The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Sideshow Babies, Strange Sneezes, Rust for the Rust God

Episode Date: February 13, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from premature babies displayed as a sideshow exhibit to people who sneeze after eating a big meal. 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!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepsies Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- 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

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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. Oh, another sternutation. Excuse me. 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 Claire Maldorelli. And I'm Eleanor Cummins. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease of some kind of story we came across while reading, writing, reporting, clicking around on Twitter, et cetera. And we decide which one we absolutely have to hear more about first. 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. So, Eleanor, why don't you start with your teas? I would like to talk today about Rust for the Rust God. Great. And Claire, how about you? There's a medical condition where you can't stop sneezing after you eat a large meal. Huh. Interesting. Mine is about how

premature babies used to be a side show attraction and also there are Nazis. That's just terrible. I'd like to hear that one. Same. Okay. Great. So I have to start by saying that this story I initially heard about years ago listening to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Memory Palace by Nate DeMayo. It's the episode called Dreamland. And like most episodes of the Memory Palace, it made me cry and feel a lot of feelings. I re-listen to it this morning. And I, like, almost cry in the middle of the office. Have either of you guys listened to the Memory Palace?

No, but now I'm going to. I tried to listen one time. And, you know, that sensation on your skin when you're, like, about to feel an emotion? And then I stopped it. Well, so I felt some emotions. This episode, Dreamland, was about the amusement park at Coney Island. It's a beautiful episode. I highly recommend it.

But one of the things Nate DeMayo mentions is that you could pay a quarter to go see a premature baby. What? No. A bargain. But this story is surprising, Claire. You will be surprised. I'm appalled right now. I've always been interested in this ever since then, and I've been reading about it periodically.

And this summer, a book came out about it by Dawn Raffle. I have not read it yet, full disclosure. I actually only found out there was a book about it when I decided very randomly that I wanted to use this on this week's episode. But I did read a couple of great excerpts, and it seems like a really fascinating take on the subject. For most of human history, babies born too early, who were not going to thrive on their own, they just died depending on what their families were willing and able to do to help them breathe, eat, stay warm. But that's not to say that no super premature baby survived. In fact, Isaac Newton, who was born on Christmas Day in 1642, was, according to his mother, premature and small enough to fit in a court-sized beer mug. Wow. Wow. Which is maybe an exaggeration. But at point being, if you were fortunate and your family was willing to hand feed you and keep you very toasty, you had a shot at surviving and being okay. And becoming the greatest mathematician of our time.

No big deal. If you were very lucky. There wasn't really anything. in the medical establishment. Even as we started having a medical establishment, in fact, there were incubators for birds before there were incubators for human babies. That's how a Parisian doctor got the idea in the mid-1800s. He saw that the Paris Zoo would incubate baby birds and eggs, and he was like, huh, interesting. Whoa. Up until then, people had just not bothered to think there was anything they could do for these babies. The turning point here was due in large part to France's falling birth rate.

The Franco-Prussian War was a thing and there had been famines. So all of this previous sentiment about premature babies being like unfit and too weak to bother with, they didn't have that luxury. They were looking for ways to keep from dying out as a country. So doctors started looking into these bird incubators. And wouldn't you know, they also helped with humans. But this remained controversial and not widely accepted for a very long time. And that's where we get Martin Arthur Cooney, who was actually born Michael Cohn. Coney Island.

No. Unfortunately, the name has nothing to do with that. Though, you know, he did change his name, so I can't say that he wasn't somewhat inspired by the Coney Island. He claimed to be a physician who trained under some of these French incubator pioneers that may not have been true, according to the recent book about him. But what's definitely true is that this German Jewish man put incubators full of premature babies up as attractions at big expositions in Berlin, which really says a lot about. how little regard people had for premature infants because he was going to put on this exposition showing off incubators. And he was like, well, how about we put some babies in there? And everyone was like, yeah, you might as well take them to Berlin.

They're not going to survive anyway. But all six babies survived because they had jokes on you. And he also did this in London. And then he ended up immigrating to the U.S. to take advantage of the big sideshow culture there at the time. So again, this is the late 1800s. Or today. We love a good side show. We do. We love gawking.

What can we say? So the Lancet said of his London show in 1897 that the incubators and the ventilating tubes were silvered, which gives them a bright and cheerful appearance, while the infants look clean and comfortable, so that altogether it is a pleasant as well as an interesting sight. Wow. Yeah. At Coney Island, tourists were paying a quarter to view the babies. And at this point, Martin had set up a pretty regular enterprise. He would travel around the country a bit. but Coney Island was one of his flagship locations, if you will.

That quarter went to pay for an actually really well-run intensive care unit. So it was super sterile, at least for the time. They had well-trained nurses. In fact, he met his wife because she was an expert in caring for premature newborns. Their baby was born premature, in fact, and was taken care of there and then later became a nurse there. It was a real family joint. Wow. That money went to keeping the place clean.

They had top-of-the-line machines. They had wet nurses who fed the babies every two hours and were kept on a strict diet. They were fired if they were caught eating a hot dog, which must have been terrible because they were on Coney Island. And felt a many hot dogs had just opened. Wow. Yeah. And so they would even feed some of their babies drop by drop through the nose because the gravity would send the milk straight down. And if they couldn't swallow without choking, that was the best way to feed them.

So they were doing a lot of work to keep these babies alive. And the parents were not being charged, which is not to say, that this guy wasn't making money. His family was living very well, but he also was not charging people for the service that they literally could not get at hospitals at this time. In a 2015 story court interview, Lucille Horn, who was born weighing about two pounds in 1920, talked about her experience in this little batch of infants, this newborn hatchery, as many people called it. Her twin had died, and her family was told that she would die too. So her father bundled her up in a blanket and got a cab to Coney Island, and she lived there for six months. She went back to visit a few years later,

and Dr. Coney met her and then walked up to a guy looking at one of the incubators and tapped him on the shoulder and said, look at this young lady. She's one of our babies, and that's how your baby's going to grow up. I have heard he was quite the showman, so I imagine that's how he talked. So it wasn't without controversy. There was a lot of showmanship. Again, he was known for dressing the babies in oversized clothes cinch with ribbon to emphasize how small they were. One of the nurses would put her diamond ring around their entire wrist. They did a lot of stuff to make it a sideshow. But on the other hand, he at least claimed, and it's kind of hard to argue that this is totally untrue, he claimed he was putting out pro-premy propaganda.

You know, he was getting these people to pay money to help support these infants and their families. And he was showing them, number one, how much help these babies needed. But number two, that it was possible and that it was worthwhile. And that was really radical at the time for reasons I'll get into in a second. Now, one of the main and most reasonable points of controversy surrounding him is that he inspired copycats who were not as careful as he was. Basically, I have this article from The Lancet, and I won't go through the whole thing. I'll have more about this on popsye.com. But there were other fairs where people would advertise and get babies for and sell tickets to these sorts of preemie shows.

but they wouldn't have real incubators, and they'd be right next to the horses. And in Martin's wards, there was filtered air. There was a super high-tech heat regulation system. There were those wet nurses who weren't allowed to eat hot dogs. It was all super above board, and it costs a lot of money to maintain it that way. So when other people tried to capitalize on the popularity, it's no surprise that they cut quarters. I promise there would be Nazis. And there are.

Oh, no. It's even more revolutionary than you might think that this was going on because it was happening as the American eugenics movement, which a lot of Americans like to forget had a really big influence on German Nazism, was reaching its peak. At the time, a Chicago doctor named Terry J. Heisledon. He felt so strongly that some babies should be allowed to die by way of not giving them medical procedures that you could give them, that he actually made a propaganda film about it. One of the ads for it read, kill. Hill defectives save the nation. He considered premature babies to be defective and that you were actually damaging the gene pool by helping them survive so that actually the best thing you could do for America was to let these babies die. There was an anonymous article in the Buffalo Medical Journal that questioned why you should save premature infants the way that Cooney was doing. It called them weaklings. And it said, whereas any good stock breeder raises only the most sound, healthy and perfect animals. Medical science was sentimental and helping inferior humans perpetuate.

This is eugenics. This is what the Nazis believed. And again, Americans did a really good job of fostering those beliefs. One thing that's really interesting is that these so-called defective babies were often being saved just steps away from eugenics exhibits. So during this time around like 1911 to 1913, there was this wave of so-called better baby contests where you You would go to a fair and present your infant, and they would measure it, like they would take its height and weight and facial shape, and they would analyze it like it was livestock, and they would give you ribbons for having a good American baby, which is obviously worrying on many accounts. And these would often be at the same fairs as Cooney's Premature Baby exhibits. One time at a Chicago World's Fair in 1933, not the famous one. This one was during the Depression, so it was a lot more low-key.

The Hall of Science featured an actual literal eugenics exhibit while Cooney's infants were in the like entertainment section. And this happened to be the year that Hitler came to power. So boo us. But CUNY did a lot of good work around the 1940s incubators finally became common in hospitals. It took almost 100 years from when French doctors first started using them. for hospitals to actually think this was worthwhile. And he is thought to have saved at least 6,500 babies. Wow.

Yeah. I feel like more praise should go to the wet nurses. They didn't even get to eat hot dogs. They did a lot. It's true. Or orange soft drinks. Apparently that was the other big thing. It's my favorite soft drinks.

They were just always trying to sneak those orange soft drinks and hot dogs, which I totally understand. Imagine your job is that you live at a boardwalk and you're also constantly feeding infants, which makes one very hungry and can't eat a frickin hot dog. It's amazing. So I think you're right, Claire. Yeah, or if you sneak a hot dog, you're like, am I endangering infants? Very scary. Yeah.

Congrats to them. Absolutely. My highest praises. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back. And we're back. Eleanor, why don't you jump in with your fact? I've been listening to my first ever audiobook. Yes, this is a big deal for me.

I've never listened to an audiobook. before. Unheard of. Have you ever listened to a podcast? I have. There's this one I really like called the

weirdest thing I learned this week. But to my first audio book, I'm reading or listening to rather, the wizard and the prophet by Charles Mann,

who you may recall from the Costco nonfiction sensation 1492. I just remember that book being available by the 10,000s

in Costco. But this new book, it spends time on sort of the matter of like how we're going to feed enough people.

And so there's a lot of discussion of cross. And one of the things that just kept coming up was this idea of a fungus called stem rust, which I had never heard of, as well as leaf rust. They're in a family. They're a family of rests. And they affect the stems of wheat, barley, and rye and have basically been causing famines for thousands of years. So there's this throwaway comment in this audiobook where they're saying, you know, that the Romans used to sacrifice tawny animals to stave off rest. And I was like, what is going on? and also to whom are they sacrificing these tawny animals. So it turns out that the Romans had a Rust God, which is my new favorite thing. I've been saying Rust God a lot, as both of you know. His name was Robagus.

That's how I'm choosing to say that. And on April 25th, it's coming up. Mark your calendars of each year, the Romans celebrated Robagalia, which is actually described in Ovid's six-book poem, Fausty, which was public. in the year 8 AD. That's one of our best records of Robagalia. And basically the festivities were centered around sacrificing dogs with red fur. But I've read they were also interested in foxes, should they come across those or any other unlucky Auburn critters. I'm glad that I'm saying this to both of you, both of whom have red hair. Welcome. Welcome to Robagalia Hour. And they were

offering their entrails and their blood to Robagus in the hopes of appeasing him. So to backtrack a little bit, I figure that I should talk a little bit about rust actually what it is. Because when I think about rest, I think about the... Tetness. Yeah. Well, that's another thing because tetanus isn't actually... Yes, caused by rust necessarily.

Anyway, when I think about rust, I think about like iron oxide, right? And like that kind of thing that happens when, you know, you have to paint over a bridge so nobody realizes that this is about to collapse. But it turns out that the much older and formidable form of rust is that that... this thing that happens with this fungus. So there are 7,000 species of this fungus, and there's spores that form, and then they, like, ride on the wind to their ideal host species. And they're very specific about where they're going to grow, but once they latch on to, like, the right spot, it's over for that plant. The rest will grow right into the cell walls of the plant that it's, like, taking over, drain its nutrients in a very classic parasitic style.

And instead of the plants growing normally as a result, what you're seeing as they're starting to die is that they get these little red spots, which is why it's called rust. And there are this really interesting descriptions all throughout history. They kind of started to solve this problem maybe like a few decades ago in the recent 20th century. And so for like thousands of years, you hear these descriptions and read these descriptions of whole fields that were previously going to feed people that are grayed out because they've just been totally rusted over. from this fungus. So it's obviously really devastating, especially for subsistence farmers who need you know, everything that they can to survive. And it will also really destroy large portions of a field very quickly, especially when there's high humidity or high temperatures. And it does this all over the world. Even now, despite our best antifungal treatments, which are a lot better and also our rust-resistant

plant breeding schemes, because, you know, you can try to edit them. You are still seeing rust everywhere. And so historians have, I think this is really funny, historians have compared our fervor, which is unseen, but is happening today, this moment probably at the USDA, they're talking about rust, I'm sure. And they've compared that sort of effort at, like, the USDA and Monsanto and all of these companies as well to try to like rust-proof crops as basically the modern equivalent of robagalia, which I think is pretty funny. We just are trying to appease the rust god. Yes. That is what it's always about.

They actually talked in this Charles Mann audiobook about this Bayberry or bread campaign. So in the 1910s, American public health officials had kind of finally narrowed down that Bayberry, this common plant that was really popular in like front lawns. It's very decorative. That it was one of the main contributors to rest spread. And so they started this campaign where they literally. encouraged Americans all across the country to remove bayberry plants. The bayberry or bread was like get rid of these or don't eat wheat because it will all die. And they successfully removed 500 million bayberry plants.

And thanks in large part to the Boy Scouts of America, who I guess won some badges or however that works for digging up these bayberry plants and destroying them. I'm sure they got the badges for like knocking on the door and being like, have you heard that you should get rid of your bayberry plants? it, but I'm imagining just Legion Boy Scouts in the night with shovels. That's what I'm imagining as well. With their little scarves, just digging up the Bayberry plants. Yeah, that's what I prefer to imagine happened. It's reasonably, comparatively under control, but we definitely do still have some, like, Rust God fervor.

The other thing that I just wanted to say is that while I was on this very strange rest God rabbit hole, I found out that there were a lot of other agricultural festivals in Rome, all over the world, but in Rome. some fun ones. And so apparently, serialia was held in the honor of the grain god series, and that's where the word cereal comes from, which I think is really exciting. And, you know, they had ones for like the wine harvest and things like that. But basically, I guess this was just like a little journey to tell you that we should all remember forgotten festivals because the things that they were trying to vanquish are always ready to return. Wow. Don't don't

A powerful message. Thank you. Thank you to the rest, God. May we always appease him. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be right back. Hey, weirdos. Looking for awesome popular science merch? We've got you covered at popsye.threadlist.com.

Pick up t-shirts, notebooks, mugs, and other great swag with iconic vintage covers or modern designs. Plus, check out our podcast store and rep your favorite pop-size shows, like the weirdest thing I learned this week. All that and more at Popsize. threadless.com. That's P-O-P-S-C-I-threadless.com. Okay, we're back. And Claire, you have a story for us. Yes, I do. Last week, I was at the doctor. My appointment was a midday lunch appointment, 1230. As I sat down across from my doctor, we were getting started, she started sneezing quite a lot. And then she had to sneeze, but couldn't quite get it out. And so she was like, let me find a light. found a light, sneezed, and she was like, that always works, and then apologized a bunch

because she was sneezing again, and she said, sorry, I just ate lunch and had to get out my post-prandial sneezes. I was like, wow. Let's forget about my health issues and just talk about your far more interesting, weird sneeze habits. Because she is the coolest doctor, shout out to Dr. Kramer on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. we discussed sneezing for a bit. So she told me that her mom used to sneeze every day after dinner and that as she got older, she started to do the same,

sneeze after eating big meals. And that if she needs to sneeze, staring at some form of bright light is typically a full-proof method. Yeah, I have that too. What? That part is really common. The food thing I've never heard of them. But if you look at a bright light, it will help you sneeze.

Yeah, I actually, when I was little, I thought that that's what being allergic to sunlight meant, because any time I look at a bright light, I will sneeze. I mean, this isn't bright enough. I'm staring at a light, for those of you at home. It's not bright enough. But if the sun is out and I look directly into the sun, I will sneeze. That's amazing.

I'm so jealous. But yeah, no, I've never heard of the food one. I think that is less common. I've got a lot to tell you about it. So first off, typically we sneeze because of some sort of irritation in our nasal passages. So our nasal nerves get irritated. This all leads to a sneeze. which I found out is called a sternutation in medical literature.

That's what I call it. Which literally translates to the act of sneezing. So things like pollen and other outside irritants are common causes and other things like allergies to foods can also trigger you to sneeze. But there are other ways, as Rachel just mentioned, she has, namely staring at light and then also eating a normal to large sized meal. You might have heard of sneezing when you stare at a light. Sunlight in particular, it's not common, but it's not entirely. uncommon either called the photosnease reflex effect or wait for it a chew autosomal dominant compulsive heliophthalmic outbursts of sneezing syndrome oh wow that's like some NASA level

it is exactly like the name implies a simple autosomal dominant genetic disorder we've known about the photos sneeze reflex for over 30 years in fact if you take a 23 and me test it will tell you if you have it or not. Wow. It did? It did? It had me figured out. I get it from my dad.

That's so exciting. We're both so enthusiastic right now. We're just grinning. So for anyone from 25% of the population with this dominant trait, sudden bright light can trigger an onset of sneezes. And as it turns out, which I'm curious to hear, Rachel, the number of subsequent sneezes can be predicted by what older generations in that person's family had. So, for example, if your mom had sneezed three times from the sun, then you

probably will sneeze three times as well. You're kidding. That's really interesting and I've never thought about it. I tend to sneeze. You know what? I've never really paid attention to how much I sneeze when I look at the sun and I've certainly paid even less attention to how much my dad sneezes when he looks at the sun. But now I'm definitely going to start counting. Yes, we'll do a Popsai investigation. Yeah, I'm actually going to see my dad tomorrow. So if the sun's out, I'll let you guys know what happens. Yes, please. And perhaps video it for content. Indeed. So that is sun sneezing. It's funny, relatively common, almost always benign, and gets talked about a decent amount in the media.

But for the rest of the podcast, I'm going to talk about Sun Sneasing's strange cousin, post-prandial sneezing. This is also caused by a single autosomal dominant gene, and it's characterized by episodes of sneezing triggered by a full stomach. So prandial means related to food or eating, and post is, of course, after. So after eating sneezing. To the best of my PubMed research abilities, the instance was first reported in the 1989 study in the Journal of Medical Genetics entitled Autosomal Dominant Sneezing Disorder provoked by fullness of stomach. The article began mentioning the fact that at a 1978 birth defects meeting, four physicians had mentioned groups of families who sneeze from the sun and that that was perhaps an inherited condition. At the time, sun sneezing was not as popular as it is now. Well, he writes, I think I've got another one.

We report a documented family history of another sneezing disorder similarly transmitted in an autosomal dominant manner but provoked by fullness of the stomach. In the index subject, who is a phenotypically normal, 32-year-old man, fullness of the stomach immediately after meals, invariable results in three or four uncontrollable sneezes. This phenomenon is also present in his three brothers, one of his two sisters, his father, and uncle and his son and the grandfather. The index subject became curious when his daughter started to show the phenomenon at the age of one years old, and he mentioned it at one of his appointments with us

that was unrelated to sneezing. The stomach sneeze reflex in this family has no relation to the type of food and occurs only when the stomach is full to the extent that no more food can be eaten. There are usually three to four sneezes, but maybe as many as 15 consecutive sneezes, He concludes, we learned a further three sporadic cases.

We hope that further studies will clarify how many of us sneeze uncontrollably after heavy meals and why. Wow. Yeah. 15 sneezes is... That's extensive. Yeah, I don't think I've ever sneezed 15 times in a row, to be honest. Okay. I can't look at a sun or eat a huge of meals.

I don't know how I'm going to do it. I'm going to go to the Westminster Dog Show and report back. It's hard to say how the rest of the medical community took to the news of this new condition, but one comment on the paper might hint at a positive vindicating response. Quote, I read with greatest delight this report, and he goes on with his enthusiasm for the condition. I would like to suggest that a catchy acronym may hasten the process of reporting other families, although he acknowledges it hasn't really helped in a choose much. Therefore, I propose the newly described condition be called the snatiation reflex,

a combination of sneezing and satiation and easily remembered by the acronym handle of sneezing, non-controllably, at a tune of indulgence of the appetite, a trait inherited and ordained to be named. Because that's not a stretch at all. Snecacious. Well. Furthermore, he writes, the mechanisms involved in producing the sneezes in both the achute, and snatiation reflexes are totally unknown. Are there other inherited sneezing reflexes?

Time to get busy surveying friends, relatives, family, clinical personnel, exclamation point. Strangers on the subway. End of common, yes. Though it is a little more well-known now, researchers have still not completely identified the exact mechanisms at play, nor how many folks actually have snatiation. Some think it happens because the act of eating initiates a person's parasympathetic nervous system, which controls digesting food. This might trigger the sneezing area, too, which is nearby in the brainstem, but that's

all we really know for now. Wow. There's more. Apparently, though, for some people, it's actually extremely bothersome. So the Wall Street Journal reported a super interesting story on snation back in 2013 called Thanksgiving satiation can lead to sneezing for those with snatiation, which reported that among those who have snatiation, Thanksgiving appears to be an unusually bad time of year for it.

Quote, one of us starts sneezing and then another starts sneezing and sometimes two of us start sneezing at the same time, says Ms. Kitterman, a 30-year-old restaurant manager at a retirement community in Branton, Florida, eventually fathers and daughters sneeze it out. Another woman says that she sneezes up to 20 times if she eats too much or too quickly, prompting her to pace her intake. At Thanksgiving, she will eat the stuffing and only a minuscule serving of meat if she eats too much, She says the sneezing will force her to skip dessert. For another person, I have that.

No. Priorities, guys. For Mr. Pultz, a few spoonfuls of chocolate pudding are enough to set off, quote-unquote, whole-body-earth-shaking sneezes. That's not being full. I don't know. If you're full from a few spoonfuls of chocolate pudding. Maybe you're just allergic to chocolate pudding. Something's going on.

However, for some with snatiation, they aren't bothered by it at all. Given that many suffers professed to enjoy the carthartic sinus clearing effect of a sneezing bout, snatiation might not be a problem. Some people, this woman says, have a cigarette after eating, and we just have a sneeze. Oh, my God. Oh, gosh, the sinus cleansing ritual of a sneeze. Yes. I've never thought of it that way before. Are there people who never sneeze?

I was just going to say that I am able to hold in a sneeze whenever applicable. Wow. Wow. Yes. That's like a superpower. I can't even imagine. That's incredible. I just tell myself to like take a deep breath and then the sneeze just goes away. It evaporates.

Wow. That's some strength of will. What if they all come back at the same time? One day you're just going to sneeze for 48 hours. Today I managed to keep my mouth shut as a sneeze came on because I had just popped a Zyrtec, ironically. And I was really proud of myself because it was really difficult to not sneeze and shit. across the room. So yeah, I do not have the ability to hold in sneezes. I can make myself sneeze by looking at light.

I can make myself burp whenever I want to. Dang, Rachel. That's all I've got. Yeah, I think I'm just jealous. But at my doctor's episode, in my head, I was like, why isn't she just stopped sneezing? She's not that difficult. But apparently it is. Yeah.

Oh, two ends of the spectrum right here. I fall completely in the middle. I think I'm a really average sneezer. As sad as that is. What do we think the weirdest thing we learned this week was? I vote for sneezing. Yeah, I'm pretty shocked. Yeah, I'm surprised at how surprised I am.

Right. Which is the hallmark of a great weirdest thing. Definitely. Congratulations, Claire. Incubations. Yeah, also wild. It's wild. But also very American.

Yes, so true. Americana at its finest. Crowdfunded health care. Uginics. Sides. Chicago. America. Hot dogs.

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