The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Art Crime Doesn't Pay, Canines Cooking Meat, Eggs Gone Wrong

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

Comedian and writer Josh Gondelman joins the show! The weirdest things we learned this week range from dogs cooking in kitchens to chickens laying eggs inside of themselves. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? 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!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  -- Follow our team on Twitter! Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 dummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. 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 ocean front 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 heck 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 Fultman. I'm Sarah Trinosh. I'm Sarah Tronash. I'm Josh Gondelman. Josh, welcome to the show. Listeners, I'm sure people who enjoy podcasts have heard Josh's voice before. He is a frequent guest on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. He hosts a delightful show called Make My Day, which I caught up on a few episodes this morning, and they did truly make my day. So thank you.

Oh, my gosh, thank you. That is, like, truly the kindest compliment because it's, like, literally the premise of the show is in the name. I, like, really just wanted to be like, like a fun, breezy half hour that makes people feel better on the way out than they came in feeling. And then you also, after writing for some time for John Oliver, you now write and produce for Jesus and Mero, which I often forget because I kind of just think of your job as being like a national resource to like help us all feel better. That's so sweet. Yeah, no, I'm, I've been at Deasus and Mero.

This is the third season of the Showtime show. And I've been with them since they started at showtime since we started. So it's been, yeah, it's been really wonderful. And I've just, like, had really great fortune to go from, like, dream job to dream job in the past, over the past, like, eight-ish years. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So we wanted to have you on weirdest thing because I was like, here's a person who is great at talking about interesting facts in a fun way.

And we often get accidentally depressing your own weirdest thing. I'm looking at Sarah. It's mostly me. My beat on this podcast is just like the saddest thing I learned this week. Also with a little weirdness. It's like, hey, guess you got polio? Yeah. Yeah.

This is also, I would say, by far the most Jewish episode of Weirdness the Gaelia this week we've ever had. That's what I was going to say as well. Anticipating this, I was like, oh, we should have aired this like during the week of Passover just so we could fully be maximally. Jewish? Oh yeah, just charging up. So, on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story

we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, making people's days, etc. 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. Sarah, would you like to start with cheese. Yeah, I'm going to talk about how chickens sometimes accidentally miss their op-a-duct

and lay a little bit of an egg inside their body cavity and other assorted weird egg facts. Weird chicken facts is my beat today. This is not your first weird egg fact rodeo either. No, it's not. I actually referred back to the other one because I was like, I don't want to repeat a weird egg fact. It really says a lot about you as a reporter that you're able to get two full episodes of weirdest thing content out of Chicken eggs, specifically. Yeah, if anyone needs a chicken egg reporter, I'm your gal. Listeners just listening like, more chicken egg facts? All right, Sarah, we get it.

So sorry, so sorry, listeners. No, I'm intrigued. Josh, how about your tease? Mine is about, my fact is about an art heist that still has not been recovered from. Ooh, I love it. I love a good heist. my tease is that I would like to talk about a dog that was genetically engineered to serve as a kitchen appliance. All right.

Well, we have to go with that one first, I feel. Okay. All right. I accept. Okay. And I will say to you that I had it in my head, Josh, that this would be a great one to have while you were on because I have really enjoyed your comedic references to your dog. Oh, yeah. My dog, though.

She's a chubby little pug. She's so cute and so grumpy. She wouldn't serve as any appliance other than maybe like a paperweight. And even then, she's very defiant. She just doesn't have a lot of, she's not very tenacious. She's not especially strong. She eats wet food and I have to cut the wet food up into pieces because she prefers chunks to gum and she won't attack it all as one. glob anymore. So she's mostly gums. So yeah, she can maybe be like a business card holder or a

paperweight. But other than that, she's she's not super utilitarian as a pet. Well, the story ended up kind of being a little darker than I expected, but I'm going to do my best with it. But it is about a very utilitarian dog. And the long story short here is that people bred, these small dogs to have, like, relatively kind of long bodies and, like, short, crooked legs, and they were very strong and very high energy. Charles Darwin actually referenced these pups as an example of genetic engineering, where humans, you know, specifically bred qualities that would serve them into animals that they were raising. And the reason people did this is so that the dogs could basically power kitchen appliances,

which just sounds so wild, but I'd get it explained. So back when open fires were our best way of cooking things, the spit was invaluable. As early as the first century BC, people were sticking meat onto spits so that they could turn it and cook it, because otherwise you would get like half of your mammoth was on fire while the other half stayed raw, similar issues. But for hundreds of years, that meant that somebody had to be physically turning the spit. And in medieval kitchens, this was a job for, like, the lowest of the lowly servant boys. And they would be called the spit boy, which is just, God.

Which is now, that's now a different thing. Don't Google it. Exactly. I mean, or Google it. Like, I don't know what you're into. Whatever you're into. But, you know, Google with caution. Google with caution.

That I think is always good advice. Yeah. Or they'd be called, like, spitjack, which I think implies that they just call. all the boys Jack if they worked on the spit. Joe Biden was their supervisor. And that is kind of my impression of like what medieval Europe was like that you could just be renamed to Jack because you were basically a human rotissory turdor. So anyway, the first mention of the turn spit dog, which was also called the Wernerpeter

Kerr or Connus Vertigus. Conis Vertigus, as in like a dizzy dog, was in 1576, and it was referred to as the Turn's Pete. But most of what we know about them was written down in the 1800s, which was near the end of what was apparently centuries of regular use. So these were dogs. It was a breed of dog, specifically, that had been bred to fit easily into these treadmills that basically looked like the wheels you'd see outside of a mill. But instead of water running through them, there were like cranky dogs running through them. And this was a real thing. That's so cute. The cutest little, oh my God, I can't get over it. It's really cute, but then if you think about,

the more you think about it, the less cute it is, which we'll talk about a little more in a second. But there were actually several devices that these dogs could power, like they could help Mill Green, really anything that you could attach some kind of like treadmill style gear to, they could power. And there was even a patent for a dog powered sewing machine in the 19th century, unclear whether anyone actually used that. That is the cutest sweatshop condition I've ever heard of. It's like really, really awful implications, but also so cute.

Yeah, very, very cute and very tragic. So yeah, unfortunately, as some listeners may have already guessed, this job totally sucked for the dogs, for all the reasons that it had sucked for humans. And this was really common so that we know, like, during the period from that first mention we have in the 1500s until the early 1800s, that it was kind of like the mark of a high-end kitchen was to have at least one turn spit dog. Because if you didn't, that meant that you had a little boy cranking the turnspit, which, you know, maybe it was a little more obvious that that job sucked when it was a tiny human boy. But, yeah, according to at least one historian, it was an encounter with a New York hotel's turn spit dogs in the 1850s that inspired Henry Berg to found the ASPCA. So like turn spit dogs apparently were our first instance. of realizing that maybe animal cruelty was a thing and not just like what animals were for. And yeah, this feels, I mean, like, obviously there are so many animals that we make do jobs for us that are like, that seem like maybe not what the animals would prefer to be doing.

Totally. Like, even a really fast horse, right? You know, they don't necessarily want to take Paul Revere around a Revolutionary War, Boston. But, like, when you're, when you're like, when you're putting an. animal, like a foot away from another animal that you're cooking? And you're just like, so you're not, we're not going to cook you, we hope, but like, hey, that's on you, dog. If time get rough, you know, we may.

We may have to. Well, and like they worked really long hours. There's just in kind of the historical accounts we have that mentioned turn spit dogs. They're always referred to as being very suspicious looking and very like, really easily trained. In fact, there's some stories about them, like, if you were rich enough to have, like, a pair of turn spit dogs so they could trade off during the day,

like, if you accidentally kept one in for too long, it might, like, hop out and be like, my shift is over, clock it out, going to my coat to the misses. Good for the dogs. Unionize the spit dogs. Yeah. But it does seem like they were probably treated quite awfully, and it was a really grueling job.

And they were even bred to be not just, energetic, but like it sounds like they kind of bred like hyperactivity into the dogs so that they would actually like want to run for a long time. Obviously they were still made to run for longer than they would have liked. And there are awful stories about like people doing things like throwing pieces of hot coal in there to like try to get them to go faster. But it does seem like they were, they were really bred to be dogs that would mostly be fairly content to just run on a wheel. all day. And so, yeah, there were actually as early as 1551, people had like schematics for steam-powered roasting jacks, presumably named after the boy named Jack, who turned every spit

in every medieval kitchen. That was in 1551 by Taki Al-Din in the Ottoman Empire, where generally they were just doing things more sophisticated than making dogs turn their meat. But there was a version patented by an American clockmaker in 1792. And there were also smoke power jacks described as early as the 1600s. But a lot of these things were either really expensive or they required kind of like retrofitting your giant old medieval oven that so many of these like wealthy houses still had. So I think, you know, one of the reasons that there was that opportunity for the guy who founded the ASPCA to be shocked is that they actually were like much less common in the Americas where the buildings were newer, so people were more likely to be able to build a chimney to accommodate,

you know, a steam-powered jack versus in Europe where maybe it was just simpler to keep the dogs running. I feel like that's like one of those building codes where like you see it grandfathered in, right, where you're like, oh yeah, this is a new building. You can't have spit dogs in here. Or if it's like a really, it's a really old building, they're like, we're going to do these renovations, but we're going to do it so we can keep our spit dogs because otherwise it's going to be a pain in my ass to install a steam power jack. Exactly.

Yeah, and it wasn't until like the late 18th century that these and other solutions, including this jack that had like a wind-up clockwork mechanism, which seems really like wildly complicated for just like making sure your meat doesn't burn. Those became accessible enough. You know, again, as we got closer to the turn of the, 19th century that people started to replace their dog treadmills. But yeah, just a little bit more

about turn-spit dogs, which I think are a beautiful and terrible human invention, like many dog breeds that exist today. They weren't just relegated to the kitchen. The lords and ladies of the house would actually use them as like living foot warmers at church on Sundays. Oh my God. And which is way cuter than the, um, the, um, running on hamster wheels next to a hot fire thing. Much cuter. Yeah. Queen Victoria is said to have kept several of them as pets, which must have seemed really quirky.

But even though she set lots of trends, that is not a trend that took off. They were generally considered ugly and mean, which I have to assume is because people kept making them run on hot treadmills that smelled like meat. Yeah, you can't blame a dog with a, like a line cook dog for being a little surly. Exactly. I'd be angry too. Yeah. So once they became obsolete as kitchen utensils, they just quickly disappeared. And so they're considered extinct now, which is really funny because dog breeds aren't distinct species. So calling them extinct is kind of a misnomer. It's like how like cabbage, kale, broccoli, colabi, Brussels sprouts, and a whole bunch of other plants are actually one species. So if we

stopped eating cabbage and it disappeared, it wouldn't really be extinct. Like the making of cabbage would still exist in the DNA of those other varietals. And so, like, similarly, any extinct dog breed is just one where we don't have proof that, like, a pure descendant of that exact lineage is still around. But generally speaking, like, there's always some idea of, like, what modern dogs they're really closely related to. Um, and that sort of thing. I do have, um, one picture of a, um, there's a taxidermede turns spit dog. There's the last known specimen.

God, I'm so afraid. Wait, it's like one old, oh, sorry, go ahead, Sarah. No, I was just going to say, I feel like the taxidermy dog is either going to be like, that looks just like a living dog or like, dear God, that is terrifying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This looks like a wolf that someone panseered for half an hour. Yeah. Oh, God.

Yeah. Okay. I am attempting share screen. and here's the dog. Oh, I think it's cute. Yeah. Wait, it's so much, what is the scale there? It looks so much more petite than I was picturing.

Oh, definitely very petite. Like, the wheels were not large. Kind of like terrier-sized, I would say. Oh, my God. And a lot of the kind of like modern dogs that sought to be related to our terriers, that picture, which I will post on popsye.com slash weird.

There's a great episode of Kitchen Sisters, an awesome podcast, talking about turn spit spit dogs from a few years ago. And the historian they talked to about that taxonomy was like, it's clearly lovingly done. Like there are flowers in the like shadow box that it's in. The box is painted. But it was maybe their first attempt to taxidermy animal. Ooh, okay. Not very well done.

Lovingly done, but poorly executed. Yeah. Sure. So it's hard to know exactly what they look like, except that that was like their size. They were a squat, sturdy, but like petite dog. Also just like, you know, extinct dogs in general or extinct breeds. Again, like a dog breed being extinct is kind of like a weird concept. Yeah.

Right. Right. Limited edition discontinued dog. A dead stock dog. Yeah. But there were a couple that I found that I thought were really interesting because it really speaks to like how dog breeds, you know, go away when there was some really specific purpose we were breeding into them that becomes obsolete. So one example is the Belgian Mastiff, which was

this massive dog like all Mastiffs are. But it was used to pull carts in Belgium and the Netherlands until the 20th century, like a little horsey. And then around World War II, I guess other countries started making fun of Belgium for having dogs pull around their grosses. and they stopped using them for that. So this begs the question. Like you said, a little, like a little horse. Like, did they not know about horses in Belgium? I really don't know.

It might have been like it was just the right size maybe. Yeah. A horse is a little too big for your groceries, but a dog could be exactly right, you know? All right. It was like a, you know, a milkman's cart would be pulled by the value. I'm just saying, like, I guess the way we treat animals. This is what it's reminding me is the way we treat specific animals is kind of arbitrary, right? Like which ones we assign labor to and which ones we treat as pets.

So maybe in Belgium, they just, their little horses like lived in the house with them and would sometimes sleep in their beds if they were very permissive. And the dogs were the ones that they gave all the jobs to until someone was like, you got to switch this up. Your pet horse that you let sleep by the fireplace, this thing could be dragging your car around. He got it all backwards. Instead of this team of doxins you have on a rickshaw. Well, and then one other defunct breed of dog I found that was really interesting. I didn't write the name down, but there are a lot of the quote-unquote extinct breeds are hunting dogs who were just bred to hunt really specific things. And like one of them, probably more than one of them, the reason it was so specific is that they wanted a dog that was really good at

silently sniffing out a particular kind of prey, but not actually hunting it. Like, those were the dogs that found it, and they needed to do it really stealthily, because then they would be like, all right, now other dog go hunt that thing that hasn't yet realized there are dogs around. And, like, people are absurd. Just breathe one dog to do that whole thing. Yeah. You know. That was the snitch collie.

Exactly. Just like, I'm not saying nothing, but. Yeah, if you're looking for a pheasant, I'm right. I've heard some things. So, yeah, that is, you know, a brief overview of the turn spit dog, the dizzy dog. I would love to have one as a foot warmer. I think they, it sounds like they're probably really smart, industrious little dogs.

And, you know, I'm really glad that, like, eating shwarma doesn't, involve, like, a dog having... Imagine if everywhere you went in New York, like, every swarmer cart was just... There was a little dog just, like, going in circles outside. Like, tragic? Yes. Would it make the streets of New York a little more adorable? Maybe.

Also, yes. Yeah, for sure. I feel like that is, like, not... It would be, like, akin to the bodega cat, right? Like, it feels like there's... There are openings in New York institutions for other kinds of animals. A swarmadog, a bodega cat, a deli bird. Like, you get all sorts of, you know, like a hot dog cart parakeet.

Well, I also think, like, the only thing that it would take to make this a much more humane practice is to just have a ton of dogs. Yeah, they just go as long as they want. Yeah, and then they just pop out. Yeah, and then another one pops in. Yeah, it could be a fun activity. Yeah. Yeah. I know dogs who would love to run in circles.

an hour, just like burn off all that energy. There's my, my dog, as I said before, just very old, very lazy. She would absolutely not be able to resist just trying to eat the meat that she was assigned to cooking. Perhaps a good foot warmer, though. A great foot warmer. Absolutely, yeah. She would, she'd be great at half of this job.

Well, just a very specific, you know, it's like the hunting dogs that divide up the labor. She's just got the foot warmer part. the foot warmer. She wouldn't, I mean, I guess she could do it in church as a, as like a vocation, but she is a Jewish dog. There's a little too much standing, I think, in synagogues to have a foot warmer be useful. Yeah, you're up, you're down, you're, you're startling your dog who just kind of got a good snore going. Oh, she snores really loud. So she would additionally be bad for religious sinuses. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Just, she's got like, Yeah, well, it's a problem.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And Josh, why don't you talk to us about art heists? Okay, so this is my favorite thing. I hope this isn't too redundant with information people already know because there have been other podcasts and books about this. But this is like my favorite fact. And it's one that I kind of like retained as a kid and resurfaced in my brain. as an adult, which is there's a museum. I'm from Massachusetts, and we went when I was a kid on a

field trip to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. And in the museum, there's a little history of the museum to start with. Isabella Stewart Gardner was born in New York in the 1840s. She moved to Boston with her husband. He died in 1898, and she started doing this thing they'd always planned, which was to start a museum. So you can see what kind of financial bracket they were working in. If they weren't like, honey, should we have a garden? It was just like, hey, babe, you know what I was thinking? Let's do a museum.

So he died and she starts getting this museum ready. And so they had been all over the world and acquired art. Again, when it's the 1800s, mid-1800s, and you're just like acquiring art from other countries. I don't really want to like vouch for that process as being ethical or fair. However, what the the end result was that she built this, um, this had this mansion built basically as a museum.

And it's just full of all the art that she loved. Um, and it's like the art itself, I have the, I have the webpage open. Um, because the art is, like, not consistent, uh, in any way. Like, it's from all different countries.

There are, like, paintings. Uh, there are, there are, like, artifacts. And it's, it's organized just by, like, how she liked it. Like, how much she liked different stuff. She was like, I think these look good together. I mean, she was not, uh, I believe not, like, trained in curating art. But she did, uh, she was very specific. So when she died, she was like, I'm going to leave, I want this to be a museum forever.

I'm leaving this in a trust. But one of the conditions is that you can't move anything, which it's like visiting, like, a grandparent's house where everything, you know, it's like, that's the room you don't sit in, even though there's a couch. Like, everything just stays and there's like a picture of your grandparents and they're very young and just nobody moves anything. Nobody touches anything. There's just like a glass jar full of seashells for some reason. So this is all fine and good. She was just like, keep it like it is. Then in 1990, so yes, okay, so I'll just tell the story fairly linearly.

In 1990, the night of St. Patrick's Day, there was. Oh, no. I know. I know. Okay. St. Patrick's Day in Massachusetts, nothing can happen. St. Patrick's Day in Boston is chaos. It is, so the night of St. Patrick's Day, two robbers came in, I believe, dressed as police.

And they stole what the FBI has valued at over $500 million worth of art, including, yeah, including one of 32, or excuse me, one of 34 known Vermeer paintings. The Concert was one. The only seascape of Rembrandt's, which called the Storm and the Sea of Galilee, sketches, a Chinese goo, I think I'm pronouncing that right, which is like a ceramic. It is a bronze vessel, excuse me. So just all the stuff stolen, never recovered. The case is open. The museum has a $10 million reward for its.

information leading to the recovery of this art, which obviously hundreds of millions of dollars of artwork. I believe it stands as the largest unsolved art heist in history. But the fact that I love that was so fascinating as a child and that it is so fascinating now is that where the art was is empty. The robbers cut canvases out of their frames to just take them with them. Those frames remain empty on the wall of the museum. Yeah. So like you go into this museum and there's place. It looks like it's vaguely under construction because it's gone.

And so there have been 30 years of investigations. And I really want to shout out the podcast last scene, which was a joint venture between WBUR, Boston's public radio station and the Boston Globe. and they go down all these kind of rabbit holes of like maybe it was this the segment of the Boston mafia. Maybe it was Whitey Bulger. Maybe it was these other criminals from, you know, international art thieves that hit this museum knowing that on St. Patrick's Day, like, you know, midnight to 2 a.m. on Sunday night after St. Patrick's Day was Saturday into, I mean, St. Patrick's Day is kind of a state of mind in Boston. Like some people I think are constantly, it's constantly St. Patrick's Day.

But they go hard. And so they seized upon this chaos. Oh, and it was also, there were thoughts about whether it was an inside job, whether one of the two night watchmen was involved. And all these leads have come up empty as are the frames on the wall of this museum that you can go and see, which I think is like, that's pretty fun. Like, obviously you want to see Rembrandt's only seascape, but if you can't see Rembrandt's only seascape, don't throw up just another painting there and eliminate the history of this art heist.

Leave it empty and just be like, no other paintings. I was going to say, oh, sorry. Oh, how fun for the people who pulled this art heist, that there is a permanent tribute. A lasting legacy. Yeah. Because now it's like it's both an art museum and also a museum about this one specific heist. Yes, it's an art heist museum as well as an art museum. I love that.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner slash Oceans 11 Museum in the Fens. And yeah, so I'm like obsessed with the heist in general, but also with the fact that they keep that because of this charter. And in the, on the website to the museum, because I remember here in. on the tour when I was, whatever, 11 years old, that it was the charter of the museum that said that they couldn't replace the art. And on the website, they kind of, there's a whole section devoted to the theft because it's such a big deal. And I imagine it like drives at least some of the visitors to the museum. But it says, let me find it, because they're a little gentler about the reason that they leave the frames open.

I can't find it. When I was looking at it the other day, it said something like the single largest property theft in the world, they claim, on the website. It took 81 minutes. There's pictures on the website of one of the guards kind of duct taped to a pipe downstairs. And then empty frames. Today, empty frames remain hanging in the museum as a placeholder for the missing works and as symbols of hope awaiting their return, which I think is kind of a sweet way to say that. Right.

Yeah, it's kind of like the... That's sweeter than this dead lady made us promise we would never move these frames. This dead there, this dead old lady was like, don't move anything. I have it the way I like it. My ghost will know. And it is, like you brought up Rachel at the beginning of the podcast, Passover. And it's kind of like the idea of like the bitterness and the sweetness that once of like hope for the return but also a reminder of like whoopsie yeah i you know i've been

thinking since you uh you mentioned that there would be an art heist involved in your fact i was like what what does happen with stolen art right because you can't just like go sell it to anybody yeah people are looking for that stolen art um you got to sell it to the right people you do have to the right people. Yeah. And yeah, I definitely, I read a few pieces about how, you know, unsurprisingly, there are rich people who are less scrupulous than others about, you know, some rich people love the brag of having some hidden stolen art in their home that only their, you know, close friends and associates can know about. But I also was reading that it's like stolen artworks that are recovered. It's often found that they were basically just used as like

collateral in like, you know, in mobs and, you know, various criminal underbellies where it's just like, yeah, I got the goddamn Mona Lisa. So you can hold it while I go do this thing. And then I'll come back and take the Mona Lisa back. And like, what a bummer that so much stolen art is apparently just being used as like an, as like IOU markers. So one thing that that was interesting in the podcast last scene. is that they really make the point that, like, you, there's this image in our, in the public

imagination of, like, the art thief as like a gentleman criminal, right? Like an appreciator of art who's like, mm-hmm, I shall have the Vermeer for my own. And then they're like, they're like, sad to have to sell it to like a fence to, you know, to like, to get that money and have the art. They're like, it's beautiful, treated well. But, like, in real life, it's just like, whoever, it's, the same kind of person that would do any kind of robbery. And I don't want to like, by that I don't mean like anything derogatory other than it's,

it's not like an art appreciator. It is like the same kind of person who would like rob a bank, but they're like, oh, instead of getting the money directly, we know how to get this art. Like we know somebody on the inside or we know a security vulnerability. And so it's like a very funny where it's just like it's the same mob that steals other things. Like this, yeah, there's not like a secret like art mafia. Right. And also then like, you know, there's always the concern that the stuff is just going to be destroyed once it's more risky than it is.

Sure. So yeah, like if you're going to, if you're considering doing crime, just like consider doing it with something other than at priceless artwork. Well, my favorite art crime is I just watched that documentary made you look about the art. forgeries. And I think if you can forge a priceless work of art and sell it to a rich person, or, you know, through a gallery to a rich person, I think they shouldn't be able to prosecute you. I think you win fair and square. Yeah, if you can trick someone into that, especially if you can trick someone who like verified the painting, like this is a legit, I don't know about art to insert.

Insert an artist's name here who you can forge effectively. Yeah, I feel the same way, especially the rich person. Like, jokes on you, buddy. Sorry. In that movie, there were people that were very mad that they felt defrauded out of $8 million that they spent on a Rothko. And a Rothko that turned out to be forged. And nobody spends $8 million on a painting when they have a net worth of $8 million and $50. Like, they're not like, oh, no, how do we pay our cell phone bills?

they we got screwed on this Rothko deal. So like I think if you can get, you know, if you're selling a painting for $1.2 million and it's you trick the people that are supposed to verify. I think you don't get to bribe the people to verify it. This is my rule. But I think if you trick them, then it's, it's, um, no take-backseys.

It's fair and square. There's a, um, I think that's fair. There's a museum of art fakes in Vienna that I have been to. And there's no, there's no like, quote unquote, real art in it. It is just about art forgery. It is incredible. I'm a big fan of weird museums.

If you're ever in Vienna, if ever we can go anywhere ever again, go to Vienna and go to the museum of art fakes. I want to do a fake version of that museum somewhere. I want to open up like it. Would it be real art where it's fake fakes? Oh, whoa. Yeah, that is awesome. Where you're just like, these are fakes, wink. I feel like, these are incredible.

And it's like, yeah, that's because Picasso did them. But I love art crimes. Yeah, we had an episode of We're just thing a couple years ago where I talked about this young female artist who claimed to have like uncovered the secrets of the Renaissance masters and offered to teach these famous male painters how to effectively copy them. Yeah. And she ran a great scheme because the thing is that when the men took her courses and still. sucked at painting and weren't as good as painting as she was. Her secret for copying the Renaissance Masters was just that she was a better painter than the guys were.

Yeah. See, that's a great scam. And no one wanted to admit it. So they would all just be like, yeah, I learned a lot. It was great. Definitely, definitely pay her to do the same thing. I'm like Monet now. Yeah, that's so funny because that is, it's like an unprovable scam, especially because She's so good at painting.

It's like a, it's like a, the reverse of that popular, the axiom, right? This is those who can, don't teach. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Hey, weirdos, it's Corinne, the editor-in-chief here at Popular Science, jumping in to let you know about our brand-new digital exclusive magazines. These quarterly issues feature our award-winning science journalism, the very best gadgets, and of course, journeys down science's weirdest rabbit holes. But being an official popular science subscriber gets you so much more than that.

Our desktop and mobile apps have a catalog of more than 15 years of back issues. My favorite new feature? Siri or Google Assistant will read you the magazine. That means you can listen to Popsie like you would listen to a podcast. To get in on the action, go to Popsi.com slash subscribe. Our very first digital issue, which is all about the science and necessity of finding chill, is already there waiting for you to dig in. Okay, we're back.

and Sarah with some egg facts. Some egg facts. So I do just have to start by saying I'm about to tell you basically like, what I'm about to tell you will change your life. It won't change your life. But I did feel a little like I was slandering chickens because I'm just going to talk to you guys about how all the ways it can go wrong. Like how many ways can you lay an egg badly? But I'd just like to set the record straight and say that chickens are really, really good at laying eggs. They lay, most of them lay like more than 300 eggs a year, which is like a crazy production rate. If you produced an egg every single day, your life, holy crap. And like the vast majority of them will be absolutely perfect and beautiful and wonderful. But some of them are not. Don't let big chicken intimidate you, Sarah.

Sorry, my printer just made a noise. I have a new printer and the printer just made a noise. And I was like, the chickens have hacked into the mainframe. Yeah, it's going to print out for me. Yeah, it just is like, A piece of paper comes out. Okay. Okay. So, like, we're going to start with least to most wrong. So the least wrong an egg can be is like it's just like missing a yoke or it has too many yokes. So like double yokes eggs, those are pretty common.

You can get more. The Guinness World Record is five yokes inside a nine inch wide egg. I hope that that's like long ways and not wide because that's a rough time for the chicken. That's a chicken egg? Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I think it must be a bigger. It must be like an ostrich egg or something. It must be something big.

Or like Kiwis, by the time Kiwis lay their eggs, they can't walk. Right. Kiwis are like all egg. It's all egg. They're a weird bird. Is the world record attributed to the bird or the person who like found it? Because I think the bird deserves most of the credit. I mean, it's really, it's really to the egg.

but definitely, I don't know if you know the name of the chicken or the ostrich or whatever it was. There's a record that the, or there's a rumor that the real record is like nine yokes in an egg, but it's unconfirmed. The Guinness World Record, people weren't there to see it. They were like, that's just nine eggs in one ball. We can tell. I cannot verify this. But yeah, I mean, that's basically for like the same way like humans have like twins or triplets or quadruplets or whatever.

Like that's basically the general idea. You can also get fairy eggs, which are also called fart eggs, dwarf eggs, wind eggs, or a lot of other names that I thought were too rude to mention here. Wow. But they're basically like little teeny tiny eggs, like the little eggs you get for Easter that are chocolate, but a real egg, sometimes they're all whites, but sometimes they're just little tiny eggs. There's like weird shell abnormalities. You can get like really rough ones, like sandpapery.

And that's if your chicken, I know, if the chicken deposits too much calcium in the shell, it gets real bumpy, which again, I mean, laying an egg can't be comfortable and definitely laying a sandpapery one isn't. Some eggs are wrinkly, which happens when there's like a problem partway through like the eggshell breaks or something, but then sometimes the hen can like patch it back together basically and so they end up wrinkly. I've seen that before. Like I'm sure, like not a profoundly wrinkly egg because it wouldn't have been sold to me if

so. But I've definitely seen some eggs. eggs that I would describe as having a wrinkly quality to that. Wow. Yeah. And then like, chicken, chicken buttholes are amazing. They are. Nature is incredible.

I once made a comment offhand about an egg coming out of a chicken butthole. And the people I was with made fun of me being like, Rachel, they don't poop the eggs. And I was so, they so effectively embarrassed me that I was like, oh, gosh, you're right. And then later on, I was like, no, they do. There's one hole. Yeah, it's a cloaca, right? Yeah. It's just a cloaca.

Yeah. They do who bags. Not strictly a butthole doesn't mean it's not their butthole. Right. It's a butthole plus. Who's to say when it's being used as a butthole? Like maybe an egg comes out a butthole or maybe it's an egg hole when an egg's coming out. This is a matter for philosophers.

It's more of a philosophy question than a science question. It truly is. It's the next great chicken of the egg question. So like the, okay. So then like the color of the shell can vary a lot and that depends on like the stage at which the color gets deposited. Like, you can get blue eggs or green eggs. And if they're blue or green, that's like the whole shell all the way through is blue or green. If they're brown, you can actually wipe off the color when they're freshly laid, which is crazy. Like,

they've just been painted like little Easter eggs. Wow. That sounds really fake. Yeah, it seemed not real. I googled it a lot because I was like, there's no way that that's true. But it seems to be true. Where I'm from, they sell, like, the eggs. you generally get are brown eggs. And they like the in Massachusetts. And they, there was some like the egg council or what, whoever sold them had, there was like a slogan of encouraging you to get the brown eggs because they're

locally produced. Really? That's so interesting. When I was a kid, I remember my, or it's just something my dad made up, which is so weird. I like,

I kind, I want to Google it, but I also like don't, I can't face the fact that like, did my dad just make up this slogan for eggs? But I think it's from like when he was a kid and they would like push you to buy like locally produced brown eggs. That's funny. People, um, I already said this egg fact, but in another podcast alarmingly, but um, if you, a lot of people think that brown eggs are like more organic or like more natural eggs,

but they are not. The color of a, of an egg is just dependent on what breed of chicken pooped it. And yes, they did poop it. Um, there's also lash eggs, which are truly horrifying. I encourage you to never, ever Google it. They are like egg-shaped clumps of goop that happen when the like aviduct gets infected. So that's real nasty. But the actual fact I have to share with you today, I learned because our tech editor, Stan Horacek, tweeted about his wife asking him whether they had any lube on hand because she needed to stick her fingers up the chicken's butt slash cloaca to see if an egg had gotten stuck. And that turned out.

Stan's wife is a superhero. She's incredible. Sarah Horjacks. So I got, I asked Stan a bunch of questions and he was like, you know what? I don't know the answer these questions, but Sarah would. So I'm just going to connect you guys. So about an hour after he connected us on email, I got this incredible response where she was just like, let me tell you about all the weird egg stuff that I know.

So half of the facts you've already heard it from actually from Sarah. So their chicken, Cleo, she thought was egg bound, which is like exactly what it sounds like like the egg gets stuck inside the hen. And there's some solutions to that, including, I found this advice on the internet. So I don't know how legit this is. But supposedly if your hen is egg bound, you can just give her a nice little warm bath. You just want to relax her and soothe her. And then you put some K-Y jelly inside the cloaca to just kind of like loob it on up.

and sometimes I guess that that solves the problem. But Cleo, as it turns out, was not egg bound, sadly. So she had something that's called egg yolk paratinitis. I couldn't figure out why this happens. But as I said in my tease, like basically, chickens can start laying little bits of egg, like one without a complete shell or like one that's rupture. or like often it's just like part of a yoke or something. And it just sort of goes into their body cavity.

Like it just, it almost literally slips through some kind of gap between the ovaries and the aviduct. And it just sort of goes into the body. I'm not even really clear how all the diagrams are just like egg starts here. And then it just, it just exits this little loop. We don't actually know what's inside of a chicken. No one's ever looked. It's just a big old cavity. So yeah, but then like because it's just like a loose yolk, that's bad for the chicken.

So like a lot of times they get a really serious bacterial infection. And it's like it's hard to catch stuff like this early because I don't keep chickens. I hope to keep chickens someday because I think that their happy little clucking sounds are absolutely adorable. But because chickens are like prey species, they hide if they're feeling sick or like feeling crappy. So like it's very hard to tell when you're. chicken is feeling sad or off. But also... Oh, they get shy.

I know. It's so sad. They like, you know, they just want to be strong. Right. They never let him see a cry. That's an old chicken mantra. But weirdly sometimes, so the yolks can also like solidify into like a mass. Stan said that he thought it was from like their body heat.

I don't know if that's true. I could not verify like why they solidify. But they act basically. like a tumor but made of solidified eggs. And that's what happened to Cleo, Cleo the chicken. You're going to find one of those inside me someday. I know. So, yeah, if you catch it early, there is a treatment,

which is that you give them hormonal injections or an implant. So there's a little thing called a deslorellin implant. I'm sure I'm not saying that right. But it's like, it's kind of like birth control, but for some animals. Yeah. So it's like, it's like Implenon, but humans. Like, sorry, no. It's kind of like, it's not for humans. Don't give it to humans. It's kind of like implanon is for humans, but it releases gonadotrop and releasing hormone. And you can use it to suppress fertility in like male dogs and ferrets and also male or female cats. And this is just a thing that you can get. I mean, like, I think most of the time you wouldn't get it from your vet, but like, this is a thing. There's animal birth control and I had no idea. That's not. just like spaying or neutering them. Anyway, vets prescribe it off-labeled to chickens.

It's not really supposed to be for them. But if you give them this little implant, it suppresses their egg laying. So you can stop that process and then you can treat the infection if you get it really early. And at least one chicken blogger, there's a lot of chicken bloggers on the internet. At least one of them successfully treated her hen this way. But it seems pretty rare. And sadly, Stan told me that Cleo the chicken will not survive. her egg yolk pair to my eyes. I know. So surprise, this was a sad, I know, I'm so sorry. It turned

out to be sad in the end. This, this episode is so, so sorry. I just want to dedicate the episode to Cleo the chicken, because without her, we would not have these facts. I'm so sorry. RIP. Play as much Sarah McLaughlin as we could afford to play here, Jeff. 29 seconds worth. Yeah. In the wings of wings. Oh, God, I'm going to start crying. just from that.

So those are my egg facts. I don't think I have another episode's worth of egg facts. So this is probably going to. Maybe not about chickens. Yeah, other eggs, I'm sure. It's time to branch out. Other eggs. Or other non-egg chicken facts.

Yep. Yeah. Oh, God. All right. Well, I'm going to find one. Now you've challenged me and I have to have another egg fact or chicken fact episode. Yeah, there are so many other animals that lay eggs. I feel like you're just scratching the surface.

I was picturing when you said the egg. inside the chicken cell until I realized that it was just the yolk more or less right loose in in their chicken tubes the I was like could an egg just hang out inside a chicken until they give birth like a live birth oh god like it just keeps going yeah that's what I was worried about but it sounds like no right it sounds like it's it's not a fully formed it's a shell yeah it's not but that is why kiwis have such big eggs because like like most animals that lay eggs do it you can just like cook them partway and then put them outside your body. But Kiwis, like, they still lay the egg, but the little baby Kiwi develops like almost entirely

while it's still inside its mom. So that's why they have such big eggs. So like a kiwi could maybe just not, they could just do away with egg part. They probably could. Yeah. And they just have an evolution was like, you're stuck with this forever. Wow. That's fascinating.

Yeah. Kiwis are crazy. The people and the birds, to be honest. All right. Well, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? God, I don't know. There were a lot of weird things in this one. A lot of weird things. Yeah, it's true. We had a lot of, a lot of, like, tangential weird things. Yep. I think this may, this may be a three-way tie this week. I think all three of our facts taught me new things. Me too. Is this a first time three-way tie? Oh, no, I've definitely pulled this. So we're in decisive times.

Yeah. Look, I love it. I don't think there's a reason we don't need to make facts compete. No. They're all equally good facts. Yeah. Sometimes facts, yeah. Sometimes it's just the love of the game.

Exactly. The game called science. That's what we do. Josh, thank you so much for joining us. What a treat. Thank you for having me. And listeners who don't already definitely check out Make My Day. facts do not have to compete.

No. Everything is fully invented. It is chaos. It is a game show where there's only one contestant, so they always win, and each week, the winning contestant and only contestant wins a $100 donation to the charity or cause of their choice. And it's really fun. It's the only game show that I know of where no one ever loses.

And so it's very stressful. free. That's what I strive for. That's what we need right now, honestly. Thank you. Just a zero stress game show. Thank you. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms.

So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please read and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsye.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, tote, bow, bag. and mugs at popsye.threadlist.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and

audio engineering by Jess Bodey. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.