Stuff You Should Know - Why is Venice so wet?

Episode Date: June 3, 2014

Venice, Italy has a problem. It's sinking, and the water around it is rising. Thankfully, some engineers are working hard on the MOSE project - huge gates that keep high tide from happening. Learn all about Venice in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Apple Podcasts, 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 Debbie Chuck Bryant, knows with us again. And it's another morning edition. Yeah. We got an email, I think we had our last morning session not too long ago, and someone

wrote in and said, please don't do that again. I didn't think it was that bad. You guys are clearly like really tired and not the same. So what I say is, if you have a choice, is save this one for the morning and just pretend like we're your local NPR station or a cup of Joe, like Josh is drinking. Yeah. And it smells so good. And let's do this morning style.

Let's do it, man. Let's do this morning style in Italian. Yeah. This is going to be a fan favorite, I predict, because there's some Italian pronunciations that I'm sure you will do for everybody, right? I'm not going to do it my best. Oh, that was good. Yeah.

Give a little taste of it. Yes, that's one of the accents you can have a great time with without people saying that you're offensive. That's a t-shirt. Yeah. So Chuck, you heard about them sea levels? Yeah. Rise and fall.

Yeah. Yeah. And climate change? That's what I'm saying. Well, it's climate change. The big bone of contention is whether it's human cause or anthropogenic. The thing is, it is undeniable that sea levels are rising. Yes.

A rate of about three millimeters a year, which doesn't sound like much, but buddy, if you live for a thousand years, you'd see the sea levels rise by three meters, which is almost 10 feet in America. Yeah. Not the biggest deal in some parts of the world. Big deal in Venice. Yeah. And you know, if you're waiting a thousand years to watch it rise three meters, that's

the current rate of sea level rise. It could speed up tremendously. And while three millimeters might not sound that much to you out in the Rockies. Sure. Yeah. Cause it's nice and dry there in the middle of the mountain. They're all stoned. Right.

Yeah. So how do you get back in those small areas? If you're in a place like the Maldives, you're saying, wow, my country is probably not gonna exist in the next like 20 years. Yeah. That's scary. If you're in New Orleans, worried about the same thing, and a little town known as Venice, Italy is facing the same problem and has been for a very long time.

And you say little town, it is getting smaller not only physically, but the population, because because Venice is such a mess has declined down to about 60,000 people now over the years from like 180 because people are tired of getting wet. They are. They used to get wet, say back in 1900, they would get wet about 10 times a year due to flooding. They could expect 10 noteworthy floods a year, and when we say noteworthy floods, we mean like the squares throughout the city are flooded up to maybe your knees.

Yeah, kind of like the whole ground floor of Venice. Yeah, gets flooded like you're slogging around, which I mean, sounds kind of fun when you're a kid, but it's not that fun, especially when you're an adult who may be a germaphobe because Venice has an antiquated sewer system. That's antiquated is the perfect word. Yeah, by antiquated, we mean all of the sewer pipes go right out into the canals. They have along the years added like septic tanks to treat the stuff first, but not everybody has those, and sometimes they get backed up too.

But the raw sewage or septically treated sewage in Venice goes into those canals that you float around in boats, and when you're swimming around in the flood like a tourist, you're swimming around in fecal material. Did tourists get in that water? There's a picture of it. On a, oh man, I can't remember. I think like a Bloomberg article about Venice, or maybe Wired, but it's like, if you know about Venice, you'll think these people are crazy for swimming in this flood water, and

it shows a couple of tourists like swimming in a flood in the middle of the square, a San Marco, the San Marco Square, and now that you know, it's gross to see. They're like, it tastes briny and sort of umami. Right. Why are my lips swollen? Yeah, that's one of many, many problems facing Venice right now, an antiquated sewer system, and a lot of the problems are unique just because of the city, and how it's created. Yeah, let's talk about this, because Venice is not something I knew a ton about.

I knew it was on the water. I knew it was sinking. Shout out, by the way, to Venice's Sinking, Athens Band, and Stuff You Should Know Fans. Oh, nice. Um. Well, then I like them already. Yes. No, you know those guys?

He does, in fact. No, he doesn't. No talks. Jerry doesn't. What if he was real loud and was like, oh, yeah, they're great. He launches into like a five minute discourse. So I knew a little bit about Venice, very little though, I'd never been there, but when I watched this awesome video that Josh found, we should go ahead and plug it because it's just super

cool. Yeah, it's called Venice Backstage Period, How Does Venice Work? Yeah. It's created by the Insula Spa, which is, I guess, the production arm of the city of Venice. Yeah. So it's like a locally produced video about Venice, but it's one of the most fascinating like 18 minute videos I've ever seen.

Yeah. I mean, they pack a lot of learning into that 18 minutes. So if you don't know much about Venice, imagine, if you do know something about New York City, imagine like the Greenwich Village, and I use Greenwich Village because it's not on like the direct, like North-South East-West grid, they got all those crazy diagonal streets. Imagine if... Plus it's so hot right now because of Lou and Davis. Yeah, true.

Imagine Greenwich Village if every block was an island, and that's essentially what Venice is. Right. It is 124 tiny little islands all packed together, and instead of streets, you have water, 183 canals, and it's all connected by little foot bridges and real bridges. Yep. And, yes, canals by boat. Yeah.

I mean, it's crazy when you... I'd never even seen like the big zoom in from above, bird's eye view of what Venice looks like, and I was like, that's what's going on? Yeah, it's crazy because I mean, especially when you're in the city, like you're walking over canals, but you don't give too much thought to them, you're just like, oh, that's so quaint. Yeah. And you're thinking like they dug that out on purpose or something to get tourists. Now, those are necessity.

Yeah, it's odd. It was an odd and different way for a city to form. They didn't start from a city center and grow out. Each little block in section was its own little thing. Yeah, it was kind of its own little municipality. And the reason that these people set up shop hundreds and hundreds of years ago on these islands was for protection. Venice was a very well-protected municipality or cluster of municipalities, right?

Yeah, it sits in a lagoon. And there are three waterways that flow water in and out every day, twice a day with the tides. Yeah, the Adriatic flows in to the lagoon and brings it out, brings the water back out at low tide, right? Yeah. Yeah, high tide, it brings water in, low tide, it takes the water out, which is why they're not that worried about their sewage going into the canals because the water comes in

and kind of brings all the trash out to the sea and then no one sees it, so it's fine. It's a self-efflushing system. Yeah, well, I mean, it pretty much is. So that's how they've been able to put up with that for so long because twice a day the water is exchanged. There's a big exchange to it. The problem is when that water comes in, especially when you include sea level rises and now up to six times more flooding per year, remember it was like 10 times a year in 1900, now it's

up to about 60 floods. You have kind of a problem now. You have a sinking city, essentially, is what it amounts to. Yeah, I mean, it's two things. The water rises and Venice itself, the buildings are sinking, so those are two bad things that don't taste great together. The reason that it's sinking is because they extract fresh water from beneath the city, right?

Yeah. So there's less of a solid foundation now, and there's also drilling nearby, like for natural gas or fossil fuels, and it's also just eroding. Well, yeah, they've done a lot of things over the years. When you've got seawater lapping up against, well, let's step back. It's not just dirt and stuff. They realized pretty early on, we're not going to be around unless we encase the entire city basically in brick below the water line.

They came up with some really ingenious construction methods that you can see in that Venice backstage video on Vimeo. Is it Vimeo? Yeah. But even though they've ensconced the whole city in brick as a foundation, that was lapping saltwater, and these canals are busy, it's not just the gondolier singing the song. If you see real footage and not movie footage, they're packed with boats, motor boats, cruise ships, all sorts of stuff.

That action creates a lot of movement in the water, and it just whittles away those bricks little by little over the years, over hundreds and hundreds of years, and then that's why Venice is sinking. One of the other problems, too, is sediment builds up in the canals. They're supposed to close them down on a fairly regular basis, basically dam them up, drain them, and then remove the sediment and basically clean it out. They stopped doing that as frequently as before, and there's been a problem as a result. Plus, saltwater permeates bricks.

Bricks are semi-permeable, and they have capillary action, so it draws saltwater up into the bricks, which, I mean, as long as bricks are connected by mortar, that saltwater will rise all the way to the top of a building. When the water evaporates, the water's gone, but the salt stays, and it apparently increases in volume tremendously and basically crushes the bricks from the inside out. Yeah, and they've been taking steps and measures little by little in different ways over the years to help, but they're kind of fighting a losing battle, they're like inject resin into the between the bricks and into the bricks, like hydraulics.

Yeah, a barrier. But they're fighting, like I said, they're fighting mother nature here. Right, so finally, they've said, let's turn our attention from these piecemeal measures of kind of treating bricks and go to where the problem is. Let's go to the doorstep of the problem, which is the Adriatic and the three inlets into the lagoon. They turn their attention to that, and now they've come up with a pretty great plan for dealing with rising tides and floodwaters.

And I think we will get to that plan right after this break. I knew you were going to say that. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen.

So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to 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. All right, so there's a plan. You know, one thing on that video too quickly that amazes me when you're talking about the

building construction. The walls in Venice, the exterior walls have a tendency to bow out at the top, and so they have these basically hooks that pull from the inside the walls in, and then those long metal hooks travel into the floor where they're spiked into the floor, so they're trying to pull it in there, and then the roofs of the buildings in Venice aren't just like, hey, let's keep the water out. They are literally like caps that lock the walls in at the top. So it's not just like a weather protector roof.

It's actually like, if the roof wasn't there, the walls would bow out, and then the interior walls don't even connect rigidly to the exterior walls. Yeah, they allow some give so that they can move back and forth as the wave action basically moves the walls. So, I mean, we're saying Venice is a mess, but it's really an ingenious city of just engineering, the fact that it's still there at all, you know? Another construction point that kind of stuck out to me was that buildings in Venice are built on piles of stakes, like wooden stakes driven into the ground to kind of reinforce

the mucky ground to build on first. It's really a remarkable place when you look at all the things they've had to do just to make that what shouldn't even be a city. I mean, let's get real. It's a very neat, beautiful city, have you been? No. You and me and I went last summer and it is gorgeous. Yeah, I did roam and that's it.

It's very neat. Yeah. Rooms neat, too. Yeah. Just walking around and all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm next to a 3,000-year-old ruin, so it's just basically part of the cityscape. Right. Whereas here in Atlanta, you're like, oh, there's a Burger King.

Right. But it's from the 60s. Right, exactly. All right, so we had a pretty good cliffhanger that they had an idea, so we'll go ahead and announce it. Oh, OK. Well, the idea is called Mose, or you should do this, Chuck. The Modulo esperimentale electromechanico, electromechanico.

So that's the experimental electromechanical module, which is the reason that has that clumsy name is because the M-O-S-E, the acronym, is also the Italian spelling for Mose or Moses. And basically what Moses was well-known for, one of his many hits, was Parting the Red Sea. Right? Well, they thought that was very clever. That was his biggest hit. They were coming.

I don't know. He did a lot of stuff. Ten commandments. That was a pretty big hit. Burning Bush. I'd say the Red Sea was his American pie, or no, that was his Baker Street. The Ten Commandments was his right down the line. Who did?

Jerry Rafferty. Baker Street. That was the saxophone one, right? Yeah. Yeah. And right down the line was his other hit. I've never heard that one. You have.

You just don't know it. OK. Says you. I was just about to bust it out too early. So anyway, Moses in Italian, that's a clever use of an acronym, because this thing, the contraption they came up with, it's pretty ingenious and clever to defend against these rising high tides, which are known as aqua-alta. Aqua-alta.

Yeah. And this is one of those things where you say ingenious and clever, but I would add in its simplicity. Right. One of the favorite kinds of projects when man looks at something and says, well, why don't we just build a big gate, and that's pretty much what it is. Yeah. Yeah.

But it's more complicated than that. Let's talk about the Mose. So remember we said sea levels are rising in general, but high tides are a really big problem in Venice because they're getting higher. So the Mose project, it consists of a bunch of gates that can be brought up and raised on command. They have a magician who commands the gates to rise. And the gates come up and basically separate the lagoon from the Adriatic Sea.

Yeah. So imagine a big, huge steel door that lays flat on the bottom of the ocean. And they fill it with air and it's got two hinges on one side. So that big steel door just raises up as it fills with air, obviously becoming more buoyant until it looks like about a 45-degree angle facing out into the sea, away from the city. And that's it. It's just a barrier.

Yeah. It just swings up. And I think there's about a two-foot differential in the water levels. And it essentially prevents high tide from happening within the Venice lagoon. That's exactly right. And these basically walls, floating walls is what they amount to. Like you said, they have hinges on the bottom. And there's all sorts of pictures of the Mose project, the Mose project, all over the internet.

I found it exponentially easier to understand when I saw what they were talking about. Yeah. It's like, oh, that's all it is? Yeah. But it'll allow us to clumsily try to get this across. So you've got the hinges hinge the metal wall to the bottom of the seafloor, right? Well not to the seafloor. Well, to a concrete trench within the seafloor that the thing sits in when it's not in use.

Yeah. They tried to pound it right into the sand and they were like, it's not a workin'. Right. Get us some concrete. So these trenches also provide a place for engineers to go underneath and basically fix things and fiddle with stuff and it also provides a delivery system for the compressed air that the hollow metal walls, gates basically, fill up with air so that they start to stand upright.

Yeah. And how long does that take? Like 20 minutes or 30 minutes. Yeah. And then it takes about the same time to fill them with seawater again to return them back to their laying position on the floor. It was a little quicker going down, but which makes sense. Yes.

But that's pretty much it. So when the high tide's coming, they fill them with air so that the gates stand up above water and then on the lagoon side, the sea level stays low. On the sea side, it can get as high as it likes and because they're hinged and filled with air, they're not rigid, which means that they can take a pounding and they can sway back and forth a little bit and still not give. So it is, like you said, it's ingenious and it's simplicity. It is.

It was officially launched in 2003 and this was after years and years of, I guess, ideas and bids and plans and the Mose Project is what finally went out. They said it was going to be $2 to $3 billion and would be done in 2012. It's still not done. They're looking at 2016 now. They did the first successful test late last year and like with every big project, city project like that. It's going to be over budget and over schedule.

Yes, but there's a lot of accusations of corruption. Really? Yes. Southern Italy, a big public project is corrupt. The group that suggested the thing in the first place is called the, you want to take it? Someone's going to be offended by me, by the way. Maybe.

I'll bet they're not Italian though. Concorzio Venezia Nuova. So that's basically the new Venice consortium. It's a group of companies and construction companies that said, hey, we've got an idea for this problem. Let's try this and we'll build it for you. We have all the companies under our banner that can provide everything you need. And they said we'll build it for you for $2 to $3 billion and everybody went, what?

Which sounds like a lot, including to people in Venice. Is that American dollars or is that euros? That's American dollars as far as I'm seeing right here. Yeah. But if you go to Venice, Martini's like $15 or $25, it's like $20 or $25 bucks for like a little tiny Martini at Harry's Bar. I know. Yeah.

So it sounds like a lot, but all you have to do is go open the cash register at Harry's Bar on a Tuesday afternoon and you can get $2 to $3 billion to pay for this project. All right, someone's a little salty about their Venice. It was really expensive. Yeah, it is. It was neat. It's also like really expensive. Europe's not cheap.

No. So there's a lot of accusations of corruption, of kickbacks, of the thing being artificially expensive. Yeah. Apparently there was a study that found like this thing is, they've padded this tremendously. But by the time this came out, public opinion apparently wasn't enough to stop at construction. It started. They did their first test in 2012, apparently it was successful and the Mose Project continues.

I believe they're tracking for 2016 to have all of the gates across all three of the inlets operational. Yeah. And you said multiple gates. So each of these inlets, you have the Lido, the Malamoco, and then I pronounce this Chiojia, but I heard it much, much differently on the video. So I know that's not right. But those are the three inlets.

Well, that was a British student. They just pronounce things however they want. Yeah, that's true. And then we assume because they're European, they know. You're right. So it's not like one big gate for each of these things because it's on a curve and you can't just have one huge gate. So the Malamoco and the Chiojia have, the Malamoco has 19 gates, the Chiojia has 18 and

they're all in one row. And then the Big Daddy, the Lido has two rows, one with 20 gates and one with 21 gates. Yeah. And they're not all the same width, but they're not all the same height. Right. And I mean, they don't need to be. No. Some are taller than others.

They're all about 16 feet thick. So these are huge, huge walled gates. So yeah, I think we should, I don't know if we've gotten across how big they are. You said they're 16 feet or about five meters thick. Yeah. They're the, the deepest amount of water is 100 feet, which is like 30 meters. So these things are taller than that. Yeah.

Or if need be. Yeah. And then they're what, about 350 tons. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing.

You're talking to yourself. What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh God. Seriously. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts on the podcast, pay dude, the nineties 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 nineties. 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 nineties. Listen to Hey Dude, the nineties called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think that's just for like one of the gates. Yes. Like one single panel that weighs as much as a 737 or is it 747? A 747. And they are using something that Rolls Royce makes that is basically an elevator for ships

to convey each of the gates out to the sea floor. Oh, really? Yeah. And it takes three days to move a gate. Wow. Yeah. So they're really, really big gates. Yeah.

And they're going to be very nimble when filled with compressed air and smacked around by waves. Plus they're in water. Yeah. So that helps with the weight. That reminds me that this project faces a lot of problems that the project faces. So there's some people have said, maybe this is a good idea in theory, but practically this may or may not work.

What if sea levels rise faster than we think? Yeah. Then these things are going to basically be very expensive, totally obsolete gates. Like the water would just go right over the top of them. Exactly. Yeah. That's a nightmare scenario. Yeah.

When I saw what I saw, it didn't look like to me they came out of the water enough. I was like, I would add another five feet. Yeah. Just to be safe. Just to be safe. So that's one possible problem. Another one that apparently they haven't addressed is the buildup of sediment. Remember we said that you have to clean out the canals pretty frequently because sediment

builds up, it backs up septic systems, it crumbles brick walls. Well it will also fill in these trenches, which apparently need to be totally flat. And as sediment builds up, then these things aren't going to lay flat again and you may have some problems. Apparently that's something that hasn't been addressed by the Mose Project. How to deal with sediment buildup. So I know they've got about 150 people that will just be full-time caretaking staff. And I guess part of their job will be to clean that stuff up, huh?

I would guess. And some of the other problems, anytime you're undertaking a project like this that has to interact with the elements in Mother Nature, they're going to be environmental concerns. And they range the spectrum here from, we don't really know how this is going to affect things and disrupt the ecosystem to, well, wait a minute, we need this constant flow in and out of water twice a day to flush our giant toilet that we're living in. And proponents will say, it's going to be better actually because, and it sort of makes sense if there's, if you have three holes going into something and you plug up two of

them, you're going to have a stronger flow in the one hole. Right, exactly. So they're saying we can actually use this to manipulate this flow of water artificially. And make a better toilet flusher. Exactly. Yeah. But I think that hopefully the ones who are like, well, but why don't we just use this as an opportunity to update our septic system as a whole, or our sewer system as a whole.

Hopefully those guys will win out. But pollution, increased pollution levels are definitely an issue that environmentalists are looking at. And I just get the picture in Southern Italy, it's a tough, it's a tough game, you know. It seems to be a lot of fighting. Like this is a very controversial project and it still remains so. Yeah. And it seems to be marching on.

One of the other criticisms was that they basically just ignored easier, less expensive options, right, that have proven effective elsewhere. Yeah. The Netherlands. Yeah. Or like building barrier islands. Yeah. Underwater dikes.

But although apparently they have a lot of this stuff already and it's not necessarily helping. It's mainly just reinforcing the natural barriers that already exist. Yeah. I guess they're like, why don't we just put up more of that? Yeah. I think it's interesting to, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. I really hope it works because they've sunk a lot of money into this and they, I mean,

they moved all in on this Mose system. Yeah. Like they can't scrap it and say, well, it didn't work. Let's think of something new. Yeah. And I wonder how much it would be to just, like you can't just add a new gate, a new taller gate if the sea levels do rise faster and these, the ones they have proved too short because it has to sit flush in the trench.

Yeah. And create a whole another trench to accommodate this larger gate. It'd be a real problem. That's the worst case scenario to me. Is if it's, yeah. If they're too short. Yeah. The water laps.

I mean, surely they thought of that. It didn't look right to me, but they know what they're doing, right? I hope so. Pretty neat. And hopefully, you know, they had all this in that great video, a lot of footage where it looked like, it looked like some parts of Venice on a daily basis with high tide is slightly underwater. Yeah.

There's a bunch of people walking to work through water and delivering stuff to places through water and everyone looks very sick of it. Yeah. Go check out on Vimeo, Venice Backstage, that is definitely worth watching. Venice Backstage period. How does Venice work? I think they meant to put a call in there. The period bugs me.

A period in a title. They're from England, Josh. No, these are the Venetians that made this. They're from Venice, Josh. They know what they're doing. Yeah, and check out stuff on the Moe's project. Moze. Moze.

I just want to say Moe's from Paper Moon. Your favorite movie, right? Yeah. Boom. And if you want to learn even more about the Moze project, you can type in m-o-s-e project in the search bar at HouseDeForx.com and that will bring up this article. Yeah. And hey, check out Venice's sinking from Athens, Georgia.

Yeah, that's nice of you. My one buddy is no longer in the band, but you're still friendly with the other guys. No, they haven't been in touch, actually, but they sent a record and they're good folk. And if you ever get a chance to go to Venice, I recommend you do it because it is a neat town. But don't go to Harry's Bar. You have to go to Harry's Bar. Is that the legendary place?

That's where the Bellini was created. Why didn't you have a Bellini? Because you had a Bellini. Because you had a Bellini. She had a Bellini. I had a Martini. What is a Bellini? A Bellini's a peach juice, peach puree and champagne.

Okay. Yeah. But again, it's like basically a shot for, I think it was like $25 or maybe even more. Yeah. But you have to. You have to go. You walk past the seat that Hemingway used to drink at. Right.

You know, it's a neat place. Yeah. There's a lot of those seats around the world, though. Yeah. Right. You know, find a cheaper one. Yeah. I think we already went through the whole rigmarole that leads us up to listener mail.

So now it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this a murderer in our midst, not murder in the midst, that's different. You're thinking of guerrillas in the midst. Hey guys, I have a boring job, so I binge listen several days a week to your show. I was listening to the Insanity Defense episode and I heard a very familiar name. I happened to have met John Belling during his killing spree. I used to manage a coffee shop and a guy was oddly peering in the window with his hand pressed against a glass, though the store was clearly open.

He paced around the building for a while, thought it was pretty weird, so I sent the girl working with me. Pretty brave of you, Josh. His name is Josh, by the way. Oh, okay. I was going to say what I did. I sent the girl working with me in the back. Oh, no.

Okay. I take it all back. He was trying to protect her. And that was me. I sent her in the back and told her to hang out there until he left. He came in, looked the menu over, and asked if our ice cream was any good. I gave him a free sample. Here you go.

We don't want any trouble. He liked it. He liked it and said he had to go to his car to get some money. He literally said, I'll be right back. Then he went out to his car for a while and drove away. A couple of days later, the girl I was working with at night called crying and told me to find a newspaper. Well, no wonder he sent it back.

She's clearly fragile. She's crying like the guy was at the front door. Did you see that Sunday in New York Times is $6 now? On the front page was a large mug shot of our guy from a couple of nights previous. Turns out he had actually left the store and murdered someone. Crazy. And because the ice cream drove him nuts. I guess so.

And he stole something, stole her car that same evening. Anyway, just thought it was an interesting connection. The guy was definitely in need of some help. And as you mentioned, had no shot at getting it in the legal system here in Idaho. It is clearly a tricky, ethical area. Thanks everybody. And then it's from Josh Noel. That's from way back, huh?

The Insanity Defense? Yeah. That was a good one though, it turned out. Yeah. We learned a lot. So he fed a guy ice cream and he went out and killed someone. Man, that is really scary stuff. And his coworker who was around for none of it cried when she read the paper.

Yeah. Apparently she never got any work done because any time a customer came in, she gets sent to the back. You know? Yeah. Crazy. What was the dude's name? Josh Noel.

Oh yeah, Josh. Thanks Josh. It's always good to hear from another Josh because we are the greatest names on the planet. Josh. That's such a great name. It is. Especially if you say it in other ways like, yosh or hosh.

Yeah. There's all sorts of ways you can say Josh, but really the only right way to say it is Josh. And it's a verb. Yeah. You can Josh. And it's a friendly verb too because you're making fun of somebody but in a non-hostile way.

It's a verb too. How about that? Yeah. Look at those. Right. Josh and Chuckin. Yeah. That's good stuff Chuck.

I can't believe it's taken us this many years to come up with that. If you want to tell us to shut up, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com. Drop us a line via email at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and wait, wait, don't press stop yet. Go check out our awesome website. It will be your new favorite home on the web. Just bookmark it and do yourself a favor. Make it your home page.

The URL is H-T-T-P colon slash slash W-W-W dot stuff you should know dot com. 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. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90's called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90's. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90's called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.