The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The Sweetest Butts, Flaming Birds, The U.S. vs. 40 Barrels and 20 Kegs of Coca-Cola

Episode Date: January 23, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from the sweetest smelling butts to birds that were used as candles. 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 on social media: www.facebook.com/groups/theweirdestthing www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Learn more about all of our stories: https://www.popsci.com/weird Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Corinne Iozzio: www.twitter.com/corinneiozo 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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This is beaver butt juice flavoring. And you had an issue with that? 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 Learn This Week, a podcast from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feldman.

I'm Corinna Iosio. I'm Claire Maldorelli. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering a tease of some kind of story we found while reading, writing, reporting, editing, being fascinating people who work for Popular Science Magazine. And we 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.

Corinne, since you're our guest, why don't you start with your teas? Oh, such a wonderful hostess. I want to talk about what may be the sweetest smelling butt in all the land. Wow. Oh. Wow. What a superlative. Claire.

There was a lawsuit in 1916 called the United States versus 40 barrels and 20 kegs of Coca-Cola. I feel like this is just going to make me want a soda really badly. All right. So mine is about flaming birds. Birds aflame. Birds of flame. Birds of flame.

That's it. Is Rachel confusing Monty Python first, like actual facts? It wouldn't be the first time. I want to hear about sweet smelling butts. I know my audience. If I had any soul. Okay. So I'm going to start.

by reading the two of you a description of a bourbon from a distillery in New Hampshire called the Tamworth Distillery. It's called Eude de Musk. It was a limited edition released in 2018, and this is the tasting note. Dry, smoky spice with fleeting hints of fresh cracked bows and mint that open up to reveal rustic sweet sensations of wet hay, vanilla, wood sugar, and saddle lever interspersed by waves of red fruit. I can never taste all that. I can never taste all that either. And you and I actually tasted this whiskey. Right.

I remember that. It was good, but I tasted none of that. I tasted none of the special things that I'm sure whiskey supertasters can taste. It was nice. Generally speaking, like none of this sounds particularly unique, right? These are all flavors that we hear associated with, you know, a fine bourbon, a nice sipping whiskey. The way that bourbon whiskey specifically is made and stored requires that.

it be stored in brand new charred wood barrels. And the char on the wood actually naturally creates a vanilla-e spicy kind of note. The reason that Rachel and I tasted this whiskey, though, is because that's not the only place that the Ud-Musk gets its vanilla-iness from. It gets it primarily from a substance called castorium, which is a secretion from a gland on a beaver's butt. Oh boy. Beaver butts.

So it's a creamy brownish, orangish substance. Oh, God, that makes it so much worse. I assumed it was like clear and oilyish. No, you buy the whole gland. You buy it dried. And the perineum, right, is, you know, south of the genitals, north of the b***. Right?

So that's where these glands are on beavers. And beaver trappers, they have special instructions on how to remove them. And yeah, in this instance, the castorium was used to flavor the whiskey. Now, I didn't end up reading about this whiskey and then find out about custodium. Custorium has been on my mind for a very long time because every now and again, some celebrity chef or some food blogger will set the internet on fire by saying, oh, you know, the flavor in your vanilla ice cream, that's actually beaver butter. Right, yeah. It permeated the culture. It got to me.

It got to the point where I was checking the ingredients. on things. But the trick is is that the word custodium isn't listed in ingredients for vanilla flavored stuff. Is it a natural flavoring? It is listed as natural vanilla flavor because it is a naturally derived flavor.

So you can get real vanilla, right? Which, you know, you get from a vanilla bean in Madagascar primarily. You can get a synthetic vanilla or you can get a natural vanilla. But the trick of it is is that like these food bloggers and all of the internet fury gets you

convinced that all the natural vanilla that isn't real vanilla is, you know. Is beaver butt? Is it, is it all butt stuff? It's not all butt stuff. There's a couple problems with this. First of all, as we established, not the butt. Second of all, not actually juice. The thing that that trappers sell to people that is used as flavoring is kind of a dried,

oily, clay-like, clotty thing. Okay, so not juice. Worse than juice. Worse than juice. but, you know, okay, not juice. Got it. I'm wondering how much one of these go for? How much a gland?

Yeah. I know the price for a gram. You can get two grams on Etsy for $15. $15. So I wonder how many grams are in a gland. I don't know. I don't know. I think about like a gland that can fit near a beaver butt.

Yeah. They're like, I mean, they really, they look like testes, which we'll talk about more later. Because there was a lot of misunderstandings throughout history about what exactly these things were on the beaver and what they were for. So the other thing that's wrong with all of this internet fury is that people aren't really doing this a lot anymore. Like Tamworth is sort of at the forefront of a little bit of a resurgence, like a snout

to tail kind of if we're going to kill a beaver, we're going to use the whole beaver. And, you know, maybe this part is especially delicious. But it's not really a food additive that people use a lot anymore. That's a shame. Isn't it? I mean, it's delicious. I completely support the snout-to-tail movement if you're going to kill it. Like, you know, beavers have...

Use the whole thing. Use the whole damn thing. I talked to the trapper that Tamworth Distillery worked with to get their castorium. And he's like... And he told me that beaver is actually quite delicious. It's sort of like a giant steak tip. It doesn't taste a gamey, like venison or moose. But all of this begs the question.

Like, how did we even start doing this to begin with? Like, when did people... Yeah. Who realized like, oh, this gland is... Tastes good and smells good. Let me use it in multiple flavorings. Yeah, somebody had to be like going and blind eating beaver butt. So the unfortunate thing is I couldn't actually figure out when somebody figured out that beaver butts smell great.

You know, and what the gland is actually for, right? It's for marking territory, which is what most animals do. It also, because it's a little bit oily, helps the beaver with its waterproofingness. Because obviously they live in streams and lakes and things like that. It doesn't actually have any of the vanillin, which is the vanilla flavoring that people make synthetically. it doesn't have any of that in it. The best that ecologists have gotten to so far is that it's from their diet. They're eating like birch bark and things like that, which has that lovely smell.

We don't know who first lifted up a beaver's tail and said, because I wouldn't admit it. Well, people have been using custodium for all kinds of stuff for thousands of years. So before we had it in food, which we did a little bit at the turn of the 20th century and in perfume, which we'll talk about later, people used it for medicinal purposes. Oh, boy. All the way back to Greeks and Romans, Roman women would burn castorium candles because they thought it would induce abortions. Didn't.

There was a monk who would take powdered dry castorium and mull it in wine to cure headaches, which kind of makes a little bit of sense because there is a compound in there that is the same compound that's the active ingredient in aspirin. Oh, cool. And people were really, really into the medicinal properties to the point where in the old world, you know, in France and Germany and then eventually in the new world and up through Scandinavia, people were hunting beaver not just for the peltz. They wanted the cisterium. They wanted it for its medicinal properties. There was all of this lore. Like it's even written into an Aesop fable. Wow.

This is a story of a beaver that was running from hunting dogs. And the beaver being wise bites off its own testes and then throws them back at the dog because it's a story. It knows. The testicles. Yes. Yes. But the notion of the fable is that the beaver is very wise because it knows that if it sacrifices this one thing, it can spare its life. Would that we were all so smart.

Wow. Wow. You know, there were times when people were using it as a food additive. There are old recipes that I found about it being baked into samosas, which kind of sounds super yummy. Like a little vanilla beaver but donut. But people didn't really start using it as a food additive until the turn of the 20th century when flavor science really became a big deal. And they started diving into all of the things that perfumers were using to create their scents. And perfumers were particularly attracted to it because if it's oily

nature, it actually serves as what's called a fixer in a perfume, which is something that helps all of the other smells stay around longer, in addition to having its own, you know, lovely sweet odoriferousness. In the mid-20th century, it was in beverages and baked goods and chewing gum. And people started also putting it into tobacco for flavor, which is something that they actually borrowed from the Native Americans who used to roll muskrat and beaver gland dried bits into their tobacco is a thing called kinnik-knik. I feel like this is going to turn into like a new superfood if it gets out to like the internet world. I mean, like I said, it's staging a bit of a comeback. It fell out of favor. The last good numbers that we have are from the 80s. We're talking like

300 pounds of custodium a year and compare that to like over two million pounds of natural vanilla in which you get from fermenting corn and other things like that to get that sweet smell. It also means that we've got a lot of beavers. And beavers make all kinds of problems. So trappers like the guy who works for Tamworth are super duper busy. But what they've actually been finding is that the price of the custodium has been starting to go up a lot. And so naturally I was like, well, what the heck is going on?

what's going on there? I don't understand. It's not just all of these small craft brewers and distillers, like brewing it into their libations, right? It's got to be something else. We're looking at, I think it was two years ago, one pound of custodium was $55. Now it's $73 to $75. And a beaver pelt, the price is dropping. Like, people want the butt. Who's snatching up all these beaver butts? So the best I can figure, I can't find really good numbers. But my thought is that, it has to be tobacco or something very close to the vaping culture as much as we load it. I did find some e-juices from years past. Some of them discontinued. Some of them still active. One of them was called beaver but buggy.

Wow. So that could also be what's going on here. But I don't know. I think I'm with Claire. I want it to stage a comeback anyway. And I also kind of want to taste beaver just generally. Because the idea of a 40-pound steak tip is extremely appealing. I just want to go to like a smoothie shop and have like them display like this contains beaver butt juice as like a signal of pride. Yeah. And it's like, oh, $5 more for a squirt of juice.

Oh, like in the pompous. Yeah, I definitely, every time I've heard about the beaver butt juice, I definitely thought it was like milked from the gland of a living. There is a woman at Southern Illinois State. University who has actually successfully milked a beaver, but you have to knock it out. It's really, really terrible. It's like if you ever have to take a

cat to get its teeth cleaned, it just has to be fully anesthetized. So yeah, nobody's squeezing a live beaver butt. Not milk in the beaver butt. It sounds horribly unpleasant. Apparently, when they make the secretion in the wild, it's loud too. I tried to find some audio.

Like a shart? Yes. Sounds painful. It is 100%. The beaver just... Vanilla shart. Yes. vanilla raspberry. Thank you.

Well, I don't think we can top that before the break. Top a sweet smell and shart. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. And I'm going to talk about another oily animal, some very oily birds, some very oily birds that are on fire or were up until the end of the 1800s. Until the end of the 1800s, sailors in Scotland's workney and Shetland Islands often lit their way through dark nights by shoving wicks into dead birds, just like a bird would hold a bird and I would have a wick in it. Like a torch? Yeah, or a candle, like a bird candle where the wax part is the bird.

Claire looks on the verge of tears. Poor birds. You all rest in peace. It's not as wild as it sounds because an oil lamp is just some kind of wick suspended in an oily or fatty substance that will burn when the wick is lit. Stormy Petrels, the similarity to the word Petroleum, by the way, is totally coincidental. Their name either comes from St. Peter or is a mangled form of an old English expression that we don't use anymore. But they were these still arc, these fat little birds that produce oil in their digestive

tracks. They eat really fatty diets. They spend most of their lives at sea, and they have to fly really long distances over the ocean for mating and nesting. So it seems like they store a bunch of oil in their stomachs as a more ready source of energy than their actual fat stores. And in this way, a stony petrol isn't so unlike a bowl of oil. It's just its tummy as a bowl of oil. It's just a fleshy bowl of oil. Right. And sailors took advantage by treating them as such. And you can find some of them preserved in museums. I will have some pictures on popsye.com. It looks like a taxidermy bird with just a wick coming out of its mouth. So they snake it down? Yes. They would cover them in tar to make them stiff enough to go down. And they would

just be like down the hatch, light them up, and it would burn like any sort of primitive oil lamp. Obviously, it was around 125,000 BC that we started using fire, according to our best records. And then around 70,000 BC, we started carrying around rocks and shells full of like moss or similar material, and they would be soaked in animal fat. Oil lamps came around in 4500 BC. Candles were invented in 3,000 BC. But from then, until, like the 1700s, oil lamps were truly just bowls of oil with wicks in them. So, again, bird, same thing. And most sailors probably didn't feel too bad about it because stormy petrol's tendency

to show up and freak out before storms, hence the name, made a lot of seafarers think they were like bad omens or even brought the bad weather. Some people called them devil birds. So they were like really taking their revenge on these birds. Yeah, they were like, take that. So the birds would flock to the ship pretty frequently. They were common visitors of men at sea. So they were just like, grab a few, light them up.

This made me think about what life was like before we had relatively convenient indoor lighting. I'm not even talking about electric lights, which obviously totally changed the way we live our lives. But again, looking at the history of oil lamps and candles, we had this span of thousands of years where, the technology didn't change very much. You still just had either a candle or like bowl of oil. It wasn't until the 1700s that people started like making lamps that could sit in a nice place. And have that nice little control knob. Cren could see what I was doing.

We're both miming. Because for radio land people, we're miming that little twisting thing with your right. Well, they were probably like, who needs that when I have this bird that I can dust light on fire. Exactly. But can you make it be more. or less on fire at your bidding. So I was looking into the history of darkness and light. And so even when you get into the 1700s, 1800s, in places where candles were more popular

than oil lamps, they were still really distinguished by class. Like only rich people had nice beeswax candles or spermaceti, which is the wax extracted from the head cavities of sperm whales. They went wild for that spermaceti. Middle class people had these like stinky, smoky animal fat candles. And the poorest people just had wooden reeds. dipped in fat, which is frankly, like, you might as well use a bird at that point. It's, it's garbage. So that got me thinking about how people live differently when there was just a

lack of reliable light, when most people just had these candles made of globs of animal fat, and you weren't going to stink up and smoke up your house most of the time. And I found this one article by John Henley and the Guardian. And it noted that in Sweden, it was common practice to move all your furniture up against the walls before bed so you wouldn't knock into it while getting up to pee in the middle of the night. So they would literally just clear the floors, which is really funny to me for some reason. The most fascinating thing about this period that I found is the concept of segmented sleep. Claire, do you know what segmented sleep is? I just feel like I've had segmented sleep lately. I think that's all I have. Yeah. So interesting note, that may be the most natural way for

humans to sleep. Is this like a bunch of catnaps? Not quite. Scholars have found, oh, wait, I think I know, but I'm going to listen to Rachel. So scholars have found hundreds of references through history to first sleep and second sleep. And this is basically people would go to sleep right after eating dinner as they were losing light. They would wake up at like midnight and enjoy a couple hours of being awake. And I had heard of this before, but I had always assumed. that people got up and just did work, just did tasks that they had been able to complete during the day. I didn't think it was like a fun time in the middle of the night. But according to this article in The Guardian and some books on the subject by historians, people were really social. They

went to visit each other at midnight and had fun times. There was one medical paper in the 16th century that actually claimed that couples were more likely to conceive if they tried between the first and second sleep. The reason was probably because a lot of these people had lives and involved a lot of manual labor. Even if you weren't doing manual labor for your livelihood, everyday life involved a lot more like walking and climbing stairs and cranking things and everything was just a little bit harder unless you were super, super rich. And so people were tired all the time, not unlike today, but they would go to sleep right after dinner and this time between first sleep and second sleep, they would have energy, unlike when they came home from their farms, their factory jobs, whatever,

and just wanted to eat and fall into bed. So this period between first and second sleep was when all the fun stuff happened, like having sex, apparently, but also visiting friends and, you know, doing creative work and also finishing tasks that you had not been able to do during the day. And there's been some research suggesting that if you take away all modern day cycle cues, and you just have people having a very natural dark light cycle, that they'll start to fall into this pattern of segmented sleep. They'll go to sleep earlier than they normally would,

and they'll wake up and be up for a while and then go back to sleep. Some people believe that this is actually the healthy way that humans evolved to sleep and advocate for doing it in the modern world, which I was really fascinated by when I first read it, I was like, oh my God, this is how I'm going to live my life. It makes so much sense to me. That's what I'm thinking right now. I know.

I just love the idea of being well-rested at midnight and spending two hours writing and then going back to sleep. I mean, I think I've done this accidentally. Yes. On multiple occasions. I think maybe it's why we all get super sleepy after we eat a big meal, right? It's like, this is what my body wants to do. And it happens. We just came off of, you know, the end of your break where everybody's schedules were completely wonky.

And everybody was, at least I was letting my body do whatever the hell. hell it wanted to do whenever it wanted to do it. And that required a lot of like sleeping right after dinner. And then I was awake in the middle of the night. Yeah, exactly. If I let myself go to bed every night when I was first tired enough to do it, I would wake up at 1 a.m. And so yes, I was briefly very tempted to just convert my sleep cycle to this. But then I was like, what about when people want to get dinner with me at 8 p.m? That's my sleeping. That's my first sleeping time. Yeah, sorry. What are you doing between first and second sleep? That's when we can really party.

That's what I'm available. I'm also thinking more like if you want to eat, we can do it like blue plate special time, like right straight from work. It's a way of save money as well. But yeah, I think, you know, more and more as we try to figure out ways to like undo the damage of modern life and all of our screen time and our messed up circadian rhythm and our work schedules that are killing us as we have written about several times in Popular Science Magazine.

You know, I think there more and more there are people who are like, you know, to hell with social convention. I am going to have a segmented sleep schedule and you can come hang out with me at midnight if you want. And if not, good day to you, sir. So I think we're going to see more and worth of this as the information becomes more widely available and more widely shared and as people continue to do research on this stuff because we know so little about it.

Kind of similar to like intermittent fasting. It's becoming more and more common, at least in the media. world, which is maybe a little isolated in this regard. But it's, it's becoming a lot more common in certain circles for people to be like, no, I can't have a social meal with you at that time because that is not a time in the day during which I eat. So I feel like that's going to be happening more and more with sleep, too, as we try to fix our broken selves. One thing I don't think we'll be seeing more of is bird candles. Candles shaped like birds, though, maybe. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Any day. I'm totally finding you a candle that's shaped like this bird. I'm going

have one made. Amazing. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back for one more fact. Hey, weirdos. Looking for awesome popular science merch? We've got you covered at popsye.spreadlist.com. Pick up t-shirts, notebooks, tote bags, mugs, and other great swag with iconic vintage covers or modern designs. Plus, check out our podcast store and rep your favorite pop-sai shows like the weirdest thing I learned this week. All that and more at popsye.threadlist.com. That's P-O-P-S-C-I-threadlist.com. And we're back, and Claire is going to tell us about what 40 barrels and 20 kegs of Coca-Cola did to the United States.

Yes. So speaking of sleep and waking up at multiple times of the day, one of my goals for the week off that I took between Christmas and New Year's this year was to go cold turkey on caffeine, which I told Corinne about before, so that I would have, you know, accountability, but it didn't happen. Yeah, it didn't go. so well, Claire. That failed because my mom makes really good coffee in our house. It's like box-like and small and it makes the whole house smell like coffee and I was like, I'm tired. I'm going to drink

the coffee. Anyway, so I failed to do that and restarted work last week and was like, well, I need more caffeine to energize myself. And so it was really late at night and I was hyped because of all caffeine and so I was researching how we came to know that caffeine is indeed an addictive substance and I came across this lawsuit titled the United States versus 40 barrels and 20 kegs of Coca-Cola and I was like what does this have to do with caffeine but I'm going to find out it's just so bizarre that they sued the specific barrels not the people who made that correct a good question we're going to make those barrels pay some nerve so it all started in 1906 and Congress at the time had just passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the creation

of the Food and Drug Administration, better known as the FDA. And this prominent American chemist named Harvey, Washington, Wiley, was quickly appointed to head the FDA. And it seems that Wiley had a little bit of a vendetta against caffeine and simultaneously Coca-Cola. And he was like, I'm going to use this new power of mine to take down both caffeine. caffeine and Coca-Cola. Part of the newly minted FDA's job was to warn and prosecute companies, which were making

misleading claims about their products. So if they didn't say that something had something that was detrimental to human health, then they were trying to crack down on these companies. Coca-Cola had long dropped its trace amounts of cocaine from its top secret formula, but it still contained caffeine, which, as we know, Wiley hated. So his biggest concern, and for good reason, was that these products were being marketed not only to adults but to children often as young as four years old, he claimed. And we don't know enough about the potentially toxic effects of caffeine to say it's okay

to market these to anybody, but particularly to children. Coca-Cola claimed that its signature drink invigorated the fatigued body and quickened the tired brain. But Wiley, on the other hand, saw caffeine as a poisonous and habit-forming drug. Both are true. Yes. He thought the same about coffee and tea, but to him, those had natural amounts of caffeine, whereas Coca-Cola was literally adding this terrible stuff to its beverage and then selling it to kids. How terrible. So by Wiley's doing on October 20, 1909, the U.S. government agents waited in Tennessee right on the border as a Coca-Cola truck coming from Atlanta to a bottling plant in Chattanooga was traveling, and upon arrival, they seized what was inside, which was.

40 barrels and 20 kegs of Coca-Cola syrup. I don't know if I want to make a smoky in the bandit joke or like a drug-running joke, but there's something going on in that neighborhood. So the goal was to name the food itself as the subject of the case and to keep the company only in it directly to say, look, this food contains stuff that's terrible for you and we are marketing it to children. So they had to seize it.

Once they did, there was a child to come ahead because the U.S. government sued this product. And so Coca-Cola was preparing for their trial, and their lawyers realized after doing some lit searches that the only research on the effects of caffeine were done on animals, nothing was done on humans. And so they were like, oh, shit. So they looked around for all these scientists

who would be willing to take Coca-Cola's money and look into the effects and potentially say that they're not that bad, which is, as we all know, not the greatest form of science to do. But they did find this one guy named Harry Hollingworth, who was then a Barnard instructor, not a professor, who really needed the money, as the story goes. So he completed a series of three studies in 40 days,

because they were on a limited time, from a Manhattan apartment rented solely for that purpose. But as it turns out, as many scientists over the years have said, these studies were so incredibly well designed and well done that they're still cited today. Really? Yes. His studies showed that Coca-Cola appeared to be a mild stimulant both for motor and cognitive performance and that he found no evidence of deleterious effects on both mental and motor performance,

which is what the government had brought the company to court for. The case was first dismissed, but eventually brought back to the Supreme Court in 1916, where Coca-Cola lost, so they were forced to reduce the amount of capital. caffeine in their beverage and pay the government the court costs as a settlement. Now, the settlement was accepted because, as it turned out, Wiley had resigned that year for other reasons, and everyone else was like, I have no vendetta against Coca-Cola or caffeine, so this sounds great to me. So moral of the story, that was the first big studies that they did on figuring out that

in normal doses, caffeine actually does stimulate our cognitive performance and how. no deleterious effects to our health. Except the shakes. Except the shakes. Do you guys remember in like the 90s and the 80s, there were these big pushes for super caffeinated sodas like jolt cola? Right. And there was a, I think it was another Coca-Cola product called Surge.

I remember, yeah, surge. There's like Pepsi Max. I think Pepsi Max still exists. And Mountain Dew has a, has so much caffeine. You know what else? has a ton of caffeine in it, sunkissed. I was drinking a diet sunkist, which I love. I accept no judgment.

And I always assume that flavored sodas don't have any caffeine. An intern years ago was sitting next to me when I was drinking this diet sunkiss and she said, oh, are you really tired? And I said, no, I just like orange soda. What are you talking about? And she said, there's a buttload of caffeine in that. I used to drink it instead of coffee when I needed to stay up and study. Wow.

Did it say the amount of caffeine in there because a law that can. out after all of this said that first you have to put that it contains caffeine and that it's added. And then for some drinks, but not all drinks, you have to say how much caffeine is in there. I don't have a distinct memory of seeing it on there. It was definitely in the ingredients list when I looked and I was shocked and appalled. Wow. Another awesome food safety story. And what an intriguing lawsuit. Who do we think one this week? What was the weirdest thing we learned? Beefer butts were very strange. Yeah, I'm going to say beaver butts. I was going to vote for the bird candles, but I will accept your nomination.

Beaver butts. Beaver butts. Right. But stuff wins again. Whiskey and Coke. Let's go have some. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms.

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