The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Bird Chess, Monkey Selfies, Crocodile Dung Birth Control

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Stan explains the iconic monkey selfie legal struggle, Amanda talks about how scientists got crows to stop pooping so much, and Rachel divulges many details about crocodile dung birth control.  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!  If you’re looking for a simpler, effective investment for your health, try AG1, and get 5 free AG1 Travel Packs and a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D with your first purchase. Go to https://drinkAG1.com/WEIRDEST Here's a special, (limited time) deal for our listeners to get you started RIGHT NOW, Get 55% off at https://Babbel.com/WEIRDEST Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice. work. Now Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. 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 Amanda Reed. And I'm Stan Horacek. Amanda, Stan, welcome to the show. Amanda, it's your second time with us. But you were here pretty recently. And Stan, you're an old hat at weird thing, but it's been ages. So welcome back. Yeah, I hide in the rafters. Like, I'm like the Phantom of the Opera. Like, I just come up sometimes. We did kind of summon you here when we were figuring out our, uh, our Mike situations over Zoom. Just did say,

is Stan, Stan, are you with us? And I felt a little bit like we were invoking something. So I'm glad that that dark ritual worked and that you are back on the show. Give us a sign. We just all pull out a Ouija board and then it's like a Ouija board. But instead of the little thing that they used to do the thing, it's like a camera lens. Right. Yes, Stan does love cameras.

I love it. Wonderful tie-in. So before we get into the show, I do just want to share some exciting news for listeners. By the time you hear this, our next live show will be imminent. It is on August 24th at caveat in New York City. You can find details and tickets, of course, in our show notes. Or if you Google like, weirdest thing, caveat, New York City, it'll come up. There are not that many combinations of those words, probably.

And yeah, it's going to be super fun. It's our first one in a while and definitely our first one with an actual live audience in person in quite some time, many years. And we're really excited to get back into it. We're going to have special guests, some fun games, maybe some prizes. And if you do not live in the New York City area or you're not doing indoor events right now, you can buy a ticket for a live stream of the show. and we would love to have loads of weirdos there for that. And we'll probably, you know, try to do some live stream audience participation the way we did last time. We'll see what we can make happen.

But anyway, we would love to have you there. So get your tickets. They may be close to sold out by the time this episode goes up. We'll see. So don't delay. Yeah. Yeah. Come have some popcorn and a ginger ale.

That's what I always had there. It's the best. They have a popcorn flavor topic bar at caveat. which is like truly however many types of popcorn topping you are imagining in your head, caveat has more. They have a greater number of them. So even if you have no interest in a weirdest thing live show, which would be weird because you're listening to this, you definitely want to get that bag by which I mean that bag of popcorn.

And my personal recommendation of popcorn topping is anything with chocolate? You get the mix of the salty and the sweet and the popcorn provides a really nice fluffy medium. Oh, yeah. Like chocolate-covered popcorn is one of my favorite snacks, and I think more people should know about it. Thank you. I appreciate that. We're giving people news they can use here. So let's get into the show.

On the weirdest thing I'm this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, popping popcorn, 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. Though a recent amendment to the show, after weeks of me complaining about having to pick a winner at the end, is that we no longer pick a winner at the end. Did people want me to change the intro? I don't know. I would have to remem memorize the intro, which I already forget half the time. So, So, whatever.

So Amanda, let's hear your tease. Yeah. So my tease is ornithologists play bird chess so you don't get pooped on. Wow. Thank you, ornithologists. Bird chess, too, I have a lot of questions. So we'll circle back to that momentarily. Dan, what's your teeth?

Yeah. Mine is the age old question. Can a monkey be a professional photographer? Are you going to make the joke that you try to answer that question every day, Stan? I do. It's really, it's not a question that bodes well for my chosen profession. Stan is a very good photographer. He photographed my wedding. I'm a big fan of Stan's photography.

But you also do tend to make those kind of jokes about yourself. And I am I am kind of a monkey in a way. We all kind of are. We are but great apes staring up at the stars. from the gutter, maybe taking a photo of it, hopefully with a popside.com article by Stan Horacek telling you how to take a photo of the moon that doesn't just look like a white blob. Yeah, I have a really dedicated ape audience for my photography content. So my tease is that I'm going to talk about, among other things, how crocodile dung may has been

a pretty effective birth control method. not just because they've made people not want to have sex with you for other reasons. In Florida, Crocodile Dung has the opposite effect there, I think, actually. Well, listen, I try not to yuck anyone's yum, so we'll leave it at that. Amanda, why don't we start with bird chess? Mostly, I just, I need to know what it is. So bird chess is a phrase that I can. came up with because as I was getting this script together, I was like, hmm, this kind of feels like

chess. So, a murderous scene descended on the University of Pittsburgh campus and surrounding Oakland neighborhood in fall 2017. Students and faculty would leave class at the Cathedral of Learning or leave the Carnegie Museum of Art and see hundreds of crows roosting in the trees. Crows have many admirable attributes. They're really, really, really, smart. You can teach them to bring shiny things to your house, and they hold their own funerals, which is really macabre and incredible. However, they are kind of a public nuisance to a university. Their poop shellacked sidewalks, cars, and bus stop shelters, requiring daily maintenance to make sure that it didn't damage property, which bird poop can do, fun fact. It's unsure

if bird poop actually has uric acid in it, but which uric acid would be the thing that would damage property, but just overall bird poop, not good to have on your car, not good to have on, you know, a historic building or sidewalks. Or avocado toasts, also bad there. Or avocado toasts, exactly. The list of things I would prefer not have bird poop on is long.

Extensive. Additionally, the crows pooped on students and anyone walking on campus. Well, that's good luck. So, yeah, that is good luck. There were moments where you would leave class and think that it's raining. But no, it was just a group poop. I am a victim of a campus crow poop. I was going to a party and waiting for a very specific bus line that only comes every 15 minutes. And I got pooped on right as the bus was approaching. So I rode the box. with bird poop in my hair and I was sitting next to somewhat and I was like I hope this person doesn't notice I hope this person doesn't notice I immediately be lined to the bathroom to wash it out and not be embarrassed that I rode the busts with bird crap in my hair humbling admirable

admirable humbling a good luck a good luck charm I think Pittsburgh needs like a hat sharing system we need to like have a startup where it's like a real lice problem waiting to happen yeah yeah i love the concept maybe like a like a umbrella sharing uh ponto sharing there you go yeah like city bike but umbrellas for bird poop and it's blue it's bluetooth enabled with GPS so you know exactly where you walked and it weighs the crow poop um if you're eventually capitalist, call me let's make it happen. This is especially a problem considering that fall is a very busy time at Pitt. There are many weddings and choir concerts at Heinz Chapel just behind the Cathedral of Learning and fall is a popular college tour time. If you thought parents were persnickety

asking guides questions about campus housing and meal plans, imagine what they'll want to know about the bird poop that's all over campus. I used to give a parent and prospective student tours when I went to college. And I can only imagine. Mostly my questions were how do you make the 16-year-old boys do laundry? And I would have to say, well, mom, the laundry is free. And that is the best we can do. Yeah.

Does he know how to do laundry? And there would be silence. And then I would be like, I think, I think this is a. this is the balls in your court. But anyway, you know. And here's the quick aside. Even if they're not 16, I recently, I'm on the apartment hunt right now. And I recently tore to a place where I was like, oh, this is so cute online. And it was two dudes living there. And no offense, I'm going to obviously keep them anonymous. But there was a room that had two closets. And I could not to get to either of them because there was

close all over the floor. It was very much A, we are dudes in our potentially late 20s, maybe early 20s. I wouldn't be surprised if they were in their 30s. Like we're dudes. We live in this two bedroom apartment

and we're dudes and we leave cups out. We love just cups with and beer cans, not to stereotype, but this is what I saw and I think I will need to talk to my therapist about it. Back to the crows. So why Pittsburgh? They, crows love to be together and this particular part of Oakland has lots of trees for them to roost in. There's lots of food in nearby garbage cans and lots of warm buildings they can hang out near. Because they're in the

this big roost, their bird information sharing has put Pittsburgh as their fall winter non-breeding season safe spot that they hang out in. They only go so far south from their southern Ontario, New England base, and they've been coming to Pitts campus since 2013. However, in 2017, the crow poop was just a major problem compared to years past. Crows are scarty cats, thankfully, so it should be easy to scare them away, right? Wrong. You see, there are beloved parengrine falcons that roost at the very top of the cathedral of learning. We can't scare them away.

I think the parengrine falcons that were roasting at the time were named Hope and Terzo. We love them. We love. There's a falcon cam. I forget who puts it up. It might be who I'm going to mention next. But it's in the spring and you can just watch the falcons hang out, and they're super cute and wonderful. So what to do about this crow falcon paradox?

The university sought out the help of the National Aviary in Pittsburgh's Northside neighborhood, which is the country's largest aviary, aka Bird Zoo, and the only one with an honorary national distinction from Congress. So it's called the National Aviary because Congress was like, yep, it's national. The university was like, we'll just play loud sounds to scare away the crows. And they also wanted to play red-teled hawk sounds, which is a crow predator. But it's also a parengrine falcon enemy. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad news bears, no good. Other universities like Penn State used fireworks to dispel the crows, but that is a liability in itself, especially in a city, especially when you have, I know like Penn State has a student body, but Pitts campus is

surrounded by other local businesses. I know especially close to where the Cathedral of Learning is, there is a restaurant. So fireworks in a city, good for the summer if you have a nice backyard, probably not good in a university center. So this is why I said bird chess at the beginning. It feels very, Rook can only move this way, a pawn can only do this. There are very calculated decisions to be made. So, with the help of Bob Mulville Hill, who was an ornithologist at the National Aviary, a solution was found. Crows don't like great horned avowls and parengrine falcons are like, eh, they're only a problem when I'm having kids. So the university placed various

small sound systems around the crow roost, played the great horned owl noises, and got them closer to a nearby park with actually more trees and less light pollution. Yay. Yeah, that's great. A little quick aside about Bob, Bob is an icon and gives excellent quotes like these. So, quote, these communal roosts are not only safer for individual crows, but serve as a crow version of Facebook. It's where they hear about what's going on from everybody. It's where they find out about feeding and roosting opportunities. Whatever conversations they're having, it's happening in those roosts. And, quote, don't worry about crows. To be quite honest, the crows are doing a service in terms of them being the garbage detail.

Yeah, I really like to add the idea of when I go outside and I hear crow's screaming, they're actually giving like restaurant reviews for like a disgusting old deer carcass on the side of the road somewhere. They're like, this place bad, one star. They don't need yelp. They just complain, which like I can respect. And this story personally is dear to me because I wrote about it in college and it is my magnum opus. I did not peak in college, but this is the best topic I've ever covered. And it never

got a single award. And I'm giving it its flowers now, you know, years later as a professional adult woman, because I wish I could be a person who forgives and forgets, but I'm not. Like a crow. Like a crow. I, when I was in St. Andrews in Scotland for a conference, right after leaving my full-time job at Popsie, and then I immediately got COVID for the first time there and spent a very miserable leak in a tour of room in Scotland. There was a crow who would come by my room every day. And I started training him with Cool Rich Toritos. And we were great friends. And, you know, then I left and he presumably moved on with his life.

But, you know, there were many birds around many gulls. But this crow was like, we had a connection. He would hop. He would hop along and he would, he would like peek out at me. I would see him like jumping up and being like, oh, shit, she's here. And then, you know, I would leave chips for him. And it was great. I was so bored.

I'm like almost in tears thinking about how relieved I was to have this crow to pay attention to. So anyway, I love them. Just, just snow whiting. And here's the thing. I feel like crows kind of get a bad rap from the Hitchcock film. Sure. But like, there are worse, there are truly worse birds out there. No offense.

Absolutely true. Like, seagulls, I'm, I beef with all seagulls. because I, again, I don't forgive and forget. I, they stole a sandwich from me when I was a wee young child. And yes, it was a chaotic sandwich because my mom let me put it together. I think it was just ketchup and white bread, which like a total normal child meal. And it took my sandwich and my goldfish. Are you sure that single wasn't doing you a favor?

This is a question. Honestly, I mean, thinking about it, no, probably yes. I really hope that Seagull is living its best life with my cheap white bread in its tummy. But yeah, Seagull's not my friend. People hate on pigeons. Another side, I personally kind of like pigeons. No two pigeons look alike. And it's really cute when they bob their little heads.

Yeah, one has flown in my face before. But also, one has never pooped on me. Well, I'm so glad that you could share this amazing story with us. And I give it five stars. So. Yeah, can I, is there a way I can like order one of those owls on Amazon to stop the crows from pooping all over my car all the time? Because like I park under a tree. Well, they definitely have.

They make like, like fake owls. Like not the soundbox. I'm sure you could rig up, Stan, no problem. but definitely there are a lot of barns out there that have just like a random fake owl on the top. Yeah, I got to go get one and then throw it at the crows that constantly poop up my car. Right, that's what they're for. They are to be used as projectiles. Yeah, it's like owls are vaguely football shaped when their wings are in, right?

And I tight spiral at the jerk crows that keep pooping on my car. They're just trying to shower your vehicle with blood. blessings. It's working. Okay, 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

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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. Okay, we're back. And Stan, tell me about some monkey photos, monkeying around. Yeah, so just to back up a little bit about how I arrived at this topic is that recently I've been thinking a lot about AI, artificial intelligence. Like every insufferable person you know, I've been thinking about AI. And there's all these really sort of some interesting, some tedious conversations about AI from a societal standpoint and from, you know, a cultural standpoint and a technology standpoint.

But I've been thinking about it in terms of art and more specifically intellectual property. Because if AI makes a quote unquote photograph, then who, owns it because all you did was type into a AI machine and out came the thing. And I was talking to a friend about this and it reminded me of a case from a couple years ago that I covered when I worked at Popular Photography Magazine back in the 2010s. And it all started when literally a monkey took a selfie. So back in 2008, a British nature photographer named David Slater traveled to Indonesia. He wanted to document an endangered species, and I'm sorry when I say this wrong, but the species is called the celibus crested macaques. Does that sound right? People who are

smarter than me? Is that how we think we say that? Okay, well, I'm not going to say it again. So he wanted these very endangered monkeys. He wanted to go and take pictures of them. Now, if you've never tried your hand at real nature, like nature photography, is easy if you just take a big zoom lens to the zoo and you point it at the animals that can escape. Like that's the easy way to do nature photography. But the real professionals, they spend days and sometimes weeks just like sitting next to a tree hoping that animals that absolutely hate them will do something really photogenic in front of their camera. It's a lot of sitting around. It's a lot of waiting. So part of what you do in order to increase your odds is to set up a remote

camera. So Slater set up a remote camera on a tripod. He followed around these macaques for two or three days trying to get them used to him so he could get close enough to him to take a picture. Once he had done that, he set up a camera on a tripod and he put what's called a cable release on it. And a cable release is literally a cable that plugs into the camera and gives you a shutter button. So if you want to be a little bit away from the camera, you can hold on to the cable instead of having to put your eye up right up to the viewfinder. And much to his delight, horror, I don't know how exactly he felt about it. The macaques actually started coming up to the camera and playing with it, pushing the buttons, trying to knock it over. And one of them got a hold of the cable release and started pressing the button

because it's a button. You're going to press it, right? I feel like that impulse is almost universal among primates, right? If you see a button, you want to push it. Primates and dogs, too. Yeah, I think, I feel like if we showed some crows a button, they would want to push it. Oh, my gosh. There is, there are for sure crow studies involving button pushing.

Totally. I mean, we were just on a recent episode, we talked about parrots learning how to FaceTime each other. So, like, listen. Yeah. Yeah. So the macaques, they pushed the button and one of them, which would later become known as Naruto, took a bunch of selfies. And like this didn't happen by accident.

You know, this guy went out into the rainforest essentially. He like used a wide angle lens. Wide angle lenses typically have a big glass front element. So the apes could see their own reflection in the glass, which sort of entertains. them a little bit, made them curious. He used a wide angle lens. He used a tripod. He used this cable release. He used a flash so that it would look really good. He really set it up for like maximum chances that he would get a really cool picture of these monkeys. So once he gets back, he's like, wow, I have these really awesome monkey selfies. And as the internet tends to do, they go kind of viral.

Right. Like if you see a monkey selfie, especially one as cool as the one that you see in this story, you're going to want to share it or make memes out of it or anything else. And that resulted in some media attention for him. So various media outlets reached out to him. And, you know, the reporting is kind of all over the place. In some cases, they say that the monkeys, quote, stole the camera and took the selfies. Some people got it right. Some people didn't. It was kind of all over the place. The cheeky monkey narrative. Yes. Which is always really appealing. People love that when there's like a bird steals a GoPro and flies it away. You know, a squirrel broke into this bar and got drunk. You know, we love animals getting into trouble. Yeah.

And so all of these media outlets are writing about this monkey selfie. And then this is kind of where the intellectual property and the whole monkey as professional photographer element comes up. in 2011, the images showed up on Wikimedia Commons, right? When that organization only deals with images that are in the public domain or, you know, have similar, right, they don't require rights management. And the uploader and the organization, their justification was, well, this quote has no human author in whom copyright is vested because it was the work of an animal, right? The monkey pushed the button in copyright with photography a lot of times it's whoever pushed the button owns the copyright in a lot of cases. And in this case, it was literally an ape.

So Slater was like, these are really popular images. I want to keep licensing them. I'd like to continue making money on them and not have everyone just use them for free. So he went back and forth with the organization. But the organization ultimately decided, you know what? We think these are in the public domain, so they're going to stay. you know, Slater, he made the argument. He was like, I went out there.

I brought the camera. Like the McCawks would not have gone to Best Buy and gotten a camera and taken these selfies. You know, they're not going to get in. Right. Like he facilitated it. He like composed the conditions of the shot. Yeah. To some extent.

Like they only were able to do this because he was out there. And then it became, it became such a complicated issue that like they got into the real nitty gritty of it where Slater had to say like, well, my hand was on the tripod, while the monkeys were doing this. And it became like really, really detail oriented, just like, like every legal battle ever, it became exactly as complicated and annoying as you possibly imagine. So in 2015, like this is still go, this, these pictures happened in 2008. And now we're jumping all the way to 2015. And this argument is still going on. So in 2015, the people for the ethical treatment of animals, or PETA, as we all know them,

filed suit against Slater on behalf of the monkey, which they called Naruto, claiming that Slater had violated the premate's copyright when he self-pubbed a book on a service called Blurb. So they were saying that, like, he published a book with a photo that belongs to a monkey. A judge threw the case out in January of 2016, but PETA appealed. Then all the parties attempted a settlement where they proposed a settlement where Slater would pay 25% of the future revenue from the image to a conservation organization when he sold, you know, when he made more money on it. But then that fell through. And then finally, finally in 2018, the court ruled in favor of Slater.

They said that the monkeys do not have the capacity to own copyright, sadly. It's still not entirely sorted out in terms of what happens. This was like an international incident. It happened in Indonesia. Slater's from the UK. PETA sued them in the United States because the book was published through blurb, which is in the United States. So it ended up being really wildly complicated.

And like despite the costly impact that this had on Slater, like he had to pay for all these lawyers. he became known as the monkey selfie guy, which is not an easy sort of box to break out of, you know. Right. You know, he said that he, you know, in comments since all of this is wrapped up, he said that he's kind of happy that this happened because, you know, his goal was awareness of this endangered species.

And frankly, the fact that in 2018, a media company actually bought the rights to this that they could option as a movie if they want to. So, you know, I don't think they're wrong. Yeah. So I would watch it. I mean, I would never have heard of the celibus crested macaques if this had not been for this case. And I guess the short version of this is if you do one Google today, make it those monkey selfies because they really are very charming. They are. I have to say that black macaques actually really, they like trigger a weird uncanny belly thing for me. I've definitely talked about this love years thing before because I don't know why it is and I feel so bad because they are beautiful, majestic creatures who deserve our respect and attention and protection. And also something about their teeth and eyes being so human to me really wigs me out.

So I wouldn't want to meet one in a dark alley. However, I really respect their right to party and take selfies. Yeah, I want to. Amanda handles a lot of our social media over here on Popsai, on my part of Popsai. And I think we should book a trip to Indonesia and have them be guest Instagram hosts. Oh, my gosh. Perfect. Oh, absolutely.

We do an Instagram live with the monkeys. also where is Naruto now? How is he? You know what I mean? Is he being protected? Part of the arguments in the case was that when they were trying to say like, please stop suing us about this, they were like, you're suing us for a monkey that you think is named Naruto and you don't even know which one it is. Yeah. You know, you don't know that he's happy about this situation that you're like him for. I think it's a you can really get into sort of, uh, the issue is with that flavor of animal advocacy with that. Yeah, no, absolutely. So, uh, now if you're planning a trip, uh, to document endangered animals,

make sure they're not the ones who push the button to take the picture because you might find yourself in, in all kinds of trouble. I really get divorced child vibes from. this monkey. This monkey didn't ask to be brought into this court case. You know what I mean? It just wanted to live Nerrido just wanted to live his life,

you know, doing macaque things. And his name is being brought up in the court of law and he probably doesn't even know. Poor guy. Cool. Okay. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. All right, we're back. And it's time for my fact, which I have to admit, I was prepping some other stuff and then I was like, hey, today is the first birthday of my first book. Not today the day you're listening to this podcast because it'll be a while from now, but we're recording this on May 17th. And May 17th, 2022 is when I published, Been There, Done That, a rousing history of sex. So, thanks. Book is one.

Book is one. Can we be absolutely sure that a macaque didn't. write the book? I mean, I don't know. It was a rough year when I wrote this one. So I can't really say what happened. The book appeared one day in a fugue state. But anyway, yeah, I, you know, there was a time when the book came out where I did like

a bunch of stuff about it. All we're just saying. But it's been a minute. And there are some cool things in here that I haven't brought up on the pod. So I thought I would share a few of my favorites. it. And also just, yeah, remind listeners that if you haven't checked out my book yet, there's still time to keep it from getting pulped or something else really sad. And also, I narrate the audiobook. So it's like this podcast, but with me being forced to read words that I wrote down, and it's mortifying,

including one of the last things we recorded at the very end of the book has James Joyce's letters to his wife, Nora, which are filthy. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He loved farts. Oh, yeah, he really did. And he loved Nora and her farts specifically. And I included a letter where he talks about her specific farts. and that was the only point in the whole process of recording the book that I was like, this is a board of suddenly. Like, I can't believe I have to read this out loud. So kudos to Jube Stories. And if you want to hear that, check out my audiobook. You can get it on Libro FM, which supports independent bookstores.

We love that. So I promise you I would talk about how crocodile poop. was actually a surprisingly good method of birth control, relatively speaking. So some of the earliest evidence we have for, like, actual deliberate birth control is in 1850 BC, which is when Egyptian women were known to combine bits of honey, salt, and, like, fabric or, like, cotton and sometimes crocodile dug into spermacidal plugs. And that sounds pretty horrifying to modern sensibilities. Because just to be clear, we were talking about them making a plug out of the poop, et cetera, and putting it up against their cervixes.

However, this was actually probably pretty effective. And I will explain why. And it's not just because you smelled like poop and people would be like, I'm fine. I'm just tired. I have a headache. So basically having something that physically blocks sperm from getting to the cervix is like a pretty effective, not always perfectly or even highly effective, but like a reasonably effective method of birth control. Because basically like the sperm are out of there like a shot and anything you try to do after the fact to like evict the sperm. it's too late. The faster ones are already like up doing their business. So a good sneeze isn't

going to get them out of there. Exactly. So many people throughout history tried to eat sneezing or similar evacuary measures. It really seems like it should work. Right. Like I get it. I really sympathize with people throughout history who were like, yeah, you just get that stuff out. But unfortunately, some of the stuff has already gone up. So can't do it. Within seconds, it's too late. It's like the Kentucky Derby up there. Yeah, pretty much, pretty much.

So, you know, throughout history, there have been many things like do shrances, et cetera. And it's much more effective, even in its very simple form, to, like, be blocking the sperm from getting into the cervix. So, of course, condoms are a thing. I'm not going to get into the whole history of condoms, but fun fact, when they first became widely available to the public after the ones that were made out of like animal intestine or linen and were, you know, only so, so effective, they were made out of like actual vulcanized rubber and you reused them. Like you you washed them. It was like a little, little gimp suit. That really grosses me out, which I don't think is fair to people who were being very, very, very. responsible at using the best of time. Obviously, you can boil and sanitize anything. I have used

a menstrual club. I know that for some reason. Maybe I just really don't trust, you know, men in the early 20th century to have been responsibly boiling their reusable contents. But that's just me. So go back to, you know, around 1500s BC. People are, you know, using this poop, this honey, to make spermacidal plugs. And so first of all, right, it's actually a physical plug. And having something that's kind of like playlike so that you can really like, really plug stuff up is good. That's going to make it more effective. But beyond the physical barrier, the crocodile dung would have been acidic, which would have changed the pH of that whole environment. And there are in fact modern spermacidal jellies and substances that work

to prevent pregnancy by changing the pH to make it less hospitable to sperm. So there's that. There was also the honey in there would have had antimicrobial properties. So that's maybe why people could keep using crocodile dung in this fashion and not getting into trouble. And they also started adding acacia leaves around 1500 BC, which we now know produce lactic acid when they're ground up. And lactic acid, we now know, decreases sperm motility. So basically, taken altogether, these recipes we see from like 4,000 years ago were not off base. And of course, we don't have any actual data on how effective they were as birth control.

But it's like the logic is sound and it's reasonable to believe that some people who used this because they didn't want to become pregnant were able to avoid pregnancy because of it. And that's really cool. And also just a reminder that like our knowledge of sexual health has been incredibly nonlinear because there have been times and places where people have been like really close to understanding things about as well as they could without like microscopes and cell theory and advanced imaging. But often other people did not care about those things. You know, nobody in 12th century. England was going, you know what was really smart when back in ancient Egypt they used crocodile dog use repository. So, you know, my book about the history of sex goes all over the place because so has our knowledge about sex. Yeah, and lactic acid is still kind of an effective method of birth control when you get a real bag of hammy cramp and you got to take a break.

Wow, so true. Lactic acid also good exfoliator for your face. That's true as well. That's true as well. I feel like imagining the like honey and acacia leaves and like salts and like probably doubled as a face mask. The crocodile dung, I don't know. Maybe like I'm ready to be convinced. I'm ready to be influenced.

Probably not actually. But there were many options for girl on. ago. Yeah. In 1500 beefs. The whole, the whole recipe is very TikTok

like sounds like it's like. Yes. Oh my gosh. Do not let the TikTok girls know about the crocodile tongue. Yeah. It's the next water talk. Disclaimer, no one,

no one put any kind of animal dung in your vagina, really anywhere in your body. I would say, personally, that's my, I would go so far

as to make that recommendation. But again, There are modern birth controls like Fexy is a relatively new birth control. And that's kind of use on demand spermacidal gel. And it works by changing the pH around your cervix. And that's really cool that like that kind of basic mechanism is something that humans probably figured out after a fashion a long time ago. That being said, they also did many things that were very silly and did not work.

Stan, because you mentioned sneezing, I do have to mention the lack of demonian leap, which is supposedly something that Hippocrates did or rather had patience to. So I talked about this in the book because there's been a lot of debate about how Hippocrates felt about abortion. As of the case with like a lot of historical figures who worked in health, there will always be modern people trying to use them as an example of like, you know, even even back in the day, these guys said you shouldn't do this. And the thing is that it's really complicated to talk about how ancient people felt about terminating a pregnancy because their understanding of how pregnancy worked was so different. Basically, the line between contraception and abortion was way blurrier because they kind of, in most cultures throughout history, didn't really define pregnancy as having started in a meaningful way until like the quickening, like when you could like feel. somebody kicking in there, which is pretty far along. And, you know, some people will argue that that means like, oh, they literally didn't think the pregnancy started before then, but like they knew, they knew it was growing in there. They knew it wasn't like suddenly, one day you woke up and

and there was a fetus kicking inside you. So all of that is to say, it was just way more, it, it was a very different conversation. The language was different. The vibes were different. And it's also important to note that like in a lot of ancient cultures, it was considered very acceptable to leave a baby out exposed to get rid of, essentially. Yeah. And in fact, there's one point in the book where I talk about the fact that Aristotle commented on the noteworthy tendency for Egyptians to quote, rear all their children that are born.

So like, again, it was just the whole conversation around pregnancy, child birth, child care was completely different. And to hammer that home, Hippocrates, who like supposedly based on some quotes, was against abortion, also did this thing called the Lackinibonian leap. Apparently, there was a singing girl who was going to lose her financial value because she was potentially pregnant, about to be pregnant. Again, very unclear. They didn't really, like, when did it start? What happened? And so he instructed her to like put her hands on her hips and pull her knees in tight, not literally, but basically, but basically like do like butt kicks up in the air. And he was like, this will dislodge a growing fetus. That is not true. But he was like,

the seed that's growing inside you will be dislodged. And, um, Apparently it did and she was not pregnant and that was fine. And I'm like, did how soon after sex was this? What was dislodged? Anyhow, that is not actually a way to terminate pregnancy. But Hippocrates was like, I got this great hack, butt kicks. And that's the lack of debonian leap. Hippocrates is really one.

I'm going to run around my Animal Crossing Island and just shake the trees. to dislodge the fruit. Yeah, pretty much. And listen, there's lots of stuff like that throughout history. People have found really ingenious ways to influence their sexual health and well-being. And people have done some really, really silly cuckoo bananas things. And the same remains true today. And I find that comforting.

Yeah. I still do a version of the leap. in the form of jumping jacks before I go do heavy back squats so I don't fart a bunch. Yeah, it's the same. You're dislodging the farts. Ancient techniques. So yeah, I think I'll save some other tidbits of the book for maybe another time when I'm feeling nostalgic. But listeners, I hope you will check it out if you haven't already.

I promise there's some absolutely bonkers stuff in there really, really off the wall. People are nasty and I love that about them. I've already read the text version, but now I want to get the audiobook in hopes that there's like a Rachel doing a horny crocodile voice or something else in there. Yeah, I mean, there is me doing a horny James Joyce voice, I guess. So there's that. It's also really comforting that James Joyce did both Ulysses, which is like a work of the literature canon and just like nasty, filthy fart celebrating letters to his wife, Nora. I'm pretty sure he literally wrote the letter in question while he was traveling to write Ulysses or like publishing it. So yeah, it's true.

Like we all contain multitudes and don't let anyone tell you. that you can't be a great artist because you also love garbage memes or being horny because that's what James Joyce did. I can't believe he started one of the letters with sweetheart start gathering up crocodile dung because I'm on my way home. I'm on my way home. And you better be ready. You better pick those vacation leaves.

Yeah. Honey. Well, as I said, we no longer vote on what the weirdest thing we learned this week was because we're all winners here. But I loved everyone's stories today. A lot of poop, it's true, but also a lot of heart. And listeners, just a reminder, get your tickets for our live show at caveat on August 24th. You will see some familiar and lovely faces there. We'll do some prizes, some games. It's going to be a really good time. So check out the ticket info in our show notes. 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. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnyshade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear.

Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on allolotion. You're welcome. Columbia, engineered for whatever.