Stuff You Should Know - How Human Cannonballs Work

Episode Date: July 7, 2011

There's no question that human cannonballs are daredevils. They pack themselves into the confines of huge cannons, which shoot them into the air. But how does it work? Join Josh and Chuck to learn more about the bizarre performances of human cannonballs. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Caboom and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. What are you doing? How are you doing the cheeks, huh? Have you ever captured that?

Yeah, we did it once and then people have asked occasionally like, do the cheek thing again? And I don't want to do it like once every 150 shows, literally. That's a good pace. I don't want to overdo that. So that'll be the third time soon coming up. I think so. Yeah, show 450 right around the corner. Chuckers, have you ever had Caboom cereal? No, dude, it was such a thing. Good. No, it wasn't good. The marshmallows were good. It was basically like Lucky Charms. I don't know who ripped off who, but it was clown themed rather than irish themed. That's genius. But there was a clown on front and he had a cannon and that's where the name came from,

Caboom. It was a circus clown, circus cannon, Caboom. But then they realized clowns were scary as heck to most people, so it failed miserably. I wrote this blog post recently. Did you read it? I did. That's a good one. The clown giving clown therapy. Yeah, people seem to like it too. Yeah, I thought it was a nice one. That wasn't my intro. My intro was about 100T. Oh, well, let's hear it. Do you remember? Well, sure. You're probably going to reference his death wish. Yes. So he comes down with the cancer and shoots himself in the head. And regardless of how you feel about suicide, what happened next was his, as you said, I guess his death wish, which he made in life, ironically.

Yeah, there's two kinds of death wishes. There's a wish that you make upon your death that you would like for things to happen after you die. And then there's the Jolly Brunson death wish. Nice. That was a good Chuck Brunson. Well, that's a Simpsons character too, but it's a Simpsons character. Right. The mustachioed sales clerk. Yes. But he clearly references Charles Brunson. Yeah. Anyway, what happened to 100T was he was cremated and he had his remains shot out of a cannon. Yeah. Have you seen it? Yeah. Thanks to Johnny Depp helped that dream come true because he has tons and tons of money to make that happen. Yes, he does. It is quite a cannon too. Oh yeah. And we've talked before about how I want my dead body shot out of a cannon. We have

indeed. I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe. Who knows? It would be, after reading this article and the physical requirements, it would be kind of gruesome. It wouldn't be like, unless they stiffened you up somehow, you would come out in a big, like a dead body would. That's what I've always imagined though. That's what I see flying through the air. Oh, I thought you saw yourself like shooting through a rocket toward the stars. No, like flopping like through the air and doing like half-summer salts and twists. Where did you want to land on? I think it was going to be naked too. I was going to land on the Kansas prairie and let the vultures finish me off. All right. We'll see. Coops like bring it. I got a backyard for you. I think that's how we met Coop. He offered.

He was like, Hey, I live in Kansas and I can get this done. Yeah. All right. So we'll see. But I think that that's an image that people can have in their head while we talk about how human cannonballs work, right? Because like you said, there's a lot to it. But one of the things that's not to it, and I think it's funny that people wonder how this, how you can shoot somebody out of a cannon and the gunpowder doesn't blow them up. There's no gunpowder. Of course there's not. I don't understand how someone cannot understand that intuitively. Yeah, because I think people want to believe that they're being fired out of a cannon instead of a long piston enclosed in a tube with a fake boom and a flash. Yes. For effect. Okay. So I guess it's the fake boom and the

flash. They're buying it. Yeah. Well, that's the idea. From the beginning, that was the idea. So yes, it has long roots. Indeed. Back to the 19th century, back to the UK, which by the way I've noticed, did you notice from like this article in doing any supplementary research, the UK is big into human cannonballs? I think they're big on just this whole circus experience. Okay. They were the original showmen. Yeah. Sure. They own the world. Yeah, that's true. You know? Yeah. And they sold it. And when you own the world, you have an obligation to entertain the world. And they did so by human cannonballs. That's right. Specifically something called the projector is the, I guess, grandfather of the human cannonball cannon. Right? Yeah,

the Farini projector. Right. 1871, George Farini. Basically, it was more like a catapult, like a spatula that would just flip people and stop and people would go flopping and flying through the air. Yeah. Oh God, I regret this. Yeah. Specifically, Lulu, who was a man dressed as a woman, because that always adds to the comic effect. Right. Put a dude in a dress. And he was the first person in America to get flapjacked with Farini's contraption there. Yeah. And not only did he do that, he was, he sailed 25, 30 feet into the air and was caught by someone on a trapeze. Yeah. So as we go through this, I don't want you to just think about my dead body being shot onto the Kansas prairie. I want you to think about how difficult it is to catch somebody

on a trapeze who's just been shot out of a cannon. While you're on a trapeze, you're swinging at just the right point, hitting them just the right way, and then taking their forward momentum and yanking them another way on the trapeze. Yeah. Well, this, in fairness, Lulu wasn't caught by someone. She, he just actually grabbed hold of the trapeze. But there are people later on in this article who were caught by people on the trapeze. Right. Just want to get that. So someone out there was like, no, no, Lulu. I wonder. There'd be one person who knew that. So the Farini projector was invented in 1871. It was obsolete by 1880 because this is the year that a 14-year-old girl named Rosa Marie Richter, whose stage name was Zazzle, right? Great, great grandmother to

Andy Richter. No. I'm just kidding. Okay. Great stage name though, right? Zazzle. She's 14. And she, at the behest of one PT Barnum, climbed into the first cannon, human cannonball cannon that is designed like today's modern cannons. Well, yeah, sure. And she was shot out of it. And shortly after that, within a few performances, she broke her back and was the first casualty of the human cannonball. Yes. And this first cannon used springs and they employed the blast, the fire and the boom to make people think. And back then they probably really bought it. Oh, yeah. But you know, people were so dumb back then. And there's a very famous picture of her climbing into the cannon. It's called like beautiful girl and huge gun or something like that.

I thought that our forefathers like invented everything and like built the world. And we're like, they're so dumb. What a bunch of stupid people. Yeah. Well, it's harder and harder to build and discover new things now because there all that was all the easy stuff. Like you and I could have discovered all this stuff. Right? Yeah. Now it's just more and more difficult. You have to really look for subtleties. You're right. Yeah. So we say thanks to no one. Yeah. So the late 19th century is just the the human cannonball idea just takes off, right? Thanks to Zazzle. Thanks to George Loyal. He was the one who was shot out of a cannon and would be caught by a woman on a trapeze. That's right. At the Yankee Robinson Circus, right? Yes. That's incredibly difficult.

It is. And you think about it like I think I've even seen that before like in person at a circus when I was a kid. But now that I've researched and read this, I'm like, I can't imagine how difficult that has to be how everything has to be totally precise and that these circus performers must spend like all day practicing every day just to make sure. Yeah. And not just the timing. There's a lot of other stuff that you have to take into account, right? That's right. It's not just get in this cannon. We're going to push you out. No, Josh, because the little sled that you're basically in goes forward at a force of 3,000 to 6,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. Right. We should say compressed air is now the preferred means of shooting that little piston

forward, right? Yeah. And you're in a little capsule like imagine Morc's egg, but with the top cut off. So you're in the barrel in what amounts to a bullet in the barrel, a bullet with the top cut off. And that bullet is attached to the cannon. So when the compressed air shoots it out, the cannon stops, but you keep going. That's right. But it shoots you out at a, what did you say, like 3,000 to 6,000 pounds per square inch of pressure? Yeah. Yeah. That produces some force. That's a lot. And that's why you can't just be like, I'll limp, you know, that would crush you. You know, you have to be extremely strong and rigid and your legs have to be taught like you can't just be like, all right, shoot it off. Right. Or like your dead body. That's why it would

be so gruesome. Yeah. I wonder if I just explode in blood at the end of the cannon. I don't know, maybe. It'd be sweet. The war on drugs impacts everyone whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that in on the prime example. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops. Are they just like looting?

Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil asset. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. It's your boy, Michael Kaya, world famous, often talked about alleged comedian. Some of y'all know me as Mr. Whitaker from Martin. Some of you know me as Shobo from House Party 3. And yes, I have told Jim crackers for everybody. And some of you don't know me at all, but you can come find out who I am on my new podcast called Michael talks to everybody. That's right. They gave my own show y'all. Woo woo woo. Michael talks to everybody where every week we'll be interviewing

some of the greatest artists in the game. Also, we'll be talking to ordinary people with extraordinary ideas. It's gonna be off the chain. We're gonna be covered all sort of topics. You ain't heard of nowhere else. We're gonna be doing a lot of laughs and a lot of talking. Most importantly, we're gonna have a lot of fun. It's gonna be off the chain. So please check us out. Everybody, I'm telling you, it's crazy. It's bananas. It's Michael talks to everybody. I'm talking about everybody. We got TI. We got Michael Jackson. It's gonna be just a comeback. He just gonna be here for a minute. Everybody, we're gonna be talking to him. We're gonna be talking on this show. Listen to Michael talks to everybody on December 5th on the I heart radio Apple podcast or wherever you

get your podcast. But with the big daddy cannons these days, you can go horizontally about 200 feet or vertically, which they say that's where the the ooze and Oz come from as high as 200 feet. And then speeds up to 60 to 70 miles an hour. Right. So you're hauling. You are hauling. You're also under some tremendous force, right? Oh, yes. So force. Yeah, you've got about nine G's during launch and 12 G's at impact. And we'll talk about that later. But Chuck, the Dodon Paul, right? It's a roller coaster in Japan. It has the highest acceleration. It's a 2.7 G's. G's. Yeah. So imagine nine, right? Yeah, yeah. This is a this is a this is you're putting this human body under a lot of stress right then. Yes. And you fly out a long way. And that's why you have

to take into account the things we briefly mentioned, like wind speed, body weight, obstacles, like the guy wires and the tent for the net and the poles for the for the tent. And we also we mentioned that in Sniper, remember? Yeah, we're talking about the bullet trajectory and they have to take into account like humidity. Yeah. So do people who set up human cannonball cannons. And usually I get the impression the human cannonball is the manager in charge of this whole act. They don't just come out and they're like, all right, I'll get in. Is it already? I just did it right. Yeah. And some Carney like puts out a cigarette and is like, it looks good to me. Yeah, right. No, that's not the case. A lot of planning goes in because they make a point.

It's pretty easy to get into a cannon and get shot out. Although, like we said, you got to be really strong and stuff. But the landing part is the crucial part, obviously, right? Because a 50 by 25 foot net might look pretty big when you're standing on it. But when you're 200 feet away and 200 feet up, it might look like a postage stamp to you. Right. And I mean, this is a big deal. And you want to hit that net. You want to hit it in just the right place to sure. Yeah. So to make sure that the person hits the net, test dummies are used. A test dummy is a human cannonball's best friend, because you can shoot a test dummy out as much as you want until you figure out whether or not you've got the barrel trajectory just right. The temperature

is a problem. What have you make adjustments early? Right. And so they just shoot a test dummy at the net until they have it just right. And then they, they, I guess they feel that they're confident. They're going to try their luck at it. Yeah. And like you said, you got to hit the net at the proper place too, which is generally the rear third, because when you hit something going down at an angle like that, you're going to bounce backwards. Yeah. Not like pop straight up or go forward. Right. So you don't want to hit it on the first third because then you'll bounce backwards off the net. So yeah, it's pretty specific. It is. So Chuck, who does this? Crazy circus people. Circus families. It's always families. Yeah. You know, like once you get into circus, then

you've almost guaranteed that your kid is going to do that. Yeah. So you want to talk about some of them? Well, yeah, the one, I think I'd heard of these people even before this, this article, but the Zikini family. Zakini. Zikini. The Zikini. Zikinis have been doing, well, they've been performing in circuses since the 1920s and apparently they stopped in the 90s. They're like 70 years is enough for us. Those Zikinis are hanging up our little fancy shoes. Right. And in that time, there were seven brothers in the family. Five of them became human cannonballs. And that's just the brothers. There was also a sister too, who really human cannonballing. Yeah. I'm just dying to know what those other two dudes, it's like, yeah, Eli and

Peyton Manning's brother that most people go, there's another brother. Right. Like, well, what does he do? He, he's the oldest, wasn't he? And he used to like, he was like a big man on campus at Ole Miss, but that was it. He didn't, he just partied. Didn't play football though. Nope. So he's not beloved by his father Archie. Yeah. So not true, probably. They worked with the Ringling brothers. The Zikinis did, who obviously had big name in circuses. And they sort of pushed the envelope. Hugo and Victor, the brothers, did a little double barrel gag that went over pretty well. And Mario would get shot over Ferris wheels, like two Ferris wheels. Mario Zikini. Two Ferris wheels. Not on top of one another. No. One after the other. Right.

That's quite a, quite a feat. And then John Weiss, human bullet. Yeah. He started out as a clown, apparently. Oh really? He did five years as a clown and then made the very rare jump to human cannonball. From clown to cannonball this year? Yeah. And apparently his first, first shot sent him six feet. Really? Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. That was his first one. Did he do it as a clown? Do you know? No, I don't. Okay. I think that that would have been a mockery to the human cannonball tradition. Okay. Yeah. Don't want to do that. And then there's the Smith family, also a very popular circus cannonball family. Well, did you talk about John Weiss? Well, he was, he was one of the most prolific cannonballers. Yeah. Did he die doing it? No. Okay. Did you mention

how many times he's done it? No. Five thousand? That is a lot of time to be shot out of a cannon. I did just kind of breeze over that. Yeah. Five thousand times and he'd started in 1987. Yeah. So he was doing it for a little while there for years, I guess. He was doing it once a day, six days a week, 50 weeks a year. Yeah. You're right. That's a lot of blast. That is a lot. That's a lot of, I mean, especially what we know about what the pressure and it exerts on a body. Yeah. Sure. I mean, that's, that's rough work. Yeah. And it's, I mean, we pointed out how it is safe, but more than 30 people have died doing this over the years. Okay. So that, that, that pops up in this article, 30 people have died as human cannonballs. Yeah. There's a British historian

who died a few years back. His name is A.H. Cox. He says that there's been only about 50 people to ever be human cannonballs. What? 30 have died. Really? Yeah. I thought that was kind of significant enough to be put into this article. Enough to ward me off of human cannonballing. So 30 out of 50 have died and that's just who died. Others, you know, like what was Zazzle Berger back? Um, yeah, we'll get into that gruesomeness soon. Was it Louie or Zazzle? Zazzle. Okay. All right. So back to the Smith family. They are the modern cannonball family that are pretty awesome. David Cannonball Smith Jr. has spent much of his life inside of a cannon. Yes. Have you been on their website? No. That's pretty funny. He just, he's described as having

a dynamic personality. I like that. It's better than saying he has a dynamite personality. That'd be pretty bad. Yeah. The war on drugs impacts everyone whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute a 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And on the prime example. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting?

Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer for that. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, everybody. It's your boy, Michael Kyle, world famous, often talked about alleged comedian. Some of y'all know me as Mr. Whitaker from Martin. Some of you know me as Shobo from House Party 3. And yes, I have told you I'm crackers for everybody. And some of you don't know me at all. But you can come find out who I am on my new podcast called Michael Talks to Everybody. That's right. They gave my own show y'all woo woo woo. Michael talks to everybody where every week we'll

be interviewing some of the greatest artists in the game. Also, we'll be talking to ordinary people with extraordinary ideas. It's gonna be off the chain. We're gonna be covered all sort of topic. You ain't heard of nowhere else. We're gonna be doing a lot of laughs and a lot of talking. Most importantly, we're gonna have a lot of fun. It's gonna be off the chain. So please check us out. Everybody I'm telling you, it's crazy. It's bananas. It's Michael Talks to everybody. I'm talking about everybody. We got TI. We got Michael Jackson. It's gonna be just a comeback. He just gonna be here for a minute. Everybody, we're gonna be talking to him. We're gonna be talking on this show. Listen to Michael Talks to everybody on December 5th on the I Heart Radio App,

Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. But David, the bullet Smith Jr. is a son in I'm sorry. He's the one with the dynamic. Oh, okay. His dad was a real snooze. I don't know. He bested his dad's record of by flying 193 feet. Yeah. But his dad still holds the highest at I think 203. 201. 201 feet, 61.2 meters. And that's outside of America. Yeah, that's when those over two Ferris wheels. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. Oh, should you mention the DARPA thing? I thought that was completely stupid and ridiculous. Did you think so? Yeah. I think it's kind of cool. I think if DARPA could perfect this, then it could take the human cannonball art to a whole new level. Let's fill it. But basically DARPA, the Defense Research Project,

right? Yeah. There's an A in there somewhere. Advanced. Yes, thank you. They were looking at, I think they filed a patent for a basically human cannonball cannon that has like a sled chair, right? That shoots you up. I think they said they can get a first responder, special ops, a firefighter on top of a five story building in two seconds. So basically their idea is to take the human cannonball concept and just shoot people on top of buildings to go fight fires or to go snipe people or whatever. So I get that it's the landing thing that they say is the hardest part in real cannonballing. So what's going on there? Well, that's what I'm saying. I have no idea. I don't know if they were like, well, we've got this part. Now let's go figure out the other part.

But that's kind of the big joke or the big underscore among human cannonballers is it's not a problem shooting somebody out of a cannon. It's the landing that's the important part. Yeah. Right? Or in this case, if you're shooting someone on a building, if you're off there, then all of a sudden you're a cartoon and you smack into the building and then slide very slowly down. Except unlike a cartoon, you leave a trail of blood when you slide down. Yeah. And you slide down fast. Yeah. And then there's more blood and body parts on the street. Yes. Which has happened. I'm sure it has. There's been a lot of accidents, as we've said, out of 50, 30 human cannonballs have died. Right? It's a lot. And to prevent this, you know, these people

stay in tip top shape. Right? Sure. You have to work out your core. You have to have a strong back. You need to be able to brace yourself, like you said, and really just go totally rigid so when you're shot out, you're not crushed. You need to become a projectile. Right. Because all you're wearing is a helmet, maybe a little padding. Yeah. But a helmet's not going to do much if you miss your net. No. And the net is very important. A lot of people use airbags as well, right? Yes. There is a guy who's named Elvin Bale. He's the human space shuttle. Poor Elvin Bale. He used airbags and he is a victim of circumstance if there ever has been one. Right? He was big in the 70s and 80s until I believe 1986. 87. 87. Yeah. When he went through all the tests, shot his crash test dummy

out. It landed fine in these airbags where he calculated they should be. And what he didn't know is that his crash test dummy had gotten wet, which made it much heavier, which completely changed the dynamics of its test run. So when he shot himself out, he missed the airbags. Right? He did. He sailed right over them. This is in Hong Kong. And he said that he knew, quote, I could see where I was going and that it was too far, too fast. So he knew in midair, he was conscious enough to be like, oh crap, I'm not going to hit the airbag. And apparently the dummy, because when I read that, I was like, well, how does this happen? Yeah. When that's the only safety thing you can do. How do you have a soaked dummy? Apparently it was left in the rain and

they're filled with sand. And so the outside of it dried. And but the sand was still wet on the inside. So it didn't like feel wet to the touch when they were testing it. And he said he remembered it feeling like it was in slow motion. And that his brain actually thought he could solve this problem in midair aerodynamically, like do something like I can do this and shorten the trip and land upright, which might save me. But instead he overshot it by just a few yards and slam feet first into the floor, shattered his ankles, knee, a leg and his spine. And he's paralyzed from moist down. And that is very sad. Yeah. He mentions the aerodynamics, right? Like there is a specific way you want to land. Yeah, you want to do that little easy somersault

right and land on your back. Yeah. Which is that's the way to land. You also said something that brought to mind the idea that this the G force that we talked about earlier, that's been shown to produce a loss of consciousness in people. So that's another danger that you, you know, when you're sailing, you want to like stay like a projectile. And if you're blacked out, you're going to be like a dead body like you. Yes. Yes. And Elvin Bell is not the only person that something horrible has happened to, obviously. Yeah. Matt Cranch just this year. Yeah, a few months ago in April. Yeah. He, and this is just a nightmare scenario. He got blasted off and right after he blasted off,

the net collapsed. Yeah. So how does that happen? I don't know. That's probably what he's asking. Well, he died. He landed on his head and died. He did die. So that is not what he's asking. That is what his family is asking probably via a lawsuit. It would be my guess. That was in Great Britain too. Very sad. And remember, I mentioned a zikini sister. She, the zikinis used to do these double barrels stunts where they two would be shot out at the same time, usually next to one another along parallel to one another. Well, she and another brother had an act where they'd be shot in the same direction as one another. Passed by in the high five. Yeah. Well, they collided and she broke her back. That's just a bad idea. That was a bad idea. But the

sad thing is, if you look at modern people, like modern cannonballers, they are safety conscious. They were just like a net collapsed or the dummy was wet, which that makes it even sadder to me. If you could shot 200 feet into the air at your brother at 60 miles an hour. I wonder how close you break your back than something that was part of the equation. I wonder how close they intended to go to one another because obviously the closer, the better. Like if they were 20 feet apart, it's not as impressive. So they probably wanted to get it tight for the effect. But can you imagine all of a sudden, when you see that coming straight at you, you probably have the same realization like,

oh, crap, this I'm going to die by hitting my brother. Sister, brother. Very sad. Yeah. Anything else? That's it, man. I did a, do we ever do the thing on daredevils? No, I wrote an article on daredevils and maybe we should do that at some point. Or we've been talking about our evil. Can evil podcast? Maybe because he's a big part of that one. Maybe we can just cover it all. Okay. Sounds human cannonball. Yeah, we've got that one covered done. Okay. Well, if you want to learn more about human cannonballs, including how long it takes to accelerate the human cannonballer to their top speed, do you want to know? One bit of a second. Really? Yeah. You can find all that by typing human cannonball onto the search bar at houseofworks.com.

And from what you say, Chuck, it sounds like that'll bring up more than just one article. Yeah, my daredevils seem like pop up. I said handy search bar at houseofworks.com. That means it's time for listener mail. That's right, Josh. I'm going to call this underground railroad. I'm riding in about underground railroad. I wanted to share a little bit of my childhood summers in upstate New York. My great grandfather, Louie Loveland, made a home in Johnsburg, New York in the Adirondacks. What's so funny? Like you know him. Yeah, Louie. The home itself is incredibly cool and haunted. There's a very cluttered and dimly lit room hidden away behind the kitchen,

which has a small organ buried beneath decades of stored and forgotten items. Family legend has it that the organ would mysteriously start playing at all hours of the night, thanks to spirits. As if that weren't enough, there's a very large barn behind the home, which has seen its better days. My sister and I are always warned to be careful when we went near the barn, be reasoned because the earth beneath our feet could give away at any moment. Well, that sounds like a terrifying summer house. But there's a hidden tunnel beneath the barn, because there's a hidden tunnel beneath the barn running from the back of the home below the barn and out into the mountains right next to a strawberry patch that my great-grandfather

planted a hundred years ago. The tunnel was a part of the underground railroad. And I've been told it's one of the last stops in the Adirondacks that is still intact today. Although it varies, the tunnel is roughly three to four feet below the ground, about five feet tall, four feet wide, and 75 yards long, packed with dirt and rocks and an absolute death trap to navigate without a flashlight. Geez. The entrance from the home is just too dangerous to use anymore, but there is a way to drop into the tunnel via a hidden door in the barn, so long as you don't mind a many landslide of dirt and hay falling into the tunnel, which I would. That's it. Once you carefully make your way through the tunnel, you emerge into sunlight and a strawberry field. Nice. Nice little

treat if you're in there. Somebody can do a warm wet towel, a moist towel to refresh. And that is from Alice in St. Louis. Wow, thanks Alice. You could do that, couldn't you Chuck? You've gone caving before. I could do that. You can handle it. Not me. As long as it's buttressed. I wonder if it is buttressed. If Charles Bronson, anything to do with it is. If you have a great recipe for fresh strawberries, we want to hear it. You can wrap it up in an email, spank it on the bottom, kiss it good night, and send it to StuffPodcast at howstuffworks.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast Stuff from the Future. Join howstuffworks staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready,

are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, hola, I'm Viosa and I'm Mala and we are the host of Locatora Radio. Locatora Radio is a radio phonic novella, which is just a very extra way of saying a podcast. Locatora Radio is your prima's favorite podcast, bringing interviews with your favorite Latinx creatives to the airwaves.

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