Stuff You Should Know - How Skywriting Works

Episode Date: October 9, 2014

Back in the 1920s, skywriting was invented to communicate with troops, but it quickly found its footing as a popular way for companies to advertise. Learn all about the aerial acrobatics and mental skill it takes to write mile-high letters backwards. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Chikis from Chikis and Chill Podcast and I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was whatever love I have from you is extra for me. I already love myself enough.

Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to Chikis and Chill on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bright and Jerry's over there who's the only well one of the three of us. Yeah. Which is crazy. Cray. You and I are both sick at the same time. Yeah, I'm getting over mine and you're in, sounds like in the throes of yours.

I am. Yes. In the flimmy thickness of it. And this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. It is written in the sky. It is. Or in the stars.

Yeah, well now you can't do that at night. No but you could. They tried to make it so. Yeah. Glow in the dark. Yeah, you saw that too. Spoiler. Yeah.

So we're talking about skyriding. Yes, right. And I was trying to think back, Chuck, if I have ever seen something written in the sky, I'm like, surely I have. You've never seen a skyriding message? I have. And I've seen pictures of them. Sure.

Plenty. Like you weren't like, what is this? I'm trying to remember back toward childhood, which is, you know, when I probably would have seen it. Yeah. And I just can't quite place it, but I have a vague recollection and nothing. It's me standing and there's grass, but then I'm like, look up dummy, look up, what's in the sky?

I just walk off and eat a dandelion. This was actually my idea as an article, like we're flooding the website with new material now, which is great. Yeah, man. And I pitched this like five weeks ago, not even bam, and here it is whoop. Here it is. I thought you knew. This is a good idea, Chuck.

Thank you. I found this fascinating. Did you know much about it when you pitched it? Or had you seen a skywritten message recently? I think I got the idea from the great comedian Kurt Braun or did a Kickstarter in May to do a skyriding message. And I think his quote was, it's so stupid and I love doing stupid things. And thank God the internet loves stupid too because they funded it.

And he let people vote on what to do and they chose, how do I land? And he had that written above the skies of Los Angeles and got some attention for it. And it was a funny little gag and Kurt's a great guy and a friend of the show. So that's where I got the idea because I started wondering, how in the world do they do that? Like I've seen them before, but I thought, you know, when you're up there in a plane, it's got to be pretty tough to spell something out. To like massage the clouds over into, to beat them into letters, right? That's how they do it, correct?

That's not how they do it. No, that isn't how they do it. They use a certain type of oil and some high horsepower planes and it takes a tremendous amount of skill, which is why it's not much of a surprise that it finds its origins among World War I flying aces. Yeah. Apparently the Royal Air Force, there's a guy named John Clifford Savage who I guess invented skywriting for military purposes.

Yeah. And back then I think there were several things they did with it in the military. One was to give messages when, you know, you're out of like radio control because I think you can, you can see messages for like 2800 square miles. Yeah. There's a little tricky math to it, but they say that on a clear day, if you're standing on say the Great Plains or something, you could, you can see a skywritten message for something like 30 miles.

And if you take into account all those 30 miles and multiply them, it's, what did you say, like 2800? 2800 square miles. That's a lot of exposure. Yeah. And if you're in World War I, your walkie-talkie back then might not have gone that far, so they would send messages and apparently they would also use it to cloak ships, I guess, fly around and just cloak them in cloudy smoke.

Yeah. For protection. Because what you're doing when you're writing a sky message is basically, I guess you're basically just flying parallel to the ground, right? Well, I mean, it's aerial acrobatics. You're spelling with your plane. So you're loop-tee-loop and you're doing all sorts of crazy stuff. Yeah.

So after John Clifford Savage invented this, like within a couple of years after inventing skywriting, somebody's like, you know who would love this? Companies. And companies have money. That's right. So let's charge them money to advertise their stuff in the sky. And a dude named Captain Cyril Turner was the first person, and I think 1922, to write a skywritten advertisement.

Yeah, and I think he was, I don't know if it was his original idea, but he seemed to be doing this as a proof of concept. Like let me write Daily Mail, the British newspaper. Let me write that in the air and see how that works. And then later he went to the United States later that same year and said, hello, USA, over Times Square. And then, call Vanderbilt7200, which is the hotel phone number where he was staying. And apparently the next two and a half hours he got the switchboard lit up, literally,

you can say that, because it was the 1920s. And it was, they got 47,000 phone calls in just a couple of hours. And I think that was his way of saying, this is going to work. Yeah, exactly. This is advertising. And it got the attention of some people, some companies pretty quickly. Lucky Strikes, very famously, got into skywriting for advertising, Sonoco, basically anybody who was anybody with a company back then, was doing skywriting because the other stuff

you had was the side of a barn, maybe some radio advertising. But skywriting, for the amount of money it cost, you could get a lot of exposure in ways you just normally couldn't. And Pepsi was starting out at this time, and they bought into skywriting so enormously that the company and skywriting are kind of, they go hand in hand in a lot of people's minds. Yeah, in the 1930s, they started putting, they didn't have as much money to advertise on the radio.

So from the 1950s, I'm sorry, from the 30s to the 1950s, they like went all over the U.S., Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Canada, but that was their main form of advertising. And the New York Times at the time was, they thought the skies were going to be littered, like polluted with ads, and they called it celestial vandalism, and they predicted intricate pictures and colors and glow in the dark, like we said, but none of that really came to fruition. No, it didn't. And I mean, there was pretty good reason to kind of worry about this.

In 1940 alone, Pepsi alone commissioned 2,000 skywriting projects, and for kind of more in the history of it, there's this good article called What Happened to Skywriting That Was in the Atlantic? That's worth reading too, by the way. But the thing that undid skywriting, the answer to that question, is television. Yeah, period. When advertising came in, and thanks to our friends at the Nielsen Company, you could really kind of target and tailor your ad in ways that you couldn't before with radio,

and it was for the amount of exposure you got, it was definitely worthwhile to save your money for television advertising and funnel away money from your skywriting budget, you know? Not really now, but it was like a legit form back then of advertising, and like it points out in this article, you have to have ideal conditions as well. It's got to be a clear sky, can't be cloudy, can't be rainy, can't be too windy. So there was a lot of things that radio and television offered, like it doesn't matter what the weather's like, basically.

I mean, your reception's still going to suck, but people can still probably hear what you're trying to say. Yeah. That's a good point. Pepsi, as I guess it's 50th anniversary or something like that, they commissioned one of their former skywriting pilots to go find some plane, the type of plane that was used for skywriting, and this guy found like the plane, one of the main planes that Pepsi used for its skywriting campaigns, because it was so deep into it, it maintained its own aerial

fleet. Right, that's crazy. And this guy found it, and they started another skywriting campaign for another like 20-something years, I believe. Yeah, it started in the 70s with the Mary Me Sue commercial. Did you happen to watch that? No, I didn't get a chance to. Did you like it?

Yeah. No, I mean, I remembered it when I saw it, which was from 1979, so that was the first startling thing that happened to me today. And you know how commercials back then are just so like ham-fisted, like it's this cowboy at a barn trying to propose to Sue, his wife, of course, and she's, you know, you know, it's all acted out, but it's got music over it. So she's like, what are you doing? And he's like, oh, just wait.

And she sees the word Mary, and she's like, hmm. And then she sees Mary Me, and she's like, what? And then she sees her name Sue, and she's like, what? Yes, of course. And then they kiss, and the barn catches fire. No, they're outside. Oh, okay. The barn.

The barn. Oh, I thought you said bar. I'm a little stopped up. Gotcha. But it's great 70s commercial fun. I recommend watching it on the YouTube. It would have been great had the Wicked Witch of the West flown in and written Surrender Dorothy over Mary Me, Sue, because that showed up.

Remember she skywrote with her broom? Really? Yeah. I don't remember that. It was in, uh, I guess it was shortly after, which was about the gold stand. But it was, I think shortly after she discovered her sister had been smushed by Dorothy, and that Dorothy was in Oz, and she jumps on her broom and flies up and right surrendered Dorothy with it in black smoke.

Was she like farting that out? Probably. She's squeezing flying monkeys. That broom exhaust that we all know about. So, uh, let's talk about how to skywrite right after this. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking.

You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down.

It doesn't look good, there is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Is that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Chuck? Yes. They say in this article, but probably they in general, that skywriting is a lost art. It takes a tremendous amount of skill, and it's been so underfunded over the last few decades that there's literally a handful of people, maybe four or five, how many people fit into a hand? Well it says in here, four people. I found that hard to believe, but the article also points out that it's a lost art because

it's, you can't learn it unless you learn from someone who does it, and so few people do it these days. It's just a closely guarded secret, and back in the day they wouldn't tell anyone because competition among pilots, they would keep their little secrets to themselves, so there's really, you can't get on the Internet and learn how to skywrite. Yeah, there's not a handbook or anything like that. And we should say, we're talking skywriting, there's something separate called sky typing, which more people are involved with, but for freehand skywriting, there's seriously

possibly four to six people in the world that know how to do it. Yeah, well these days too, I looked at a couple of the skywriting websites, I think there's probably only two, and it's skywriting and banner towing, which is the big thing now. Crop dusting. You've got skywriting.com and skywriting.net, that would have made it. That's what you see more these days, if you want an ad or a marry me, Josh, you're going to attach it to a banner and pull it behind your plane instead of that stupid smoke stunt. And actually one of the people interviewed, one of the very few people who know how to

freehand skywrite, which is kind of redundant, skywriting is freehand. She met her husband, who was a banner toer, and taught him how to skywrite. She was a Pepsi smoke writer, and when she got ahold of her husband, he was just some backwards banner toer. She's like, I'm going to teach you a skill, friend. He's like, but all you do is hook it up here and fly. She said, oh, just wait. Oh, you're talking about the, yeah.

Yeah, he thought banner towing was like the difficult, yeah, because he was crop dusting before that. But Suzanne Asbury Oliver, and her husband, Steve Oliver, I believe, are two of, they're possibly half of the total number of people who know how to skywrite. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. And they're married. It's all in the family.

Yeah. The secrets in the family. So these planes are going about 150 miles an hour. It's pretty fast. And in order to, if you've ever seen a skywritten message, it looks a little like a child has drawn it because they're writing it with a plane and it's very difficult to do. Right. And in fact, the word Pepsi itself apparently takes 17 different maneuvers.

And I think like 14 smoke releases, just to make those five letters. Yeah. That's pretty tricky. Right. Even before that though, you have to have perfect conditions like you were saying. The whole thing starts at about 10,000 feet up because up there it's cold enough. Sometimes it's humid enough that the smoke will stay together. Right.

So it'll last as long as like 20 minutes under ideal conditions. Yeah. Plus it can't be cloudy. Yeah. Or else your stuff just kind of blends in with everything else. Marry me blob. Right. Exactly.

So you have to have ideal conditions first. And then after that, you have to get in your little air acrobatic plane. So they used to use, I think the Pepsi plane was a traveler is what it was called. All right. That was the company that made it. And it's now in the National Air and Space Museum by Dulles, which is well worth the visit. Oh yeah.

Yeah. There's a space shuttle there. There's a SR-71 Blackbird. There's a lot of really great stuff there. And apparently there's the Pepsi plane too. But Suzanne Asbury Oliver says that she uses a chipmunk now. Yeah. Which is a small light, very highly maneuverable plane with a high horsepower.

That's another key. Sure. Because with high horsepower, you can generate a lot of heat. And you're going to have to generate a lot of heat up there because you need to burn off your oil. Yeah. It's a paraffin oil, liquid paraffin basically and it needs to, in order to reach that smoke point, needs to hit the engine at 1500 degrees and then it is just spit out through the exhaust.

And I think the letters themselves always wonder from the ground like how big they are. Apparently the letters are about a mile high and once the smoke expands about 75 feet wide, which is bigger than I thought. Yeah. I had no idea they were a mile high letters. Yeah. But it's 10,000 feet though, it makes sense. And pepsi can be, the word pepsi, it can be up to about five miles across.

Crazy. Yeah. And so when you're doing this, you have no frame of reference. Like you can't see what you're doing is the author of this article points out, Julia Layton says, it's basically like drawing a picture in the dark. Yeah. And backwards. And backwards.

It's a very good point. Which I didn't understand why they had to do it that way. Because the way you're flying, the ground is below you, but the people looking up at the message, the sky is above them. Oh yeah, sure. I guess that makes sense. So when you're writing pepsi like this, if you were beneath, it'd be backwards to you. So since you're doing it for the benefit of the people on the ground, you, the sky writer,

has to write the whole thing backwards. They probably learned that the hard way a couple of times. Yeah. So they're like, hello, USA backwards. What does that say? Yeah. Apparently there was one guy I read in that Atlantic story in New York in the early days that did such a bad job.

He landed and went back up and drew a line through his message and started over. Yeah. I like that though. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. I was wondering if there was a technique for like flying through your old letters or whatever to break them up and sort of, but a line will do it too. People get that.

I never thought about that. It's a good idea. So to, to make these letters, you're using the ground, any, anything you can on the ground is like a frame of reference, like streets in some cities or form a grid like pattern. So in an article I read, they basically said that's kind of like using lined paper. Yeah. Yeah. You also can use the shadow on the ground that's reflected by the clouds to kind of

show yourself like, okay, that, that letter looks good. I can move on to the next one, but you're also using timing. Sure. Two. So like, for example, to make the upright in a F or a P or an L or something like that, you're going to hold your smoke trigger for like a 15 count or something like that. Right. And you'll know what that's going to look like.

I mean, a lot of practice goes into this too. For sure. Because that's just one streak when you have to go make the rest of the P or an R or something. That's very difficult. And Suzanne Asbury Oliver points out writing Chinese is extraordinarily difficult. Like in the sky. I wasn't sure what she meant by that. I think she meant in the sky.

Really? Yeah. Man. I thought you were just equating it with writing Chinese on paper or something. I don't know. She's the best around. All right. So once you have written this message, if it is on a good day and it's not super windy,

you might get 20 minutes out of it, usually less than that. I've seen anywhere from like eight to 10 before it starts to dissipate. And you can see it, you know, for a while too once it dissipates. But on a good day, what you're paying for is not a lot of time exposure time. So that's why back in the day, they used to do over things like Times Square or sporting events, of course, is where they do the banners now, same idea back then. And like we said, Chuck, they use a paraffin based oil and they have a reservoir tank that usually holds something like 30 gallons, which is 114 liters for our friends outside the

U.S. and Liberia. And that's enough typically to write about 12 letters. Not much. No. So these messages are typically fairly short. Although there was one that's way more than 12 letters and I couldn't find out, but it seems to me from what I've seen, it's got to be the longest skywriting message ever, the one that John Lennon and Yoko Ono commissioned over in Toronto.

Was it over Toronto? Over Toronto. War is over if you want it. Happy Exmos. They saved a few bucks there from John and Yoko. The only thing I can figure is they might have had a couple of planes at work. Maybe. Because that's way more than 12 letters.

Yeah. I mean, if the thing sticks around for 20 minutes, it could be, yeah, I would guess they'd have to use more than one. And then over Austin in March of this year, that had to be for South by Southwest. The first several hundred digits of pie, so they must have had a couple of planes over that too. Pie in the sky. It's going to cost you some money.

In the article, it says 5,000, but I saw the other website, maybe they're undercutting, said that they started about 1,500 bucks for the most basic message. Which is just an I. Well, and it goes up from there. I know Kurt Braunauer raised, like I said, about 6,800 bucks. That's not bad for a lengthy message like that. Yeah. How do I land?

Yeah, and the Kickstarter, apparently the founder of Kickstarter heard about it and was in town and delayed his trip an extra day because Kurt had a big party on a rooftop. And he stayed and went to the party just to, I guess, say, like, this is what my company has become. Or I had something to do with this too. Yeah, probably so. And if you're worried about what is being used for smoke, like we said, it's paraffin oil and it's actually non-toxic, biodegradable, the good stuff.

And if you're like, hey, skyriding is polluting, but I'm cool with air shows, well, I have an eye opener for you, pal. They use the same stuff at air shows. That's right. And if you are a pilot, like, let's say you're a crop duster and you've got a little de Havillin chipmunk and you want to get into this because it seems like a good time to be getting into skyriding. It's also the worst time to be getting into skyriding.

But it'll cost you anywhere from three to six grand to outfit your plane to be able to do this. I mean, you can make that back in a couple of messages. Maybe one. Yeah. That's not bad. Yeah. If John Lennon hires you.

Yeah. I don't know if that's going to happen anytime soon. No, but Yoko still could. She's still around and kicking. Yeah. We saw her in New York. In person? Yeah.

No way. Way. What, just like walking? No, at a restaurant. Holy cow. That's a big one. It was a huge one. Yeah.

Very neat. Or if you're shy of LaBeouf. LaBeouf. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know that guy? Uh-huh. That jerk.

He's not famous anymore. His bag says so. He did that. You know, he was in the, had that plagiarism scandal earlier this year. I didn't know what that was about. He did some, I think, I'm not sure exactly what he did, but he supposedly plagiarized Daniel Kloes, a graphic novel, like pretty heavily, and he was just killed for it. For what?

Did he have a graphic novel? No. I think he did a, maybe it was a play or something. I can't remember exactly, but he was called out and nobody likes that guy anyway. So people are ready to pounce on him anyway. So he did, he spent 25 grand to hire sky riders, one that said, I'm sorry, Daniel Kloes or Klaus, I'm not sure how it's pronounced. And then another one that said, stop creating.

Because if you're a creator, they're going to come after you, I guess. 25 grand. And I believe those were digital sky riding, which is- Whoa, whoa, whoa. We're going to get into that right after this. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking.

You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Patrick Curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down.

Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. There's a skyline drive in the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, where wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. So digital skywriting, the wave of the future. Yeah, the wave of the future that originated in the 1940s. Yeah, I was really surprised to see that. So remember how we said there's like skywriting, which is freehand? There's also sky typing, which is basically like dot matrix printing, but in the sky. And in the 40s, a guy named Andy Stennis, whose family is still involved in sky typing, they run one of the bigger sky typing companies, as you can imagine.

He invented this process where you would use multiple planes. And they basically just fly across a patch of sky, information. So kind of like, you remember that chalk holder that you would make like the music stripes with? Yeah, yeah. You know what they call music stripes? Yeah, I think they use it to when you were first learning cursive, like lined paper. Or if you got in trouble and you had to write something all over the chalkboard, you could

just use that thing and knock out like five at once. I totally forgot about those. This is like that, but with planes. And in the 40s, Andy Stennis was like, I'm just going to put five planes in the service together. That's what I mentioned. In one direction, we'll all go back and fly above that in the opposite direction and then above that back in the original direction.

And then you print out basically a message that way. So you're building it from the bottom up or the top down. Going from side to side. Just like a dot matrix. Exactly like that. Yeah. The thing is, though, it's going to look neater than your hand-drawn one. It's not going to look like a five-year-old drew it.

Well, especially since in the 60s, they introduced computer programs that control it too. Well, exactly. And it's little puffs of smoke like the dot matrix. So the computer controls it. The pilot just flies the plane. It's got the message all loaded into the little program. And it knows when to burp out those little puffs of smoke, five at a time, and then back and forth and back and forth until you've got whatever your silly message is.

Shia LaBouf. Right. So if you're making a mile-high message and the five planes are flying in like a half a mile-wide formation, then one pass is they're going to make the bottom half of like pi or stop creating or something. Then the next pass will be the top half of it from one side to the other. And then you've got a perfect, very, very nice, like you said, very clean, sky-typed message.

Yeah, and you can still see the dots, I mean, it puffs out, but it never quite connects like a sky-written message. And I guess now to think about it, if you pay 25 grand, that's five planes at five grand apiece, which is the minimum price. So I guess that makes sense. Yeah, that's one of the main reasons sky-typing is so much more expensive. You can get way more letters out of it. Like when they did pi in the sky in Austin, they did, I think, a couple hundred of the

places. Wow. After the decimal. Like that's a tremendous sky-type message. I wonder who paid for that, I'm sure it was like Google or somebody, huh? Probably. They got deep pockets. But that's one of the reasons why it's so expensive, because you have to hire five or

more planes. Like it's a minimum of five planes. Yeah. You might need more than that. Yeah, and I think, who wrote this one? Julie Layton. Julie Layton says that the digital sky-riding requires less piloting finesse. I guess that's a one way of saying it, because you're not doing loop-de-loops.

But if you're flying five at a time in formation, that's some piloting finesse. That is piloting finesse, but they're not doing, like you say, a loop-de-loop to make the top part of an R. Yeah. You know? Like they're just basically flying in formation, and then some computer is measuring exactly like their altitude and their distance in relation to the ground, and spitting out a puff of smoke to form these letters.

Like they're not doing any of the writing. Yeah, but it's still. Oh, it's better than I can do. I'll give you that. Yeah, and there's predictions that sky-riding is making a big comeback. So much so. And I found this interesting, Microsoft, did you see this where they got a virtual sky-riding patent?

No. This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. They got a patent where you can send in a picture of a blue sky and tell them the message you want, and they will insert a fake sky-riding message into your photo, and you can show people like, hey, I got a photo of a sky-riding message that's not real. That's cheating. That's going to ruin the industry. Maybe, but apparently the patent, the picture that they used to get the patent awarded was

of a real sky-written message that was actually copy-written. So they, I think it still went through even though they had infringed on a copyright to get the patent. And I don't think they've done anything with it yet. There's not an app yet. But no, I would know about it if there were. Look out for it in the future, my friend. You might be able to fake Yumi out and say, look at this photo, and she's like, that's

weird. Usually people just walk you outside and show you the thing. I would say, no time for that. Just look at the photo. We're a busy couple. And there actually, it does sound like there is something of a future for sky-riding, thanks to social media. Because there's the novelty of a sky-written message, like a real one, not the Microsoft

fake-out one. Yeah, like how do I land? And you've got things like Instagram and Twitter. So people are like, oh, check this out, what somebody did over the sky of Austin. And all of a sudden, something that was visible to everybody at South by Southwest is visible to the entire world. Well, that's how Kurt Braunhauer's blew up. It was on Reddit.

And weeks after he had done it, he got a little bit of press, and then it popped up on Reddit weeks later. And he got a whole new round of press and did interviews about it, and it became a nice little comic stunt for old Kurt. Now he has a car. That's right. You got anything else? I have nothing else, sir.

OK, well, if you want to know more about sky-writing, this article commissioned by Chuck, you can type sky-writing one word into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com, and it will bring it up. Since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this another vulture vomit revisiting. Oh, that's the gift that keeps on giving. Yeah, we did a podcast a while ago on vultures and how their defense is to vomit on you. And it happened to this guy, which is kind of neat.

Hey, everyone, I'm a bit of an amateur speedlunker. A few summers ago, I made the precarious climb up a cliff to explore a cave overlooking a river. I had a friend with me, as you always should for such adventures, but the narrow ledge only allowed for one of us at a time to get to the mouth of the cave, so I went first. I got in to the cave, and the droppings in foul stench let me know that it was a vulture nest. But nobody seemed to be home, so I ventured a little deeper and found, to my surprise,

a nest of hissing, angry little vulturelings. Oh, but those are adorable. I bet they are. They were as aggressive as they were fuzzy, and the biggest one tried to challenge me and chase me away, which I thought was really cute. That's the big brother. Until I heard a thump behind me in a much louder hiss. I turned around to see that Mama had returned, and her bulk blocked almost the entire entrance

of the small cave. I decided to make a fake rush and yell to scare her away, and when I did, she reared her head back and projectile vomited, hitting me in the side of the face. I have to tell you guys, no other chemical deterrent in nature compares to vulture vomit. I was shocked for a moment, and when I caught the whiff of the disgusting mess running down my neck and into my shirt, I basically went mildly insane. I pushed past the vulture, leapt from the cave, and slid down a tree growing next to the cliff, tore off my shirt, and jumped into the river in a mad dash to get away from

that smell. Despite a good washing in the river, I still stank, and I had to ride home in the bed of the truck. That, my friends, is why you should never scare a vulture. That is from James Ashford in Springfield, Mizzou. Nice. Thanks a lot, James. It's funny how a vulture vomit will focus the mind.

Yeah. I bet it's, have you ever been skunked, or been super close to something that's been skunked? I was like, I've driven on the highway through a skunked spring. Not the same. I've never been anywhere near it. Yeah. My dog Lucy got skunked when we lived in L.A., and I woke up, I might have told this before,

I woke up in the middle of the night, and this was during, it was post 9-11, I thought that someone had set off a dirty bomb. It was unlike, it doesn't smell like it does on the road. It smelled like the harshest, most bitter, like, acrid chemical, it was just in the air, and I was tasting it in my mouth, and I was like, we've been attacked. We've been attacked. Yeah, because there's something almost vaguely pleasant about skunk smell far away. Oh yeah, I love it.

But I can see how it would just make you lose your mind, and cry, and feel like burn your skin or anything. No, it didn't. It was really gross though. I mean, she smelled for, we gave her the tomato juice bath, which is supposed to help. Did it work? Yeah, I mean, it sort of masked it a little bit, but it basically just has to wear off over, of course, days and days and days.

Yeah. Yeah, it was really rancid. Did you like, shave her fur or anything like that? No, I thought about it. It was so gross. It is very gross. Yeah. I didn't know there were skunks in L.A.

That might be the fact of this podcast. Oh, they're all over the place. Skunks, coyotes, mountain lions, and smelly dogs. This is a wild place. Tomato sauce dogs. If you want to tell us a story that has to do with one of our old episodes, we'd love hearing about that, especially if it brings up a counter story by Chuck. You can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast.

You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. We have an Instagram page. We have a Pinterest page. We got it all, everybody. And the whole thing comes together at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. I'm Munga Shatikler, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe.

We find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Cheekies from Cheekies and Chill Podcast, and I want to tell you about

a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was, whatever love I have from you is extra for me. Like, I already love myself enough. Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes.

Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.