do a i did do a oh i

wore a green dress i wore a green dress in some of my headshots, my first ever headshots. And I absolutely love them. Oh, I remember those. Wow. Yeah. But I currently the only suit I own that fits is like a mint green. It's like a mint green. That rules. Like a linen suit.

Like a nice little summer. It's a nice little summer suit. Get me through the day. I just bought a new suit. And it is a dark, dark, dark green, and it's wool. So I'm pretty excited about that. Ooh, good. It's summertime.

Good time for a wool suit. It hasn't come yet. So, yeah, hopefully it arrives when. It's a good six-month wait. Yeah. I'll just wear it in New York City in August. I'll sweat everything out of my body in a minute. I was going to say, if you're ever trying to make weight in a fight, don't buy there with a sauna suit.

Get a nice little wool suit. Start running laps in that, baby. Me and Chet Wild went to where they filmed Field of Dreams in Iowa. It's in Dyersville, Iowa. And there's a guy there. He's like a guide. And he will show you around, which, I mean, it's a baseball diamond with corn in the outfield. There's not a lot to see.

But he wears like an authentic Chicago White Sox uniform from the 1920s. He's just like, that's the corns this is like oh over there you can see that's the card oh it's like oh god it's so all right don't let me drink water i have to drink tonics

there is no way you're getting paid enough to do this and over there you can see the heat stroke paddock yeah in the past i feel like at least in like europe and north america that's colonized like all clothes were heavy and no water was drinkable like how did anyone live through the summer at all yeah i think about that a lot when you see like uh like mennonites or something i'm like you guys got shorts right make shorts out of that stuff is that not is that not with god because buddy yeah it's gonna be warm it's like we're gonna do a bond raising and then six of us are gonna die it's like the walking dead well and and yeah i guess green is none of our favorite color right i think we've covered that

on other ones and but i i like it a lot and we have one uh one wall of our apartment is green and it was that way before we moved in and it pretty much convinced us to pick the place. I like having that around. That's what sold you, a green wall. Yeah. And after we signed up, we were like, in hindsight, you could just paint your wall after you move in. But, you know, at the time, it was a real hook. It's literally one can of paint.

That's all it would take. It's literally one can of paint. That's all it would take. I feel like apartments aren't usually keen on that, like letting you just turn one wall a different color. But I guess I've never asked. I don't have the gumption. You have to paint it back. Yeah, who cares?

Yeah, just do whatever you want. Yeah, take that wall out. That's not even a load-bearing wall. Yeah, even if it is. Let the other units bear that load. Yeah, live moss. The slogan of Taco Bell or blowing a wall out of your apartment

out that you don't own. Yeah. Live moss. Well, we got it. We got a bunch of stuff here. We can get into it. And on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. Two. Green. It's two colors mixed.

Blue and yellow. That's the show. Shut up, Jeff. That's a wrap. Shut up. This week, that's in a segment called One stat, ah, ah, ah Two stats, ah, ah, ah, ah And that name was submitted by Tori Terrell

Thank you, Tori We have a new name for this segment every week Please make it as silly and wacky and bad as possible Submit to SifPod on Twitter Or to SifPod at gmail.com What level do I have to join at To get you to wear a 1920s baseball uniform? Please make it as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. What level do I have to join at to get you to wear a 1920s baseball uniform when you do this? I think the level is mail it to me. To find out why heat stroke is secretly incredibly fascinating.

Yeah, I'd tape in a relatively hot room, too. It would really be that Dyersville experience. Dyersville, Iowa. And you're a White Sox fan, so. I am, yeah. And a gambling addict. Right, right. Right?

And you love corn. The band and the food. They were the official band of the 1903 Chicago White Sox yeah they also played that Dyersville show we did they love corn so much they flip the sea around in Chicago we gotta be like them

I don't know some way I would love that see a nice game of the Chicago Corn Sox coming in out of Bakersfield, Chicago. Well, there's a lot of years in the numbers here. And the first one is 1918. And 1918 is the year when Marcus Garvey unveiled the Pan-African flag.

And there's an entire 99% Invisible episode about this. I'm just going to touch on it past. Garvey created a flag with three colors on it. The red bar stood for blood spilled to defend Africa. The black bar stood for black people. And the green bar stood for the lushness of the African continent. It was an effort to make one flag for all black people and all African people in the world. And to this day, you see it at events and places centering black American people in particular. That's good. We just covered the Spike Lee film Bamboozled on a Unpops podcast called Pod 6.

And there's a scene in that where Mos Def basically chides Jada Pinkett Smith for getting the order of those colors wrong. Because she says something like black, red, and green. And he goes, it's red, black, and green. Even white people know that. And you know what? I agree. I think white people do know the order of that. If you listen to enough late 80s, early 90s rap music, that flag and those

colors in particular come up a lot, like all the time. Cool. Sometimes includes yellow too, for the sun. Oh, interesting. Okay. And also these colors, the flag was not just influential on Black American people, because as 99% of Visible talks about, they ended up getting adopted by several countries in Africa who became independent after getting out from under the thumb of European colonialists. And so countries such as Kenya have a flag that is red and black and green. So it's a really influential color scheme. You know what else is an influential color scheme?

The red, white, and blue. France. really influential color scheme you know what else is a influential color scheme the red white and blue france yeah yeah and the the next number here there's a set of years 1936 to 1966 36 to 66 is the publication years for the negro motorist Green Book. And so the Smithsonian has a huge online exhibit all about this in the time of segregation in the United States, which theoretically ended with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but has still persisted in some ways. time, it was among many terrible things. It was hard for black Americans to drive around the country. And so the green book listed businesses that would serve African Americans that would not be cruel to African Americans. And it was called the green book because it was published by a black American postman named Victor green. So in this case, it was just coincidentally, his last name is green. And then they decided to make it green. That was made famous or made more famous, I guess, in Lovecraft Country. Cool.

Yeah, that makes sense. On HBO. That was one of the characters. That's what he did is he worked for, I believe, the Green Book. And this book, they basically stopped publishing it as soon as segregation was off the books legally. But yeah, this guy's name was Green. They printed it green. They probably should name was Green. They printed it Green. They probably should have kept going.

They probably could have. They could keep going like now. Yeah, yeah. And next number here, another year, 1972. 1972 is the year when Greenpeace adopted its name. So a whole other organization. It wasn't always called Greenpeace because they started before 72. According to the CBC, Greenpeace began as a Canadian activist group

opposed to U.S. nuclear testing in Alaska, in particular on Amchika Island, which was a refuge for sea otters. And so they did stuff like interrupting the border crossing and sailing a boat to the island so no one could explode a nuke there and the group started in 1969 it was called the don't make a wave committee and then from there they later arguably a terrible name yeah they upgraded the name to greenpeace in 1972 that's some good branding and i'm glad i'm glad you brought one in that's not just like uncomfortably racial where i can just or i can be like oh you can make fun of these guys though right get reagan to take care of these guys man yeah the first two numbers were very black this is not yeah yeah which by the way i'm not not against, mind you. I'm just being like, it's a comedy podcast, right?

It sounded like you were. It sounded like you were just lodging a complaint about. We're distant enough that I can make the 1918 reference. I was going to make a like, oh, it's when the Red Sox won the World Series. And then I was like, that's not an appropriate thing to bring up at this specific point in time. But tragedy in time. Comedy is back and racially speaking the red socks the most racist baseball team in history as far as uh segregation goes they didn't they didn't integrate until like 1969 yeah i believe they were the last one with

pumpsy green oh it was Pumpsy Green. That was the name of the first black player for the Red Sox. His name was Pumpsy Green. This intersects. Wow. Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, no.

I think we primed it for baseball with all the Dyersville, Iowa Black Sox talk, too. I'm always thinking about racism in the Red Sox. Those two things are all all but not in the classic red socks fan way of doing a racism man i can't believe his name was green it's amazing uh with uh with green piece they're also part of a wider thing we'll we'll only touch on it a little bit with this show but there's a book called the secret lives of color by Cassia St. Clair. It's been very helpful for every color episode of this podcast. You may have mentioned it once or twice. Yeah. And she brings up an idea, which is that the 1970s is when we started labeling environmental things as green. It really only comes from then. And she points to

Greenpeace is one landmark of that. Also, Britain, Germany, New Zealand, and the Australian state of Tasmania formed their first green parties in the 1970s. Isn't it also why all of the 70s appliances were avocado green? Could be related, yeah. Big green time. My grandparents had avocado green all over the kitchen. Everything was greenish. Should bring that back.

Right. Yeah, right? Because there's a yellow tone in there, right? Like it's a yellowish green. Well, I always think of it as like that sort of like that kind of muddish green, like that avocado-y. Yeah, there were the yellow ones too. I think my grandparents had the more, the yellower version. Oh, yeah, like the ochre.

Yeah. What were we doing? What was going on? We all make mistakes. 70s, 80s. Yeah, not me, but. No, exclusively you. Yeah, some people did.

People did before me. And green as a color connected to nature is a long-running thing. Cassius Sinclair points out that the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph that meant the color green was a picture of a papyrus stalk. Like, it's that old because people just noticed that a bunch of plants are green. But like, describing something as green or like that Green New Deal sense is only about 50 years old. Chlorophyll. Guys, we'll see you later. Jeff raised his hand partway through that sentence

so he could say chlorophyll. Honestly, I had a flashback and I thought you were going to ask me, and do we know why nature is considered green? And then I was going to say that and you're going to be like, that is wrong. Get out of my classroom, you absolute dunce. Right. Because that was the other thing I heard as a kid.

Leaves. Adam was correct. Jeff was incorrect. Yeah. Photosynthesis. Adam, two for two. Grasshoppers. Jeff, O for 1,000.

The drink. Completely wrong. I'm batting O. And next number, yet another year, but this is 1964. 1964 is the year when Desilu Productions filmed the first failed pilot for Star Trek. The TV show Star Trek. It was called The Cage, and it featured the first of many green women in the Star Trek. The TV show Star Trek. It was called The Cage, and it featured the first of many green women

in the Star Trek franchise. It's a stretch. This number was a stretch for you, huh? I do like that you're cheating with the numbers, though, because they're all dates. It's a little calendar of green, you know? It's a little history of green.

Why are you being this way jeff i'm uh i'm difficult yeah yeah that's what i'm saying that's what i'm asking is why i'm new to this i'm a rookie you could say i'm green come on oh god uh give me a tv show. No, absolutely not. There's no producers in my apartment. Okay. Yeah. All right. Let's go. Yeah, that is. Yeah.

I love that Lucy was just like, we got to make Star Trek. Yeah. Lucille Ball. She was like, me and Jazzy are going to make what was at the time one of the most expensive TV shows ever made. We're going to go for it. Famous, untouchable communist freaking rules now we're getting into the color red am i right hey because of her hair i get it yes that's why her hair was red all those communist secrets yeah that's how hardcore of it she was blonde before

she took up communism yeah she store a sickle and a hammer in that hairstyle. It's so heavy. She's always falling over. She looks like a mascot walking around. Just eating the chocolates to stabilize yourself. Like, this will balance me. Okay. Okay.

The green monster. Red Sox. I did it again. Oh. Dang. I did it me. Okay. Okay. The green monster, Red Sox. I did it again. Oh, dang. I did it again. That is, I do associate green with Boston sports. Like we, we had a waiter the other day and I was like, he's from Boston. Cause I could see his Boston Celtics t-shirt that he was waiting tables in for some reason

from like a long way away. Yeah. Well, I mean, it was during the finals, I'm guessing. Oddly. No, it was like late in the season but not not the key time he just liked the celtics a lot in new york city the best part about going out to eat in boston is even at the nice places you can see they're wearing their like their white shirt with the tie but then you can clearly see like the celtics or bruins logo through the shirt on whatever shirt they're wearing as their undershirt and you're just like man you didn't even look in a mirror before you

stepped out did you you could see jeter on your chest right there what and with with the star trek thing like i think the green women are a famous trope of it. And in the canon, it's a race of green humanoids called Orions. In the original series, it's mostly dancing slave girls. And then later series introduced non-slave Orions. Star Trek Lower Decks has a main character who's an Orion that is not erotic, mainly. But it was a weird... Still dancing, though, right? I mean, everybody dances. Yeah, but in a non-erotic fashion. ryan that is not like erotic mainly but it was it was a weird like still dancing though right

i mean everybody dances in a non-erotic fashion yeah yeah just like that but just like hitting the safety dance yeah crumps yeah yeah like competitive dancing like the jabberwockies like hundreds of years in the future they're like one of the main cultural things for humanity is the jabberwockies for sure yeah they deserve it they are they stuck with it yeah that's what star trek 4 was about wasn't it the jabberwockies yeah just chucking jabberwockies into the ocean outside san francisco like the aliens are happy now the voyage to the jabberwockies there's a it turns out there's also an interesting like origin story of getting a green woman onto star trek which is that it was a difficult production thing because the production team

they did makeup tests they used gene roddenberry's future wife, Majelle Barrett. They put green makeup on her film that checked if it looked green on camera. But the first test came back from post-production. She just looked white again. Then they did two more tests, more and more makeup. She kept looking white when it came back. And then the two departments finally talked to each other. And it turns out post-production thought it was some kind of mistake in the filming and so post-production was like laboriously color changing the footage to make her look pale again and then they were dumping more makeup on her and then they were undoing it again it was a whole snafu it was like that was the cold war that was just basically a metaphor for the cold war i would like to say that Majel Barrett, yes, a dancing girl, also famously two other Star Trek characters in the voice of the computer, as well as Deanna Troi's mother, Loxana Troi. Yeah.

I was going to say that. You weren't. Prove it. Sorry to prove. I did. Just now. Mike Greenwell played for the Boston Red Sox. Bam!

Green River Killer. Played for the Red Sox. That was his name on the jersey, too. Green River Killer. Green Monster was taken. It's fun. It's a fun riffs. We're not.

It does make sense, though, that you would associate green with like Boston sports teams, primarily just because we are a filthy Irish city. Yeah. And so like all of our third jerseys roll out. It's like, and this is a leprechaun jersey. Yeah. You even kind of see that with chicago teams like i know the white socks have at some points done green jerseys like chicago dyes a river green big time yeah yeah saint patrick yet it can't be blue any other time

of the year it goes from brown to green it's. It's a dark canvas they're working on, yeah? And actually, yeah, and the whole bonus show will be about the Irish in Ireland. So we'll talk all about that. Gross. Get out of here. But there's one more number here. The number is 20. And 20 is the number of years it took for the statue of liberty to turn green because

because of how copper oxidizes right yeah exactly right yeah i knew that actually yeah good for me and then it played for the red sox bam got them another connection what if what if the statue of liberty was like johnny damon like it was in boston and then it got signed away and it was a whole a whole argument honestly french should take it back right now yeah fair yeah france is just like they lost their privileges you're gonna go wash her up because they were supposed to keep her clean how insulted must the french have been when they were like that we made that thing gorgeous copper for you all you had to do was give it a wipe down once every 20 years right i mean we renovated it in like 86 yeah but that's just so the ghostbusters could walk it down downtown to break into that

giant museum that had all this pink sludge around it. Yeah, that's true. That was why, yeah. Yeah, they should have cleaned it when old Copperfield made it disappear. Yeah, Greenfield. Would have been a good time. Better name. That's why he did it.

He's related to the Statue of Liberty. He just asked a favor. Connect and die. Can you just like, his cousin. Yeah. And the National Park Service says the Statue of Liberty, it is made of copper. The copper is only 2.4 millimeters thick, which is about the width of two pennies stacked together. So really thin.

And according to the New Yorker, it's unusually pure copper. It was donated by a copper mining magnate named Pierre-Eugène Secretan, who got it from one of his copper mines off of the coast of Norway. We all do this. We should take all the copper from the Statue of Liberty like it's copper pipes from an abandoned house. And then we should try to sell it. Just try to recycle the Statue of Liberty's copper. It's not a bad idea. Just scrape a little off at a time.

I think you should just like clearly have to chop up all of the copper and bring it in. So it's like that's clearly the Statue of Liberty. Like, why is it an eye? Why did you get an eye? Shouldn't it be wire or something? What's going on? And also the oxidation, apparently it doesn't damage it. Like, it's not like when iron oxidizes and it's rust.

In 1886, they unveil it. By 1906, it was covered in this green patina. And the National Park Service says today the oxidation is as thick as that copper in a lot of places. And it's actually protecting it from more impact from the elements. That's a lie, right? It's weirdly positive. So they're lying so they don't have to do any work? You know, it's actually good that we let this get filthy.

Really cool. I'm not washing a spoon for 20 years. It would be quite an endeavor to clean the Statue of Liberty all the time to keep it from oxidizing. But at least people would be mad about it. Yeah. Well, people would be mad that it was like the sun glimmering off of it would bother people. I like that. Yeah.

Anytime you can blind New yorkers i'm happy that is that's a stance just like many people from boston have blinded new york yankees fans red socks yeah well i feel like it would really be going after everybody on the staten island ferry like it would just keep crashing because the pilot can't see yeah yeah how do you hit an iceberg no that's just an island just minding its own business big gleaming copper statue yeah right that close to the airport oh people would die How many laser pointers would be pointed at that son of a bitch all day? Well, and this thing that copper does very readily, it's also, it turns out it's one of the first ways that we got green pigments in art. Because one of the first common pigments for green painting was called verdigris.

And that name means like green from grease in French. but it's a thing that you can do anywhere it involves putting copper into a pot with lye and with vinegar and then you seal that leave it alone for two weeks and it oxidizes so much that you get an oxidation that you can scrape off and turn into a powder and then a pigment from there. So copper kind of generated some of the first green paint. Pass. So we could like make some pigment out of this statue and then fence it for scrap. You know, a lot of ways to go. We could do that. Two businesses.

I am low on pigment. Give me some. And that leads us into one of two takeaways for the main show. First one is takeaway number one. One of the most popular green pigments of all time caused a wave of deaths.

Turned out it had arsenic in it, and it killed a bunch of people. That'll do it. Classic green. What was it on? Was it like? It was actually just a Crayola jungle green crayon. Just a swatch of green that they were chucking at people.

It was the two main things it was on were wallpaper and fake flowers. Oh. And so it was kind of in especially richer people's environment all the time. And then they would either slowly or quickly die of it. Oh. I'm not mad about that.

Yeah, that's all right. Sounds like that's how the revolution could have started. Yeah, let's get some wallpaper in these rich people's houses. Yeah. Elon Musk to invest in pigment. And the key source here is The Secret Lives of Color by Cassius Sinclair.

And then also a piece for The Paris Review by Katie Kelleher. Those are the two here. But the pigment is called Shele's Green. That's spelled S-C-H-E-E-L-E is the last name. A Swedish scientist named Carl William Scheele came up with it. That's like just being named like Dr. Ron Cancer. Like that's not what you want to be.

He's like, look what I've invented. A color that murders the wealthy. I'm going to pretend that he's a southern lawyer. Southern part of Sweden. Sure. Yeah, sure. Yeah. That's my Swedish accent, actually.

Well, hello there. I'm from Stockholm, of course. Senator. At any end, Sheila, he was a scientist who was trying to make money inventing color pigments. And unfortunately, the first one he invented was a scientist who was trying to make money inventing color pigments. And unfortunately, the first one he invented was a new yellow, and it got stolen from him by a British company. So it's now known as Turner's Patent Yellow, because they stole the information, patented it before he could, and he got screwed over. Man, no wonder he made it that green.

He probably sent them a bunch of it you guys should try this i hope they're the ones that called it turner's patent yellow they called it dibs yellow snooze you lose yellow yeah and he what happened next is he next developed this green pigment he made it by heating sodium carbonate mixing that with copper and mixing it with arsenic oxide. Arsenic, highly poisonous to humans. That was the problem. And we did not know that at that point. That was his villain origin story. It's tough because like he develops the 1775.

It's tough because like he develops the 1775 and as early as 1777, he writes a letter to a friend where he worries about whether he should tell people that this has arsenic in it because that's poisonous. Like he was he was pretty aware. But also a parent, Cassius St. Claire, says in that same letter, his main concern was, will someone else get the credit for coming up with this? And will I get screwed again? I mean, he was he got burnt the first time yeah yeah that's his secret ingredient like he's probably a bad person for putting it out at all and also he was driven by like this feeling of i can't have this happen twice i just need to get this out there get my name on it clearly yeah so i can make money that's just being like i'm not gonna get my next idea for a

roller coaster stolen i'm just gonna get it out immediately during the beta yeah i'm glad he got his yellow stolen sounds yeah yeah although i actually know because that that kind of leads to people dying so never mind jeff is glad he got his yellow stolen i mean wow jeff is wrong wow yeah honestly i stand by what i said if his yellow had never gotten stolen he might not have made that green though so how many more rich people would have lived longer to do awful things yeah that's a good point this this mainly impacted british people as far as i can tell so oh no not the british not the wealthy british what have they done wrong

show me on a map where they've hurt anybody off of that we are going to a short break, followed by a whole new takeaway. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes.

I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. the next bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace,

because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And this Shayla's Green, it starts out somewhat popular and then grows and grows and really peaks in the mid-1800s. And once it hits its popularity peak, there starts to be a wave of people dying of it.

And like I said, two industries really leaned on it. One was wallpaper. And people in British cities in particular love this wallpaper because it felt like a taste of nature, like a green room in your house. It's, oh, I'm not in the horrible, smoggy London area I am. That's green. I'm not getting black lung, I'm getting green lung. Yeah. And also, I guess part of why it took people some time to figure out that this was dangerous is that so much of the rest of the chemicals in life were dangerous in the mid-1800s. Like, kind of everything was killing you, including this. Yeah, there's still just, like, trash in the streets at this point. Like, the arsenic

wallpaper like you're probably lucky if you die that way probably at the end of the day you look into it enough it's probably some really peaceful rich person way to die everyone else is getting typhoid out in the streets or something oh i just looked up up Shayla's green. It looks like... It's awful. It's an awful green. It's like, okay, this is pretty bright. It's peas. It's the color of peas. Yeah, pretty much.

A delicious meal. Accent. A delicious meal accent. I wouldn't say peas or a meal. Unless you're a baby you're gonna paint paint your house with some gerber non-toxic and delicious i mean funny if you were like shayla's green yeah the things they did it mostly was for wallpaper and a a fish glaze and it makes a little rosemary in there just Just some Dr. Seuss food going on. Yeah. Yeah.

And this was so much of the wallpaper in Britain at one point. Apparently by 1858, it was estimated there were about 100 square miles worth of it in British homes, hotels, hospitals, and railway waiting rooms. hotels, hospitals, and railway waiting rooms. And the Times of London estimated that in 1863, they were producing between 500 and 700 tons of it per year, just in the UK. The British loved this stuff. And also apparently the author Charles Dickens visited Italy, saw Shea-less green on a wall,

and came home and tried to make all of the wallpaper in his entire house that color and his wife turned it down otherwise he probably would have like died sooner uh for making that mistake and this guy who made it at no point when it was selling the way it was just came forward and was like hey wait we need to talk about what's in that. There's arsenic in it. I think he was hoping to die. Yeah. Yeah, he, the, Shayla died in 1786. So he was actually dead before it really, really took off and escaped liability, I guess. Yeah.

Did he die from arsenic poisoning? Totally possible because he only lived into his forties. So sure. Yeah. Lucky son of a bitch. I believe it. Like, that's probably what happened. Yeah, that sounds about right.

But also, that was probably, like, the life expectancy back then. It's like the worst version of the Marie Curie death. Where it's just like, oh, did you change the world? It's like, oh, no, you just made a shit paint for bad people. Cool. I love that Charles Dick. Like, how cool must it have been to live back in those days when the most fascinating things were like, a new color? Yeah.

Like, mind-boggling. Boy, Jove, mate. I don't know what that accent was. Are they still doing that are there still people out there trying to invent new colors there yeah there's one called like vanta black that's kind of like that and then in the 60s there's a painter named eves klein came up with his own blue it's sort of an art world kind of thing but especially with digital stuff we can just generate any color without like

crushing up any shells or you know the old ways they used to do it so it's a chiller situation yeah let's make a new color and with the with this green that is now not really used because of the deaths the other industry really using it was the fake flower industry of the mid-1800s and this is where the particularly grim deaths happen. The most famous one was a girl named Matilda Schurer, who worked as an artificial flower maker for 18 months. She died at age 19. And doctors found inhaled arsenic throughout her body.

Apparently her vomit was a green color. This is what got the headlines and convinced people to say hey we've had this color for like 100 years and it's probably poison so let's stop doing it let's just find any other way i like that they just recreated the color now and you can just get it it's like a safe paint at like bear yeah yeah totally fine now yeah it's the exact same shade because it was like it was this industry where like a bunch of underpaid people often children would like put this green powder on leaves and stems and and also like fake fruits that are that color apparently another child died of trying to eat fake grapes that were dusted with it you know like this was this was just it's the

absolute worst 1800s labor stuff you can imagine happened around this color and making it and this was to the british you say the british yeah i'm gonna need to check some facts here hold on let me google something real quick other bad stuff too and and also like apparently it took this terrible crisis and a separate arsenic crisis to get british people to actually worry about it in 1858 there was a peppermint maker in bradford who mistook a package of powdered white arsenic for sugar and so then they just made a huge poisonous batch of peppermints and killed a bunch of people oh and like then british people said maybe let's start having some laws about arsenic and things there's gonna be a i i agree but there also has to be a slight middle

ground of like well you're either accidentally using this or you're creating poison tablets for children. Right. They were talking about it in Sweden. Yeah. But and yeah, and then there was never an actual law against Shayla's green, but people developed other color fast dyes that were a similar color and then just moved on. And so that's where it went. That's what I called non-murder green. yeah safety green pumpsy green green monster go red socks now we're talking uh the uh the one other shayla's green story is sort of true sort of a myth but there's a a rumor that

this color killed napoleon because in the 1980s, there was somebody took a sample of Napoleon's hair. He lived that long? There was somebody who took a sample of Napoleon's hair in the 1980s, found arsenic in it. And then people said, oh, well, why would there be a bunch of arsenic in Napoleon's hair? said, oh, well, why would there be a bunch of arsenic in Napoleon's hair? And then an analysis of the walls of his bedroom on St. Helena in his final exile.

It was Shayla's green walls. There was a bunch of arsenic in the walls. And he used to lick them Wonka style. Yeah. Snozzberry. That's what that tastes like. That's what that shade of green tastes like. The death berries taste like death berries.

Something about Napoleon bringing children to his factory. I don't know. Like, it's all cannons and stuff. It's all like, why are there kids here? But all the cannons are edible. Chocolate cannons. A rule to go to like Willy Wonka's Raytheon factory. He's just taking bites out of like B2 bombers and s***.

Oh, these are made of licorice. Which of the children is bloodthirsty enough to inherit my factory? There's one really villain kid. They get it. Yeah, this tiny little evil Dick Cheney looking like a little penguin running around. Pushing kids into the river. That's our guy. That's our guy.

And so Napoleon, he died age 51. His walls were full of arsenic. There were rumors the British were always trying to slowly kill him off there. However, if those walls contributed to it, it's probably still not the main reason he died. Because in 2008, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics... Had him assassinated. Yeah.

They decided, hey, let's do further study of this. So they analyzed hair samples from other periods of Napoleon's life, like across his life because apparently a lot of people have his hair and they found high levels of arsenic in basically all the hair and so it turns out arsenic all the time baby yeah basically he lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s when everything was poison and so the shayla's green walls in his last home, they might have sped up his death, but not by a lot.

He was just getting poisoned throughout his life. Good times. Yeah. He earned it. Just micro-dosing death. Yes. And I'm anyway. It's like having mold in your bathroom or something. It's going to slowly kill you.

Or like eating a jack-in-the-box every day. Yeah. After every Dodgers win, he'd bring the coupon. And, you know, yeah. Get them loaded fries. Well, and there's one other takeaway for the main episode here. Let's get into it. Takeaway number two. Some modern languages do not have a specific word for green turns out there's some like pretty popular languages spoken by millions of people where there's not one specific word for

the color green and that's popular not american get out of here yeah one of them i think the biggest one is probably Push Toe, which is spoken by like 50 million people. And another one is Vietnamese, spoken by people there and elsewhere. Never heard of it. But it's surprising. It turns out like languages will really vary in their amount of words for colors. really vary in their amount of words for colors. And the key source here is a piece from the conversation.com by Ted Gibson, who's a professor of cognitive science at MIT and bevel our Conway,

who's a cognition researcher for the U S national institutes of health. I would like to add MIT right next to Fenway park. Yep. That's true. Right next to it, but it's close enough. It's in Fenway park. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not right next to it, but it's close enough. It's in Fenway Park. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of the stands. Yeah. It's just a kiosk. People don't realize that.

They get a lot done. Engineering degree and a pretzel. Like a raffle winner in one section attends MIT. Like, oh, okay, hey, cool. They just get the master's degree right there. Yeah. The Coors Light MIT seat of the game congratulations Dr. Sean Shawnee Sullivan ah look at me hey I'm a freaking rocket scientist now, kid. Drive me up to NASA. Also, Jack in the Box, 1993, deadly E. coli outbreak.

Oh, I don't know. All right. Well, I guess I'm going to stop eating there. I don't eat there. Nobody eats there. Yeah. That place is the only place that exists as a joke. Yeah. They're just hanging on until they can sell weed. That's all. Yeah. That place is the only place that exists as a joke. Yeah.

They're just hanging on until they can sell weed. That's all. Yeah. The nug box is going to happen sooner than we think. They want to sell weed so bad. You can tell from those commercials. And it makes sense. It's a partnership that makes sense. I told you.

You got a crazy high to enjoy that food. I told you when I was an Uber driver, I drove somebody who was sort of basically in charge of that ad campaign. And so I told him, I was like, I really appreciate that you guys are just leaning into the weed culture. And she's like, yeah, we snuck a bong into one of the commercials and it aired. In one of those commercials, there's like a bong in the back and they they made it to air nice that's amazing nice the sensors were too hungry you know what you know what we you know what weed is oh my god gift of the magi we just made the same joke in reverse order Jinx. What did you call me? You owe me a Coke.

A green Coke. Yeah, the Stabby one, right? There was that green Coke, and they were like, it's healthy? Dr. Pepper, that's the nectar of the gods. That ain't going to kill anyone. It's from a doctor, yeah. It's true. Yeah, yeah. It's science.

It's medical science. It's from a doctor, yeah. It's true. Yeah, yeah. It's science. It's medical science. Well, with words for colors, there's been a lot of study of how early a culture develops different words for different colors. Because the human eye can see millions of separate distinct colors, but to conceptualize them, we need words and there was a landmark study by linguists brent berlin and paul

k in the 1960s where they initially thought they had found like an order of words for colors they claimed that across 20 languages if a language had just two words for colors it would be for black and white if there was a third word it was red. Then the fourth and fifth words were either for green or yellow in some order. But then they did further studies of more languages, found a bunch of exceptions. And it turns out the upshot is every language and culture varies. Like some languages have a lot of words for colors. Some have very few and they vary. And specifically, which ones they bother to name.

And Eiffel 65 only has one blue yeah so what is science doing to fix that thing where different cultures only have certain work because i feel like we need to tighten that up one monoculture yeah we just like one world language and government and currency things like that one military i know i know that's a joke and one of these articles talks about like u.s globalism kind of pushing 11 words for colors like we apparently in the english language in an american culture we tend to have a set of like blue yellow green red purple orange brown and black gray pink and white those tend

to be the 11 that are default colors to us and everything else is like a shade of one of those perfect it's a good reminder of how bull you were when you first learned about indigo right when people are roy g bivin you and then they said indigo and you're like i need hold on i need a minute that we never talked about it again yeah what was the one between blue and violet and you're like it's indigo what color is that like it's blue violet you're like it's the bridge is not a color is that just the blending of the two yeah well i mean without it and it's just roy gbf roy rojibov the way it's supposed to be rojibov those that indigo out of there then we wouldn't have had the indigo girls so it's true two great things and apparently one of the biggest ones that other languages have that english doesn't have is that

in english we just call light blue and dark blue blue we just use the word blue essentially for both those colors and we just say they're shades of one thing. The Eiffel 65 dancing has begun. They're singing about so many colors in that song. But they can only get one word out. But like a lot of languages, in particular Russian, have separate words for light blue and for dark blue.

Like their entire other things. Get them out of here. Wow. Wow. Is that so they can attack the blue and yellow flag of the precious people of ukraine typical communist aggression those blue commies yeah they apparently in russian gullu boy is the word for light blue and see me as the word for dark blue. Yeah. I like our way better.

And, uh, and there are also languages including modern Hebrew and Turkish and a few others that have separate words for the shades of blue that, that, and both are correct. Like we're like, everybody's just calling them their word for it. But, uh, and then another variation like that happens a bunch with the color green, where it turns out many languages use one word for both green and blue. They treat green and blue as shades of one color. Are they just all colorblind? Yeah. I know we're laughing, but might that be a genetic trait that has occurred in specific groups oh it it could be related none of my none of my sources made that the reason

but i bet it could be a thing i bet they checked i feel like they would check right you're like you guys see this now those people can't be pilots yeah didn't even think about that did you alex well and it ends it seems to at least linguistically in pashto which is a language that's common in northern iran afghanistan pakistan it's sort of a nature color they have the word sheen which can mean both blue and green. And then when they specify it, the phrase Asmani sheen means sheen like the sky, which is blue. And then there's separate words for sheen like the grass or sheen like the leaves, which is green. So it's like a nature blob is that color.

It's very poetic and dumb as hell. Seems very unwieldy. Sheen, the color of tiger's blood. You guys remember that 11 years ago? That's a Charlie Sheen reference, Alex. Thank you. Oh. Thank you.

Winning. I love in that same interview, in that interview when he's like, I'm winning. And then they're like, you have AIDS, right? He's like, totally. Everyone's like, are you winning? And we were were just like let's give him a new show who are we gonna put in that show with him lindsey lohan can only go great what must that set have been like well and with with other words here in the vietnamese language there's a word zon that gets further modified to be green or blue. And then, okay, the next thing, the source is Boston University. That's not a bit. Hey, that is next to Fenway.

Whatever. Red Sox. Also, go Terriers. What, are you thinking better than me? What are you thinking better than me? So, Boston University, go Terriers. They have a reference page for color words in the Xhosa language. Xhosa is an official language of South Africa and of Zimbabwe. And the Xhosa word, Luklaza, means both blue and green. Xhosa also has alternate words that separately mean just blue or just green.

And some of these languages are in that situation where they have one word that can be either and then separate words for each. It's all just very different than English. Yeah. Yeah. That word, by the way, indigo, which is weird. Yeah. It just turns out that world language is mentally categorized colors, all sorts of different ways. And if, if I didn't speak English, this might be a different podcast topic framing, you know,

like the whole thing might be going differently. I don't know. Yeah. I think a little bit different, especially if me and Jeff did speak English and you didn't speak any, this would be a radically different podcast. Some would say better not not not much not not against what you're saying not not in any way of your own volition

would it be better i just feel like from an entertainment perspective ray what's going on would be the whole show yeah folks that is the main episode for this week my thanks to adam todd brown and jeff may for joining me on a journey through not the irish stuff about this color right so many americans point it that way, and we didn't, because hey, this week's bonus topic is the surprising origins of green as an Irish national color. Patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than eight dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring the color green with

us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, one of the most popular green pigments of all time caused a wave of deaths. Takeaway number two, one of the most popular green pigments of all time caused a wave of deaths. Takeaway number two, some modern languages don't have a specific word for green. Plus a humongous numbers section this week. The greens in everything from flags to America to Star Trek and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests they're great one way to follow them is checking out the unpopular opinion podcast network it's one of my favorite audio things it's run and created and hosted by adam todd brown and then fun live show to share adam is

doing a live episode of unpops at caveat in man in Manhattan in New York City. The website is caveat.nyc, and that live show is Sunday, August 28th, 4 p.m. Eastern Time. And then Jeff May is on Unpopular Opinion. He's also on Gamefully Unemployed as co-host of Tom and Jeff Watch Batman. He has his own podcast called Jeff Has Cool Friends. And if you have Netflix, fire up a game show entitled Bullsh**t, hosted by Howie Mandel. Jeff's a contestant on it. Very funny, very cool. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. And one of them is a book that's come up often on The Color Episodes. It's called The Secret Lives of Color by Cassius St. Clair. Used it less than usual this time, but it was part of

it. Also relied on scholarship, posted at theconversation.com, co-written by Ted Gibson of MIT and Beville R. Conway of the NIH. Also an amazing piece for the Paris Review by Katie Kelleher, plus the National Park Service, the Smithsonian, the CBC. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.