The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - A Horse in the Toilet?!, Creepy Clowns, Superpowered Bug Pee

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Melissa Dunphy joins the show to explain why she found a horse in the toilet. Meanwhile, Rachel talks super-powered bug pee, and Chelsey gets into the science of fearing clowns. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Check out Weirdest Thing on YouTube: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeekYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Thanks to our sponsors!  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at https://betterhelp.com/WEIRDEST and get on your way to being your best self.  Right now, get up to 55% off your subscription when you go to https://Babbel.com/WEIRDEST Babbel—Language for life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured,

why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Chelsea B. Coombs. And I'm Melissa Dunphy. Melissa, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to be here. This is so cool. So, folks, Melissa is a composer, among other things, whose work I really admire. And I think I've talked about at least one of your pieces on here, the what about Tesla's pigeon, infamously. But also, why don't you tell your listeners a little bit about yourself and why you are privy to some weird historical information. I see what you did there. I see. So yeah, I'm a composer based in Philadelphia. And so most of my life is writing music primarily for choirs and vocalists and I write some opera and things like that.

But half my life is taken up by what I like to term citizen archaeology. So digging artifacts here in Philadelphia out of the ground, mostly from the 18th century. So I'm here because my specialty is digging privy pits, which is sort of a, I guess, a euphemistic term, for toilets. I spend half my life cleaning human feces off of artifacts and figuring out what they are and why they're here. Amazing. I'm tempted to just ask you to go into the backstory of your privy pit adventures right now, but I think maybe we can save that for when you get into your fact. I have the short version, yeah.

Amazing. So yeah, let's get into the show. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start with a fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, digging through poop holes, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Chelsea, what's your tease? Yes. So my fact this week is that a fear of clowns may actually stem from the makeup itself. Oh, my.

Yeah, I know. I'm, you know, I'm always scared when I put on makeup. So, you know, I feel this, you know, anxiety here. All right. I'm a little nervous, but also excited. You should be. I'm not particularly afraid of clowns. But then kind of like when I think about clowns too much, I start to get a little creeped out.

I wouldn't list them on my fears. Right. Yeah. When people talk about clowns being scary, I'm like, oh, kind of art. For me, honestly, when I think of like, like, mommers are. Oh, mommas is scary. Speaking of Philadelphia. Yeah.

Yeah. No, no, no. Mommas are a whole thing. So I think maybe the reason I don't think of clouds is scary is that I'm like, yeah, but then the mummer clowns is a whole different thing. Wait. What is that? Oh, gosh, mummery.

There's a big New Year's Day parade of mummers. It's like there's this whole weird history, but it's like working class people. Yeah, it's an organization like an Elk Lodge or a Freemasons or something. It's similar to that. But then they have this parade where they dress up. Yeah. And you get really, really drunk and everyone pees in the street. I have to relate everything to toilet stuff because that's why I'm here.

But yeah, like everyone pees in the street and gets extremely, extremely drunk. And it's like working class dudes dressing in drag and, like, playing musical instruments. And they have like a whole contest. And there's also like weird race controversies that happen around the mummers. It's very, very strange. Look it up. Yeah. There are many elements of it that sound like it should be right up my alley.

But altogether, it just has a really kind of a medicing air. But anyway, I'm excited to talk about regular type clowns. Yes. My tease is that I'm going to talk about some insects with a pea-related superpower. So I kind of accidentally also sort of have a toilet fact. Melissa, what's your tease? My tease is just a question, which is, why is there a horse in the toilet? Oh. Yeah, that's a great question. I've been wondering that my whole life. I'm regretting my policy to never make guests go first. But Chelsea, you can have us, Chelsea, you can kick us off with some clown trauma. I am ready to be scared.

We're hitting things off on the right note with some cloutary. You know, it's going to be great. So there is a lot of phobia research. drought there. And in the DSM-5, there are actually four of the more kind of common phobias that they include. So that includes animals such as a fear of spiders and snakes, the natural environment, such as a fear of heights, blood injection injuries such as a fear of needles, which is one that I definitely have, and then a situationally based fears such as fear of airplanes. But there is also in other category. And that's where we find the fear of clowns or colrophobia, which is a very weird way to say, you would think it'd be like clownophobia or something. But like apparently, you know, we're going with some Latin, you know, roots and everything here. Yeah. Yeah, exactly,

exactly. So despite that kind of like cultural cachet that a fear of clowns holds and the fact that it's super common in pop culture to reference kind of like a fear of clowns, there actually has hasn't been that much academic research into colerophobia. Because they're scared of it. Yeah. Honestly, yes. I think there's such a frightening prospect that people are like, I'm not touching it. This is not something I'm interested in. I also wonder if, because, you know, so much of, so much of what determines, like, what

researchers decide to pursue is sort of, like, what people looking at the grant proposal will take seriously. And I wonder if even unconsciously there's, like, uh, clowns are so inherently unsurious, but like we're going to focus on arachnophobia instead. Like spiders are, exactly. Not exactly. Spiders are like scientific, but like if my fellow researchers see that I'm researching clowns, then it's a short step toward like maybe I'm a clown of a researcher and shouldn't be taken seriously. Right. Exactly. And interestingly enough, so this is a study that was in the International Journal of Mental Health. But I think this kind of ties into how, they got a grant proposal. They noted that research that does exist has focused almost exclusively

on the perceptions of clowns in hospital settings with virtually no consideration of the prevalence of colophobia in community samples. So, you know, they're like, oh, well, we need to find out if the clowns are really scaring the children. You know, I think that's a lot of it there. So speaking of that, in pediatric wards of hospitals, there's often something called clown therapy, which is no, not what my therapist calls my session. But it's supposed to lighten the mood and decrease people's negative emotions that occur in hospitals. And there's been a lot of research on whether this actually works or not. But there are always cases in which it very much doesn't, with kids refusing to see clowns or crying or showing anxiety when they saw them.

In one 2007 study, one health care worker said, I think the clown doctors are one. at bringing a little light relief to some scared patients and parents. However, I'm terrified of them. Don't know why, but always have been. And honestly, I can relate to that. So these scientists decided to actually examine the fear of clowns in an international population with the appropriately named Fear of Clowns questionnaire, which was adapted from the Fear of Spiders questionnaire,

which I'm really glad that that exists. Like both of those things, you know, that it's a very, specific thing that you want to make sure that you question people about. So the survey questions included a rating system in which people would say how likely they were to have a certain reaction. Like I would do anything to avoid a clown. It would take me a long time to get a clown encounter out of my mind. If I saw a clown, I would be afraid of it. And if I saw a clown, I would feel very panicky. And I was wondering, on a scale of like one to seven, like, how likely are you to not be able to get a clown encounter out of your mind?

Can either of you give us? I think it's highly dependent on the clown. Okay. Yeah. No, that's understandable. Yeah. I also feel like it's highly dependent on, you know, whether you've read or watched any media from Stephen King's It.

Right. Exactly. For me, personally, when I watch the Tim Curry, Stephen King, It, mini-series on TV when I was a kid that I think that did a number on me. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, no, I feel like a lot of these like fears are always kind of based in like what you were exposed to as a child. So, you know, getting exposed to it early is a real problem. Yeah, yeah. Actually, when I was watching that at home as a kid, this is a horrible traumatic story, but in the middle of watching that miniseries as a kid, the doorbell rang.

and someone had run over my cat. Oh my God. And I'd come to the door. Yeah, no, true story. It rang the doorbell and was like, I'm so sorry. I mean, it's kind of amazing that they stopped, but they said, you know. Right. We've just run over a cat.

My cat died in the middle of it. So I always have this memory now of like Stephen King's It will kill your household pet. Well, I think that's pet cemetery, but like, you know, very similar. It's all confused in my head. Yeah. Yeah, no, for sure. Well, I'm really sorry that that happened to you. That might be partially why you are a little bit afraid of clowns.

I just don't like them. I'm not afraid of them. They're a harbanger of doom. Yeah. Honestly, they really are. For me, it's definitely, like, quite context dependent. Like, if I were at, like, an acrobatics show. Right.

And someone came out in clown makeup and did some clowning, I don't think I would find that at all unsettling. And like if I was on a subway and someone was in a clown costume, I'd be like more likely to find them unsettling than someone not in a clown costume. But if they were just acting like a chill person going to a gig, I don't think I'd be unsettled. But then like someone doing something unsettling or in an unexpected place while dressed as a cloud, that is very unsettling.

Something's wrong. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. No, I definitely get that. My grandparents' neighbor was actually a clown and she was always very nice.

So, you know, I don't really have too much of a fear of clowns except for that kind of like media-based phobia. But yeah, it's very interesting how our childhoods can really influence what we think about them. Totally. So in this study, there were 927 participants who willingly went through the questionnaire about clowns. 27% said they had a fear of clowns with 5% saying they were extremely afraid of clowns. And it's really interesting because more women reported that they were afraid of clowns and they had a more extreme fear of clowns than men did, which actually follows a similar pattern

in phobias just generally. More women have phobias than men do. And there's research out there that kind of looks into why that is, but it's not really a settled kind of debate there. But when they dove deeper into why people were afraid of clowns, most people actually didn't say it was because they had a bad experience with a clown. What's that? Sixens line? A clown killed my dad. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I'm afraid of Krusty the clown for sure.

Like, you know, sideshow bob. All of it is a real problem. And even more interestingly, negative portrayals of clowns in pop culture like we were just talking about in the movie. movie It were a much stronger contributing factor. But the strongest factor the researchers found was that a clown's makeup keeps people guessing at what their actual intentions are. So they have this permanently happy face, but that's really concealing whether that person is angry or upset or sad. So the author is believed that being unable to know what a clown is really thinking or what they might do might put us on edge. So it's not necessarily like the pop cultural stuff that definitely affects it, I think.

But these researchers say it's because, you know, we look to people's faces to know, like, what intentions they have. Like, what are they going to do next? Should I be afraid of this person or this animal, et cetera? But clowns are going to keep you guessing with, you know, the happy face they put on. And finally, I just really love this part in the discussion that I think also comes back to that like, why did we do this study and why did we get money for it? The use of medical clowns or clown therapy necessitates further evaluation in the pediatric hospital environment so that unnecessary anxiety and fear can be avoided. And thank you for saying that, researchers.

I would agree, you know, we really shouldn't be putting clowns in environments that they shouldn't be in. Huh. So, you know. I wonder if people who are afraid of clowns are also more likely to be afraid of masks. Yes. That is actually part of it. So within the specific kind of like DSM-5 like other category, it's like costumes and mask phobia that clown phobia kind of folds into. So it's very interesting.

Yeah. It's like that uncanny thing. I also feel like this is maybe sort of awful. but, you know, when people get a lot of Botox so that their faces don't have expressions on them, and you can tell, and, you know, there's a whole conversation to be had about Hollywood actresses, particularly, you know, feeling the pressure to get Botox because we're all afraid of aging, which is another whole phobia debate, I suppose. But like, it enters that kind of uncanny valley territory where you're not really sure what their emotion is anymore.

Right. And I think that's part of. kind of like that's, you know, why people kind of look at people who may have had like a lot of plastic surgery and they're like, oh, well, that's like really weird. But I think a lot of it stems from, I don't really know what they're feeling right now because they're not having typical kind of like facial expressions that you would expect, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really interesting how much like being able to see a person's face really affects like how you interact with them and kind of, you know, even just like what you think of that person just generally. Yeah.

What they think of you. Yeah. Don't judge a book by its cover though, right? Like don't be rude about someone who has Botox face. Right. True. Very true. I am.

Yeah. I mean, so a while back on we're just saying I talked about studies on the uncanny valley, which is of course related. And I think it's so interesting like how primed our brains are to, be like something is slightly off and I'm going to make it your whole body's problem. Yes. Totally. I don't know what the correct response is here, but I know I should be responding.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. Well, consider me creeped out for sure. Yes. Sorry. I apologize to you and all listeners who may deal with colerophobia. Sorry to trigger you.

If you didn't before, maybe now you do. I am very glad that researchers are taking a closer look into the hospital thing because it's so great to be doing things to like diffuse anxiety and kids who have to be in hospital. And I so don't want a kid to have a panic attack because a cloud showed up in their hospital room in an unexpected fashion. So I'm glad they're digging a little deeper into that practice. I agree. I agree. God bless them. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door?

I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis gummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off to dreamly. land, and I can't have one right now because I have a new kit, and I definitely miss it a little bit. But maybe you can have a weed gummy, and you can get one at mood.com. So the reason that different cannabis grains can make you feel different ways isn't just about the THC. It seems like it's also based on other components called terpenes. Turpines influence how a product tastes and smells, and it seems like they can also impact the way you feel.

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and I was like, I think this is going to be awesome, and sure enough, I loved every second, so I'm excited to share with you all. So glassy-winged sharpshooters, they are not exactly the most lovable bugs, however you feel about bugs in general. They've got these, like, very wiggly abdomen that they use to make their whole body vibrate, like a little noise makers so that they can communicate when it's time to meet. they've got very bulbous eyes and they have these like red-veined wings. They're just, they're not very cute. They're also considered pests. So when they and other sharpshooters feed off of grapevines, they leave behind a bacterium called

Xylla fastidiosa. And that causes leaves to like yellow and wither and die in a condition known as Pierce's disease. And that plague can wipe out more than half of a vineyard's wines in an outbreak. And it's estimated to cost $100 million in lost grapevines and mitigation efforts in California alone every year, or at least that was the estimate in, I want to say, 2014. And unlike the blue-green sharpshooter, which tends to spread the disease most in Napa and Sedoma counties, and along the coast, which is native to that area.

The glassy wing sharpshooter is also invasive. So it currently causes a bunch of trouble in Southern California, but it likely came over from the southeastern U.S. in the 1990s, probably like on some nursery plants the way most invasive bugs get around. So they pose a problem and they're not even supposed to be there. And so scientists are always looking at ways to better understand them. so that they can improve mitigation efforts. But in addition to posing a threat to the wine industry,

glassy-winged sharpshooters also pose a more immediate threat to any humans who happen to pass by them. And that threat is being sprayed with a constant mist of bug urine. Delightful. Yeah. So sharpshooters have these little straw-like mouth parts that they stick into a grapevine zylam. which is the tissue that plants use to carry water, minerals, and sugars through from the roots up through the rest of the plant.

And that liquid diet is pretty diffuse from a nutritional perspective. The researchers compared it to living off of diet lemonade, which sounds pretty awful. And that means that a bug can sometimes have to take in 300 times its weight in sap every day, just to get what they need to survive from a nutritional standpoint. And what goes in must come out. So that means they also pee 300 times their weight every day. Wow. Which is a lot.

That's frightening. Yeah. Humans, I mean, obviously, I know that number is obviously a lot. You don't really need context to know it's a lot. But just so you understand how bananas that is. humans tend to expel something like 1 40th of their body weight every day. Wow. It's a lot more.

And I want to pause just to make it clear that these emissions, which are sometimes called leap hopper rain, can look like rain. An infested tree will just have like a constant drizzle coming down. from it. And I've seen videos from researchers showing like what looks like people hurrying through like a light sun shower. And it's all bug pee. It's just bug pee. It's a different kind of sun shower. Yeah. And folks might remember that on a previous episode of Weirdest Thing, I talked about some honeymakers in Philadelphia, actually, who use similar emissions from spotted red lanternflies, which are, of course, an invasive scourge,

to create honey that has, like, a unique flavor to it. This excreta, which is, like, a combination poop pee that a lot of bugs make is known as honeydew. And, like, it's pretty innocuous. It's basically sugary water. Okay. But, so, yeah, please don't be too grossed out for the idea that you may get a, get a spritz from,

a sharpshooter bug, but still, it's certainly, it's, it's certainly evocative. Wow. Should we be keeping our mouths very tightly closed when we go through one of these sunshowers, or is it actually a delicacy? I guess it depends on who you ask. But there's also something really special about a sharpshooters pee. So, first of all, their closed relatives, cicadas, also drink tons of sap to satiate themselves. But those larger bugs let out pee in a stream, like many animals too. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology got curious about the fact that sharpshooters, though they do have to pee like a lot, let it out one drop at a time. And as it turns out, their drop-by-drop method actually uses less energy than pushing out a

study stream. This study like took like cats cats of bugs to figure this out. I love science. Yeah. Beautiful. Like again, back to that diet lemonade comparison. Imagine if you had to spend as much energy as it would take to like get your daily nutritional needs from that kind of low nutrient liquid. You wouldn't have any energy to waste peeing. You really need the most efficient pee possible. And that's what this bug does. And it's all thanks to something called an anal stylus, or as the researchers involved in the study, called it a butt flicker.

Those are both excellent names for metal bands. Yes, absolutely. It's my new band, anal stylus. Check out our EP, Butt Flickr. Yeah. But Flickr is our first EP. So this little stylist, the little butt flicker, it's just like, you know, a little, it almost looks like a little stinger off the back of the bug, though that's not what it is. And it rotates back when the insect is ready to go.

And that provides room for them to squeeze out a little droplet of liquid. A scientific American likened it to a balloon growing out of an air pump, which I think is spot on. Unexpected clown tie-in. True. And so once that droplet has swelled and formed, the stylist then rotates back even further, and it launches the droplet like a flipper on a pinball machine. It's effectively a spring and lever like a catapult, and it can accelerate, more than 40 Gs, which is 10 times higher than the fastest sports cars.

So already very impressive. Wow. And it gets even better. So when the researchers, who by the way, we're figuring all this out with like high speed, high-risk cameras looking at, you know, dozens of peeing insects, when they measured the speed of the droplets and the styluses themselves, they found that the liquid actually moved 1.4 times faster through the air than the stylus flicked them.

So they think that this is the first natural example of something called super propulsion, which is this idea that's only been demonstrated in synthetic systems before where an elastic projectile gets an energy boost thanks to the timing of its launch. Sort of like a diver doing like a perfectly timed jump off a springboard that like helps them optimally rocket into the air. basically it's like this thing is traveling faster than the launcher that emits it and this is the first time we've seen that in like an animal. It turns out that the stylus compresses the droplets which allows the water to store energy in the form of surface tension. So basically water molecules inside a droplet really want to stick to each other more than they want to stick to like anything else they come into contact with. So the surface of the drop acts like a flexible membrane. It'll spring back into the smallest possible area to keep those molecules close together. So it's kind of elasticy.

And with the right timing, that can give you a superpowered launch. And I will include a video to this, at pops.com slash weird. So when are we going to weaponize this into like supersoakers that launch water balloons at our siblings or whatever? Yeah. That's a great question and the researchers hope soon. Yeah, they think that, you know, studying the mechanics of these like sharpshooting wizzes could help us develop more super propulsion in mechanical devices. For example, so like something like Apple Watches water lock, which already works to kind of like push water out of a device. The researchers are saying, you know, we could kind of harness. these principles to make something like that more effective by having it like truly shoot the water off of the electronic components or you could design like a nozzle or a spray bottle or a water gun that's more efficient at you know sort of launching the liquid away so that stuff doesn't get stuck to the nozzle or as the case may be so that it more effectively hits your sibling

just while you're having uh while you're having fights in the yard um And yeah, they were able to like reverse engineer the phenomenon using vibration from speakers to get water droplets to spring up at high speeds. So they've already taken steps to sort of like apply this to, you know, human devices. And yeah, they're like, this is a great example of curiosity driven science. Really having impacts you can't possibly imagine when you're starting out. This started when one of the senior study authors, Saad Bamla, who's a biophysicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, just like saw some of the insects and was like, ha, there's a quote from him in live science saying, I saw these insects peeing once and fell in love. And I really adore that. That's great.

A love story. A modern love story for the ages. Exactly, exactly. This is much better. than the research I did with grasshoppers where essentially I was like a grasshopper pornographer. I had to take like so many videos of these freaking grasshoppers like mating and like you know they also peed all over the place

but I just don't think it was as exciting as this. We have so much to learn from insect peeing capabilities. It's true. Well and just to like underline how impressive this mechanism is so

thinking about like the relative size of these creatures and the droplets they're flinging and like the viscosity and the speed of the droplets. One of the press releases about this said, imagine you had a beach ball sized glob of maple syrup and you were trying to get that unstuck from your hand. That's what they're doing at scale. Wow. So pretty incredible stuff.

Yeah. And all in the name of just pee it as much as possible without doing too much work. But yeah, I love this study, especially because, you know, like the study author said, it was purely driven by like curiosity and it could have like actually very cool, even commercial applications. So support basic research. And Agreed.

Bug pee research. And you never know. Okay, cool. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back to find out why there's a horse in the toilet. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank,

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Okay, we're back. Melissa, tell us about your Privy Pit fact. Okay. I should give a little background as to why have you been talking about Prudis. Please tell folks who have not listened to your podcast, by the way, which you should also tell our listeners about. But please tell us why. Why Privvy Pitts? Okay.

So, as I mentioned at the top of the show, I am, in fact, a composer. And in around, cast your mind back to 2014 to 2016. I was finishing my PhD in music composition at the University of Pennsylvania. But simultaneously, and I'm going to drop a lot of W-T-F things in this next sentence, which I'm not going to explain in detail because if you want the detailed version, you can go listen to my podcast, which is called the Bog House, B-O-G-H-O-U-S-E, wherever you get podcasts, blah-de-blah. But around the same period, my husband, M.

Matt and I bought a magic theater from a pedophile here in Philadelphia and accidentally discovered two archaeological features underneath, which turned out to be privy pits or toilet pits from the 18th century filled with artifacts from around the period of the Revolutionary War. And we, as I like to tell people, you know, if you want to become an expert in a topic that you don't know a whole lot about, a really efficient way of doing this is to be getting a doctorate in a completely different subject. Because if there's some, if there's one thing that doctoral candidates love doing, it's procrastinating the actual research and work that they're supposed to be doing. by diving into a rabbit hole or poophole, as the case may be, about something completely different. My poor advisor, I mean, he retired after I finished my PhD, and I swear part of it was that I just kept coming into my meetings with him. And he'd say, what work have you done?

And I'd say, look at all of this work. And he'd say, that has absolutely nothing to do with what you're supposed to be doing. It's the same with writing a book. If you will write more than you have ever had the creative energy to write in your life when you have a contract to write a book. And it's just that none of what you write will actually be for the book that you're getting paid to write. Yes. I'm curious. 100%.

My PhD took two full years longer than I meant to take because I, instead of writing music and doing musical research, I was lovingly cleaning each artifact that came out of the archaeological feature. is under my home and then doing a ton of historical research trying to figure out what these objects were, what their context was, who were the people likely to have put this stuff under our house, and why? Why is this stuff in our privy? So among the objects that we found, among the artefacts that we found, were thousands of pieces of ceramic, thousands of plates and bulls and pots and glass bottles as well. Also, animals. bones. We found a ton of animal bones. Mostly animal bones that had clearly gone through the cooking process. You could see knife marks on them. You could see chop marks on soup bones and things like that.

But one of our sort of, you know, most sort of visually impressive finds, I guess you could say, is we started pulling out pieces of a whole horse that was down in the privy, a whole horse jaw. We have the entire lower jaw of a horse. And, you know, it sort of set us out on this path of wondering, why do you put a horse in the toilet? Like, what is going on here? Why does that happen? How many things have to go wrong in your life for you to find yourself putting a horse in the toilet? Yeah, it's just the process of like, put a horse down the toilet. And it all kind of relates back to something that we don't have to think about a whole lot in the 21st century, which is where does all the poop and trash go in our lives? Right. You know, in the 18th century, nobody, well, hardly

anybody has plumbing. And they certainly didn't have trash collection where we can just stick stuff out in the sidewalk and nice people come and take it away forever and it's gone. And instead, they had to figure out what to do with all of the piles of trash that they generated. in their everyday lives. And a lot of it went down the toilet. I will talk a little bit about what happened to the trash that went down the toilet as well. There was a job, which I guess you could equate

to modern day garbage men, which is night soil men, which is a whole other thing that I'm going to talk about in a second. But there's this thing where around about this time, of course, we don't have cars. everybody has horses to get around. What do you do when your horses die is a big question? Because if there are a lot of horses around, you know, some of them are going to come to the end of their lives

and some of them are going to die. What do you do with a dead horse? Yeah, in a city, I would say that's a real problem. Right. You know, I mean, some people do eat horses and that's fine, but also some, you know, this horse chore that we have that was in our toilet was almost certainly from quite an elderly horse. You can see from the way that the teeth are ground down that the horse was quite old.

And, you know, there are some services that would take your horse away to turn into glue or gelatin or, you know, something like that. But if the horse guys, I don't know, took a couple weeks off or you're left with this rotting carcass of a horse. and it smells pretty bad and so does your toilet. So why not combine the two worst smells? And end up, you know, throwing your entire horse down the toilet with all of the poop that you put down there too. My husband actually did some research where there's a line of thinking

among some historians that cars came along at a pretty fortuitous time because if it weren't for the modern day automobile doing away with the need for horses everywhere, there would just be this glut of dead horses that cities would have to deal with because there were so many horses around everywhere in the cities. You know, you can't bury a dead horse. They're really big as it turns out. Right. So it's a lot to get rid of. So I do sort of imagine, you know, the people who lived in our house being like, oh my God, we have to get rid of this dead. horse and the horse guys have taken the week off. Just chop it up and stick it in the toilet and forget about it. And then could you imagine going to the bathroom with a horse head?

It's so awful, right? Yeah. It's a real surprise. Yes, which, you know, I've now, in the course of all of these wild things that have happened to me since becoming a citizen archaeologist, I think become probably Philadelphia's preeminent public expert on 18th century. toilet and toilet habits and things that went down the toilet. I mean, one of the questions that I also had to ask when I was excavating thousands of artifacts from the 18th century was why is there so much stuff down the toilet, particularly all of these ceramic objects that we have? Because initially people would say, well, of course, you would put trash down the toilet.

it. But I always ask the question, you know, but why so much? Like, how many plates have you broken in your entire life? Right. Right. And it turns out, it's another weird little factoid that I never thought about until I entered this weird world of archaeology. When you move house right now, what do you do with all of your breakables in your kitchen? Like, how do you pack them up and take them to your new home? Yeah, you got to put them in newspaper or, I mean, what I do. is I pack all my clothes and towels in the same box. Oh, that's a good idea. That's a great hat.

Which makes for a pretty, you know, chaotic garbage goblin unpacking process, but it does mean I don't have a producer. But it's true. Like, you do, you need some stuff to keep them from breaking. You do. Right. And back in the 18th century, there are no cardboard boxes. There's no bubble wrap.

The newspaper is really expensive, actually. You know, you wouldn't just have tons of space. paper that you could pack everything in neatly. So the general process for moving house was not to take any of that stuff with you, at least the cheap stuff. You would just throw your entire kitchen's worth of breakables into your toilet. It's like move out weekend at NYU. Right. Yeah. Yes. It makes me think of what we now do with sort of modern IKEA furniture, which I don't tend to take that with me. You just leave it out on the sidewalk for some handy garbage picker to take. And then at your new location, you go to the local IKEA and buy a bunch of flat packed furniture and unpack that

into your new home. Similarly, in the 18th century, there were sort of potters in your neighborhood that you could buy new stuff from new plates and bowls and platters and things like that. So you would, yeah, throw all of your stuff in, go to your new home on the cobblestone streets with the wagons that had no suspension where all of your stuff would break if you tried to take it with you. And then at your new location, you would find the local potter on your block and have them make you a whole bunch of new kitchen stuff. So that is the reason why in our privy, we found thousands of pots. Many of them clearly were whole when they went in. We're not sort of smashed in a drunken, stupor or, you know, broken by butterfingered, you know, house servants or anything like that,

but just thrown down in the privy. Disposable material culture is not unique to our society. It's been going on for a very long time. But the beautiful thing is that all of that trash, which was stuff that nobody cared about in the 18th century, is now stuff that I'm spending half my life. putting together and researching and lovingly displaying all over my home and using it to sort of connect to experts all over the world and, you know, have entered this whole new world of being really interested in what ordinary people in the 18th century used in their everyday lives.

It's been a really exciting journey. That's super cool. Yeah, no, I mean, like, it's, I've always wanted to, like, live in, like, an older house. And you know how like you'd watch an HGTV show or whatever and they're, we found this letter behind this panel and the wall. But it's like, no, I just have a giant crap pit. Yeah. And I found, you know, amazing finds. I love that.

Yeah. People, I mean, I never stopped to think about this before I embarked on this weird accidental journey, which is that if you live in a city on the east coast of the United States that has been settled for a long time, the ground. the ground is full of these shafts, which essentially become time capsules to an earlier period. They're everywhere. There really are everywhere around Philadelphia. They're in New York a whole ton as well, and even down to cities in the south. And yeah, we just got really lucky in that our property was not particularly developed for the last century or so. So our two toilet pits that are underneath our building, we're pretty much untouched during

that whole period. Wow. So yes, we entered this whole world of archaeology, which can be kind of controversial sometimes, actually. There is a view among some archaeologists that we being untrained archaeologists should not be excavating these privies that. There's actually, I think the term is privy pirates or looters who go around digging privies looking for treasure. But from our perspective, I'm like, we're not looking for treasure. We're just really curious. It's that curiosity thing again.

Right. And I have, you know, enough, I guess, academic training to be doing as much research as I possibly can on the most responsible way to look at these artifacts and to learn about these artifacts. And so luckily the professional archaeologists have not come for me. They've actually been very supportive. I think it's so clear, you know, listening to you talk and listening to your podcast, but like you really care about being like stewards of these culturally significant piles of crap that you don't expect. And like you could have just like kind a, you know, a slight spoiler for your podcast.

He could have just, like, filled in the foundation you wanted to fill in or whatever you were doing it there and moved on with your life. Yeah. So I think it's really cool. Instead, we went on this big journey. But, you know, it's like a question for all of us, including your listeners, which is, you know, think in America we have a tendency to, when we buy a house or move into a new property, to not really think too hard about all the people who've lived.

lived in that space before us. I don't know whether this is an artifact of colonialism in some ways where we don't really want to think about how the land became our land. But I think that there's something really valuable in exploring who lived here before. How did this land come to be my land? It gives you this sense of responsibility in two different areas. One is, you know, thinking about that cultural stewardship of, you know, well, how do I fit in historically into this picture? But also it's really made me think about my own environmental impact on the world as well. You know, what are the things that I'm leaving around for future archaeologists? Totally.

And as I researched the kinds of people who lived on my property, which has been a really fascinating study, you know, I've been lucky enough, Philadelphia being a city of journalists and lawyers and Quakers and the kinds of people who write everything down, we've been able to find out names and biographies and learn all about the people who've lived in this property before us. And in many cases, I've been sort of judging them for, oh, I don't know, having slaves and having arguments with... Fair enough. Yeah, you know, just, you know, but it makes me wonder what... future generations judge me for if anybody cares to, you know, discover what I've left behind, you know? Yeah. Too many pairs of shoes. Yeah. Exactly. That's, that is like,

extremely profound and something I think we should all spend more time using on. It's funny when you were, at the beginning when you were talking about, you know, sort of the, the like, medicine nature of like throwing a horse down the toilet and how bizarre it is that like you just lived with the horse being in your toilet because that was the best scenario. There is something I think like kind of awful about how disconnected we now are all are from our trash. Right. Not kind of awful. Like definitely awful. And I know this is not like a this is not like a new hot take. Many, many environmental researchers and ecologists and refuse experts have have been saying this for many years. But like, yeah, that actually it was way like more responsible for people to just have to deal with the horse being in their toilet.

Because like, yeah, that's your horse that you, like that horse is part of your carbon footprint. Yes, it should be rotting in your toilet. Yes, and it's your poop as well. You have to think about where your poop goes and what that's doing to the earth, because it's doing it to your earth as opposed to the river or the ocean or the sewage treatment plant outside of the city. It's like right there, and you have to go to the toilet above it all the time. I think about this constantly, actually, when thinking about privy research and what it was like

going to the toilet in the 18th century. A real adventure, I bet. I mean, can you imagine? The other artifact that we find a ton down privies are pipes, pipes and pipe stems, so tobacco pipes. Oh, yeah. In fact, we dug a privy next door. It was sort of fascinating.

There were maybe two dozen pipes that were all by the same maker and were sort of intact almost. So I'm imagining, you know, there's some probably a man, but who knows, who only liked one type of pipe, but seemed to smoke them almost very regularly on the toilet. And I've tried smoking a pipe. It's, to me, is not the most pleasant thing. And, you know, tobacco use certainly has been demonized in our society quite a lot. But going to the toilet in the 18th century with all of those ruttings, horse plus poop plus, you know, diseased bacteria smells, I think I would have taken up pipe smoking on the toilet pretty seriously. You need some stronger vapors, you know. Yeah. Not to mention the fact that some of these toilets were communal. So they're, you know, they were big enough that you would have more than one sort of hole and neighbors would congregate in these outhouses and sit

next to each other while pooping. This is why Philadelphia has such a unique neighborly bond. It's a vibe you don't find anywhere else. The brotherly love of sharing a toilet bench. I can't even poop next to my husband, let alone. I don't think most people are good. My neighbor across the street. It's become a very private thing.

But yeah, it's funny to think about how recently that, has become like a private matter. Yeah. Right. I would definitely also be smoking a pipe. Like I would try to buy tobacco that had the most smoke that came out of it. Create a little screen of. You're sitting on the toilet, having your usual toilet time,

and suddenly your neighbor from across the street opens the door and is like, oh, hi, Melissa, you're here too? And then sits down next to you and starts pooping as well. I would immediately be like smoking. up a storm to create just a little screen. The like meme of like, you know, guys at a urinal and like someone taking the one next to them even though there are like other ones open. I feel like that is like a hundred times more like, yeah, that neighbor who always sits

right down next to you at the privy, even when the whole bench is empty. Yep. Yeah. Terrible vibes. I feel like sort of like somewhere like a Marie Kondo or. a Swedish death cleaning book, I feel like there could be a book that's like, live your life like everything has to go down your privy pit. Yes.

Live your life like that horse is going to stay in your toilet. Yes. Or live your life like you have the job of being a night soil man, which is, you know, the other side of privies is that back in the day there was a job, night. soil man, which is where people came to privies to clean them out when they got too disgusting. So, you know, the horse has been down there a really long time and you've dumped so many ceramics down the toilet that it's starting to pile up in there and not degrade, bio-degrade the correct way. So I often think of this as sort of the inverse and more disgusting form

of chimney sweeps. So they would lower a small person, maybe even a child, down into, the privy pit with a bucket and pull buckets of sewage and trash out of the privy and then load them on the world's foulest smelling wagon and then sell that sewage as fertilizer to farms and areas that would take the sewage. In England, actually, there are lots of land which were privy dumps essentially, places that the night saw men would come and offload the sewage. And on some of the houses that have been built on these properties in their gardens are full of pottery shards, build bits of artifacts that came out of other people's privies with the night soil, night soil being the euphemistic term for the poop that went down into the toilet.

And yeah, you can sort of do small archaeological excavations on these sites and guess where the night soil came from. But I just often think about, you know, what a job that must have been. How would you do that without, like, I don't know, like passing out from the smell? I guess, you know, on the bright side, everything smelled that everywhere all the time. That's true. I think they were probably well paid maybe for what they did. But if you can, you know, I suppose it's like garbage collectors as well.

Right. Or septic tank. Right. You know, people who take the stuff out of septic tanks now, right? Right. For most of us, we don't have to think about where that goes. But, you know, live your life like you had to be your own night. So, man.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the world would be a much better place if we all, if we all imagined that one day we might have to be our own poop smith, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just shoving my IKEA cabinets down the toilet from now on. Oh, that would be.

Like, you know, I'm tired of having to drag it all the way down, you know. I'm just going to flush it this time. Just chip it. And I'm going to say it's your fault. Oh, sure. Okay. No worries. Yeah.

That was so good. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? For me, it was the preview. It's got to be the toilet for me. Yeah, it's got to be the toilet for me. It was such a ride. You said that to all your privy ticket guests, I'm sure. Yeah.

Melissa, thank you so much for coming on. This was wonderful. Remind listeners what your podcast is and where else they can find you. Yes, you can find my podcast. You can Google Bog House. a B-O-G-H-O-U-S-E. It's an 18th century term for the toilet. And we're available wherever you find podcasts.

I swear a lot more on my podcast than I did on this one. As you can perhaps tell from my accent, I'm originally Australian. And for Australian swearing is like breathing. So maybe don't listen with your toddlers in the car if you don't want them to pick up F-bombs. But if you just want to hear me get very, very excited about 18th century, history, and archaeological artifacts, tune in. Who wouldn't? I mean, it's so exciting.

The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bode, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire, Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos. You can't reason with the sun.

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