The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Tying Up Penises, Dimple-Making Machines, Exotic Poop For Sale

Episode Date: December 4, 2019

Ellen Airhart, host of the podcast Plant Crimes, joins us this week as a guest host! The weirdest things we learned ranged from Williams-Sonoma selling Bronx Zoo poo to a jaunty foreskin trend. 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!  If you want to see us in your town, click here to take our listener survey! Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- 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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That's code Weirdest for 20% off. 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 says, on line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. 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 sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Eleanor Cummins. And I'm Ellen Earhart.

Ellen is a former pop-thi intern and contributor and the host of a really awesome podcast. Do you want to talk about your show real quick, Ellen? I am the host of the podcast Plant Crimes, where we investigate a different crime each week that has been committed by, against, or observed by plants. So yeah. I love it. It's such a good premise. The best. Ellen is really my.

go-to plant expert. So I feel like houseplants and true crime is really just a perfect intersection of everyone's interests these days. So yeah, everybody should check it out. But this is not plant crimes. This is the weirdest thing I learned this week. And on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, investigating plant crimes, 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. Eleanor, what's your teeth? I would like to talk about how you can make a dimple in your face.

I love it. It involves pain. I didn't know it was possible. I'm creeped out. My mom is an OBJAN and she, one of her like go-to stories about a patient is that once somebody was like, we'd like them to have a dimple. And it's because they thought that the doctors just, like, had a device that they used when the baby came out. Oh, my God. Is there, were the patients correct? They were not correct, but other people have had similar goals. Okay.

I see. I love that idea, though, that, like, maybe a baby's just squishy enough that it pops out and you poke it in the cheek. It's like a warm cookie. Yes, exactly. No, we will get into it, but that is not the case. Okay, great. relieved. My fact is about something jaunty that ancient Roman and Greek men sometimes did with their genitals. Oh, I'm excited. They were two, though not physically. So this sounds like the

writer's meeting for Call Me About Your Name. Wonderful. Ellen, what's your tease? The Bronx Sue sold animal poop called Zoodoo to Williams and Sonoma in 1985. Williams and Sonoma. Wow. Fascinating. Our cookie situation has come full circle. Soft and warm like a turd cookie. Oh, my God.

Ew. Okay. All right. Great. What do we want to start with? Genitals. Okay. I always would love to start with genitals.

Great. So I'm going to set the scene with this famous statue called Boxer at Rest. It's considered Hellenistic Bronze masterpiece. And it's really astounding. I don't have a picture of it with me because it's not the focal point of this story, but we will have some on Popside.com. From some time from like 330 to 50 BC, totally made of bronze, but it's like hyper-realistic. It's a boxer. He's wearing his boxing gloves.

And he has cauliflower ears, which is for people who don't know, that's when you get a bunch of blunt trauma to your ears. Common in boxing and wrestling, obviously, it leads to fluid buildup that then disrupts, like, the typical connection of cartilage and causes unusual cartilage to grow. So you have these kind of like bulbous deformities in your ears. So, yeah, and he has like a broken nose and teeth. He's, like, sweating and bleeding. He looks like he just turned his head in a very, like, exonial. dusted man with traumatic brain injury going like, huh? It's amazing, all made of bronze, who would have thought?

But there's something else about him that really sets him in a particular period in time and showcases him as an athlete. And that's that his penis is tied up. Like how? Well, I'll get into that, Eleanor. Oh, no. So, typically, for people with penises, the foreskin, which is, is, you know, a separate part of the penis from the glance is, you know, the skin that

covers the glands of the penis, and usually in youth it completely covers it. So it actually, you know, extends past the flaccid glands, protective covering. There's, like, actually like a mucus membrane in there, kind of like an eyelid. So Eleanor's repulsed. Whoa. Has never considered. I've never heard of penis compared to an eyelid. That is true. Apparently it is, it is like a common comparison that I was unaware of until today. That extension past the glands of the penis is like less so in youth. Obviously, genitals vary widely and, you know, penises and foreskins come in all shapes and varieties and sizes, but in general, young child, you're going to have the part of the penis that we would really consider the penis being the glands is going to be covered by this foreskin.

And then less and less so as you grow up. Wow. But the thing is that the ancient Greeks associated a nice long foreskin with male beauty. They would talk about it in the same breath as like the buttocks. Yeah, what's the word? They'd be like, it's like a purely ornamental thing. That's just like, you know, just a gift from God. A nice, a nice beautiful ornamental foreskin on a man. And they actually had a word specifically for like the tapered portion that extended beyond the glands. That kind of. the like shrively bit because that was what they really. It was called the shrively bit. I didn't write it down because I couldn't pronounce it. So it's like shrively bit, but said like Spanacopera. But because that was like what was desirable having this like extension of the foreskin past the glands.

When we had Jen Gunter on to talk about her book, The Vagina Bible, she mentioned one of the other things she'd learned while writing was that, like, the reason so many classical statues have tiny penises is because that was actually the aesthetic ideal. This is, in fact, true. And it often was, like, a smaller penis was easier for you to, like, control the urges of. And having a large penis was associated with being, like, lewd and barbaric. So they were, like, you know, it should be demure. It should be barely seen and never heard.

And that was the ideal male sense organ. And it's very interesting because it's very different from ideals today. You wanted more foreskin than penis, if you could, and as little as possible of the combination of the two. Though I don't know. Maybe they would have been really into like a super tiny glands, like a really long foreskin. Unclear. But Eleanor is horrified. I'm sorry.

I'll keep along. It's like, okay, this should be cut, but I just, like, oh, my God. Like, I just want to know by the process by which they learn that, like, the barbarians could fuck, you know. They, like, had it all wrong. And human history was forever changed. Well, like, they knew that, like, they could f***. Yeah. And they were, like, gross.

I mean, oh, my God. The ancient Greeks were all about, like, I mean, the reason there was so much homosexual activity that was not. considered like part of your identity, like you weren't gay or straight. It was just assumed that men would pal around with each other in a way that included sex because they were like, how could you possibly relate to a woman on an emotional level? So like clearly you need to bone with your dude friends if you want to like connect. They were like misogynistic sapio-sexuals. Right. Yeah. The original. Similarly, the review of sex. was very much like you should be in complete mental control of like when and how you wanted

to do it. So they weren't really, it didn't appeal to them to think of like virile, succumbed men just like ready to fuck at any moment. To them that was like, gross. You'll see artwork where like barbaric characters are pictured with. very, like, grotesque takes on circumcised penises, like showing the exposed glands of the penis as being, like, as bulbous and disgusting as possible. And they often would paint the Egyptians this way and really actually had a specific word for, like,

a circumcised penis that was then kind of synonymous with, like, a lewd, barbaric character. So the Hebrews and the Egyptians, the Greeks were very much like disgusting, repulsive, an aberration. And the thing is that, though, like I said, foreskins come in all shapes and sizes, as do the glands beneath them. And so the reality was that if you were walking around as an adult person with a penis and that penis was exposed, you might not be presenting the aesthetic ideal of a. a gland shriveled up inside a big wrinkly foreskid. And what was a man to do? The answer is something called a kind of desmi, I believe, which translates to dog leash. Oh my God. And so this was where you would take a thin leather thong or some other string. I saw some references to like strips of papyrus and glue instead of a leather tie. But you would wind it around the foreskin that

extended past the end of the glands and you would kind of like bunch it up at the top and tie it so that you could create a little a little like goody bag with the glands inside and you would fashion that shut and then you would usually like tie it in a bow or like tie it around your waist depending on there were all sorts of ways you could you could configure it but it was generally like They just kind of tucked it up and out of the way. And this was long associated with athletes because we see a lot of images of athletes, both in ancient Rome and in ancient Greece, who have this, like the boxer did in that bronze statue. I mentioned at the top of the show. But it was actually probably pretty widespread.

There are other images showing like old men at parties with the same kind of setup. And apparently now scholars think that like any man who had any shame who had a reason to be nude would do this lest he embarrass himself by having a naked penis. I just think this is a fascinating. Is it like a jockstrap? How does it? I guess. Well, and it was also like shots to the genitals in sport were seen much as they are today as a rude thing to do. So this was a way, if you were fighting naked, it was a way to keep things out of the way.

So it did have that kind of practical aspect in sport. But it really does seem to have been also an aesthetic thing, that it was like it was gross if the head of your penis might poke out from your four skids. You needed to prevent that at any cost. And in some cases, so I actually found out about this because I read that there was a rumor that Prince Albert piercing, which is a kind of genital piercing was so named because Victoria's husband had one. No, no evidence to support this may have been true. Victorians did pierce some things. They were not total prudes, as we have discussed on the show before. But the Prince Albert thing, probably a myth. He had like 10 children, just throwing it out there. But in reading about that, one of the things that came up was that like,

well, of course, you know, there were these genital piercings back in the day, you know, in ancient Rome and ancient Greece where they practiced infibulation, which is when a penis is involved, it's where you're piercing the foreskin and actually inserting a metal clasp to fasten it shut. It's been compared to like a large modern safety pin. And people did this like for their health, supposedly, or to preserve the voice, which I thought maybe it was like a castrati thing. But it was just because it was widely thought that if you ejaculate, it would be detrimental to the quality of your voice. So this was more like you were showing everyone that you were not masturbating and ruining your voice. It's also possible that the long-term goal was in fact to just stretch the foreskin so that it would more reliably cover the glands. And in fact, if you were born with a shorter foreskin,

it was advised that your wet nurse use honey and other topical treatments to like soften the skin or even stretch it and tie it to make it stretch out over time. Leave baby peens alone. Well, what's really interesting is that I was reading about this from someone who was putting it in historical context with circumcision. And the tone of the article is very much anti-circumcision. And I am not here to argue for or against circumcision.

I realize that it is a very complicated ethical issue. But what was really funny to me is that the person writing this academic paper seemed to have no sense that like stretching and tying the foreskins of infants was all. also not great. Oh, my God. But, yeah, and well, so apparently a lot of artists did, you know, wear the metal clasps as, like, part of their costume. I think this was in Rome in particular, where it was just like part of your standard uniform is having this piercing that showed that, you know, you didn't.

So it's like a male chastity belt, but instead it's a safety pin that goes through your foreskin. Right, exactly. And this was corroborated in satirical poetry. in ancient Rome. He, this one poet, Juvenile, said of Roman wives, some pay a lot to undo the pin of a comic actor. So it was also, it was kind of like,

it was like sexy because people would be like, that foreskin locked up. What secrets may it contain? Anyway, here's a picture of, um, of a, oh my God. Can I look at that closer? Yeah.

This looks so painful. Yeah, it, it looks really a hair. I have never had a foreskin. Also, it means that the penis is looking you in the eye. Never look a penis in the eye. Never look a penis in the eye. Yeah, and I love this. So some ancient writings by the physician Selsis had talked about installing these safety pins, if you will. And then in the 1700s, Johann Christoph Yeager, he argued that this could be used. to halt masturbation. And he was like, it's supposed to not be painful.

It's really easy to perform. And then he was like, yeah, this other German physician, Samuel Gottlieb von Vogel also says. It's like easy to use at home. You can, like parents can do it, teachers can do it. And then Vogel admitted that he had never actually performed one. He'd just read about it in these ancient texts and thought it sounded like a good idea. And he also, they were implying that this had been used to prevent masturbation. but like that was not the point and it didn't prevent erection probably was kind of painful, but it was something that was just the thing to do.

And one last note, one research paper I read on the kind of like tension between circumcision among Hebrews and Egyptians versus the Greeks and Romans being extremely pro-long foreskin was that until like 300 BC, supposedly Hebrew circumcision is recorded as only calling for the removal of the tip of the foreskin. Whoa. Yeah. And then Jewish athletes were traveling to Greece to compete in athletic events. And they supposedly often, like, would pull their foreskins up and over and tie them to, like, you know, fit the style. When in Rome, when in Greece, you tie up your foreskins. And so supposedly the religious authorities back home did not like that they were able to, like, masquerade as Greek.

Also, like, it's possible that some of them stretched out their foreskin so much that when they came home, they, like, basically had a, you know, functional foreskin again. Born again, circumcised. Right. And so supposedly the solution was to then dictate that actually, like, all of the foreskin had to be removed. Wow. So apparently the difference between a circumcised and uncircumcised penis was very slight until. Wow. This is like when high school students like drink four locos at nationals, you know, like for track meets or whatever today.

Right. And they were like, they're like, no chaperones. Yeah. Can it just stretch our foreskins out? So yeah, that's my story. I hated every minute of it. I could tell you did so much. Oh, so good.

I just, I don't really know how I landed on talking about this today, but I did. So weird. And I know a lot. So I'm working on a book proposal and I'm reading a lot about old weird sex stuff. And that's where I read about the rumor that Prince Albert had had a Prince Albert piercing. And I was like, I find that suspicious. And I was looking for more info. And I found this.

So, all right. Well, we're going to take a quick break. and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And Eleanor. Yes. Why don't you tell us about some dimples? Oh, I would love to, Rachel.

A man on the street once referred to me as dimples. Thank you, sir. Not really. Keep it to yourself. Yeah, so, I mean, I also have one dimple, which is very rare. I have, like, kind of like my whole face is a dimple. Like, when I smile, I have, like, vertical dimples. You have very, yeah, you have nice dimples.

Jess, do you have dimples? No, no. Rachel has two normal dimples like a person should. I also have butt dimples. We're going to get into that. Okay, great. I only have one dimple on the left side of my face in case you're wondering. But a dimple is a birth defect, I learned. And so it's a Mendelian trait.

So if both of your parents have it, you'll have it. I was thinking about it. And I think my dad maybe does. My mom does not. So I don't know where I came from. I'm just, yeah, I don't know why. It's formerly called a jealousy. That's what the technical name for a dimple is, which is cute, although I don't think that a man on the street would have called you jellison.

Would have been interesting if he had. But basically, we all have a muscle in our face called the bifid zygomaticus major muscle, which is a truly metal name. And if the chin doesn't fuse correctly during embryologic development, you get like a cleft in this muscle. and it only becomes visible when you flex it, i.e. smile. And so as you flex this muscle, you get this little depression if you have this deformation. Wow. Yeah. And so many cultures are obviously obsessed with them. Like my first thought was like the happy Buddha figure, you know, who's always just sitting there smiling.

And he has two giant dimples. Like as a child, I put my finger in his dimples, you know, whenever there were like Buddha statues around. Shirley Temple Dimple, Dimple, Queen Extraordinaire. Sure. Also, many hot people. Brad Pitt,

apparently has dimples. I don't think that I would have pegged him for a dimple man, but it makes sense. Lovely smile. Jennifer Garner, dimples. So basically, yeah,

they're prerequisite to being attractive. Just kidding. But no one is sure why people like this defect, right? Like, it really just is like a fairly harmless

embryological sort of phenomenon. But one theory, which I think is honestly kind of compelling given how obsessed we all are with being eternally young, is that because all babies pretty much have dimples, they just are dimples, it's considered

attractive because it's associated with like youth. And, you know, sort of like a... Is it because it's when you're more fat than muscle as a dumpy little baby? There are just so many places where your face squishes in. Exactly. And so then that's just sort of associated with like this like sort of

of fresh face, like dimpley appearance, which definitely makes sense for Shirley Temple. I mean, that was, like, her whole thing. It's just that she was, like, eternally smiling. And, like, certain things can lessen their appearance. Like, you don't really develop them later in life. Like, you have to be, I mean, before you're even born, right? They're forming. But things can kind of make them less obvious. So, like, weight loss is one sometimes where it'll just sort of, yeah, there just won't be as much tissue on your face when you're flexing it. So you smile and you just can't tell as much. But you really can't get rid of them.

And apparently some people do ask doctors, like dermatologists and plastic surgeons, to get rid of their dimples. Interesting. So there are dimple haters out there. But more often than not, people want to add them. And that's what I wanted to talk about today.

So I'm going to pass around some pictures of the dimple machine. Don't know what else there is to say. There are two pictures here on my phone that everybody should look at. Oh, wow. Yeah. Seems very like Willy Wonka-ish. Yeah. A dimple machine. Yeah, it's not... It looks like the headgear I had to wear it night when I was in middle school.

Yes. Like a very upsetting orthodontal situation. Well, there was an era where there were like a lot of like face shaping devices to sleep in as if your nose could just be molded in the night. Yes. I feel like that's like the equivalent now of like listening to a podcast while you're sleep and being like I'm learning. Like we just were always trying to maximize those nighttime hours. But yeah, I mean, this basically looks like a 12-year-old's orthodontic head gear was like stolen by Hannibal Lecter.

Like it looks like a like a horrible face cage. And they're like it's or sort of like when, you know, like Frankenstein's like neck bolts, but like in your face. Right. But it was invented in 1936 by Isabella Gilbert of Rochester, New York, who I don't know why no one else has said this in the stuff I was reading about her. like noted hustler? Like, come on. Everyone was just like, an inventor. Like, no. No. She was not an inventor. She was extremely clever. We can give her credit for that. But come on. I found this

article from the New York Herald of that era that is sort of describing what this does. And I thought it was so horrifying that I should just like read it. So any woman who has been overlooked by nature in the distribution of dimples can have the deficiencies supplied by machinery. Of course, the machinery must be in the hands of a skilled manipulative. or the result would be an unsightly scar or possibly an open sore or complications of blood poisoning. Oh. The new apparatus, the advent of which has been hailed with joy in the world feminine, consists of a specially designed knife with a dainty but very sharp blade,

a tiny keen-edged scoop and a very fine needle. With these instruments, a pretty, life-like dimple can be produced as effective as the genuine print of, quote, an angel's kiss. A small straight incision is made in the cheek or skin of the ambitious patient, representing the diameter of the proposed improvement. With the little scoop, a small portion of the fat underlying the skin is removed. The delicate needle soes the edges of the cut together again, and the operation is complete. Like, what is happening? This is very, very upsetting.

Yeah, deeply. So they were just like, yeah, you can just do this, just like lock it in to your face, go to sleep, wake up, and you'll have a hole in your cheek, also known as a dimple. But the thing that I found out is that people are still doing this. Wow. It's called dimpleplasty. It is a surgery by which one can acquire dimples, and it is done by plastic surgeons. Although, like, I was reading, and it seems like the American Plastic Surgery Association Incorporated, et cetera, whatever they're called. They don't really seem to think that it's that popular.

Like, they don't have. Is it mostly in South Korea? That's kind of what I was wondering, but it seems like it's actually big in. India, which surprised me. And so then I was like, is it because maybe dimples are seen as attractive, but they're like maybe not as common in some populations? But it seems like on the whole, everybody was like, men and women, equal amount of dimples, various ethnic groups, equal likelihood of dimples. Like, obviously it's inherited so, you know, often. So you're going to be sort of getting it down, passed down in families. But yeah, it's like a pretty universal

phenomenon. But yeah, this like big study that was like the demand for, you know, dimpleplasty has increased over the past few years in India, at least. These people were reporting. And, you know, they were talking about how, like, in a lot of, like, Asian culture, you know, it's a good luck sign in China. And it's considered really beautiful throughout, like, the Arab world. So people will come in and they will ask for dimpleasty. But in the United States, it doesn't seem that popular. The way that it works is, honestly, Isabella Gilbert, another reason that she's a hustler is that she was, like, trying to drive a depression into your face. But what dimpleplasty does is it actually a surgeon will slice into your cheek through the muscle. And then they place a stitch behind the skin and the muscle. And that sort of creates a dimple. So it's sort of the opposite. You're not like coring into a face. You're like kind of trying to sort of force it out a little bit so that when you get this flexion going, like you create this little aberration.

But the thing is, it's really hard to do the stitch in the exact same place on both sides. Or, yeah. So apparently a lot of people are not satisfied with their dimpleplasty. Oh, no. Because you can very easily get lopsided dimples, which is pretty funny, I think. But the not funny thing is that it can really damage your nerves, specifically the ones associated with, like, lip function, and also your saliva glands. Oh, great. So you could just, like, get this silly stitch in your face only to end up, like, drooling out of your mouth for some unspecified.

period of time. It doesn't sound worth it, is what I'm saying. But then you look even more like a baby. True. Everyone will think you are so young. A beautiful baby. Okay, now that you say that, dimpleplasty, I endorse it. I think it's amazing. You'll look 10 years younger. 20 years younger. But yeah, and then obviously, as you've already mentioned, Rachel, you can get dimples in lots of other places. They sort of are formed by the same kind of phenomenon, but like in different muscle groups. So one of the most common is called like the sacral dimple, which is the one like right above your butt. Butt dimples. Yeah, little butt dimples.

Or they're often called like the dimples of Venus. Yes, the dimples of Venus. I feel like they are also sort of similar to like face dimples like considered like attractive. And they have their own sort of cultural or like aesthetic appeal. Do you guys remember when sacral piercings were like the thing to do? Yeah. It was very much like hot topic like elite, you know, membership by. sort of step to take.

Yeah. Were there any celebrities who had sacral dimple piercings? Jess is raising her hand. I knew that you would know, and I just couldn't bring myself to... It wasn't the sacral ones, but Black China, Mother of Dream Kardashian, has her dimples pierced. Yes, her actual face dimples. Yeah, it's like too little, like a bead in each sort of dimple. Yeah.

Or like you can put like, I mean, if you're rich, you can put like diamonds in your dimples. Thank you for bringing that up. My pleasure. Just inspired this entire fact. Thank you. Yes. She gave me the hookup with the Isabella Gilbert machine. But yeah, so it really is like cheek piercings for your butt if you want to do these sacral piercings.

And they are just above your butt. Yes. To be clear. I mean, I feel like even if you don't have like an actual sacral dimple, like you would know where that muscle is. You know, like touch your back. Get to know your own anatomy. You may have sacral dimples, but they're sort of like where, like, if you were pretending to be like a very old person in pain and you're like, oh, my back, like right where you would grab it in the joke is where your sacral dimple should be. But yeah, so that is the entire history and fact and machinery of dimpling.

Wow. I'm smiling now. You can see my dimple, my one dimple. Amazing. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And Ellen, it's time for your fact about poop. Okay, so I was working on this podcast episode about lemons. And I wanted to get a modern day perspective about what it's like to grow lemons.

We'll get to poop eventually here. Okay, great. I was worried. So I went to the home of this very cool lady named Isabel Wade, Dr. Isabel Wade, And she is a former urban environmentalist. And she has this project called the Just One Tree Project, where she wants to make San Francisco totally sustainable lemon-wise. Like she wants San Francisco to produce the same amount of lemons as it consumes. Okay. I thought you were just saying that she wanted it to be totally sustainable.

And that was like, seems far-fetched. Good goal. But I don't know enough about lemons to know how ambitious making. San Francisco totally like lemon neutral is, but it at least sounds possible. Yeah, she said, because lemons grow really well in San Francisco. It's the nice climate for it. The relevant facts to my podcast episode is that lemons are kind of hard to grow. They take a long time to produce fruit and they need constant water.

So this is kind of what I wanted to go talk to her about. And yeah, she said it's fairly easy to grow lemons in San Francisco. and then we just got to talking about the story of her life. And she was talking to me about how she was visiting her friend in the Bronx. And her friend, a fellow urban environmentalist, had instituted this program where they were selling the Bronx Zoo's poop. Oh, man. Such a good idea. It's such a good idea.

And she had instituted a similar program in San Francisco for a little bit. And she said it was super successful. I don't think they were selling it. I think they were just giving it away. But she said that farmers would come and bring her huge vegetables grown with the fertilizer from the zoo poop. The bounty of your poop donation. Yeah. And she said that she faded out the program eventually because she, like, moved on other things, some bureaucratic reasons.

But I looked it up and the Recology Center, which is San Francisco's like big recycling. institution trash management system. They are currently using some poop from the San Francisco Zoo in their composting system. Wow. So like they're composting like your banana peel with rhino crap. Exactly. And you can only really use herbivore poop here because carnivorous. Because otherwise you have to worry about like parasites and bacteria and right. Is that the reason why? No, because carnivore poop is too. aesthetic. Oh, I see. See, I was thinking about why you're not supposed to use human poop as fertilizer, but that's more, that's more of a one-to-one. It's like, obviously, we can get our own poop diseases

back in soil. Yeah, exactly. And there's, I looked it up, and there's still a lot of places that do this. You can buy zoo-doo, as they call it, in Miami, from the Miami Zoo. Zoodoo. Remind me of the babe. Yeah. Who-do? Zood. Yeah, so it's an excellent institution. Like I said, I found this AP article that was published in 1985 about how the Bronx Zoo sold it to Williams and Sonoma and Bloomingdale's. And Williams and Sonoma put it in their gardening kit, which they called the Garden of Eden kit, and they just sold it.

And they got like a really big markup on it. Like they were selling it for 89 cents a pound or something normally. And then Williams and Stoneoma was selling it for like $250 a pound. Sure. It's like gold. Like gold. It's all about how you brand your rhino poop. That's just capitalism, baby.

Exactly. They have it as a bag, 89 cents a bag. What did Bloomingdale's want with it? Well, they had similar to today, you know, gardening is all the rage. You can buy little urban gardening kits from your favorite millennial big box store, like urban outfitters or whatever. And so they also made these little kits for like the, I don't know, 1985 Meg Ryan character who has a little garden in her apartment. That's amazing. That's awesome. So were they mixing all of the animals poop together or like

were you getting a specific animal or was it just like? Was it like the whole arc? Yeah, exactly. Or poop arc. Yeah. Yeah. They were just mixing them together, I think. A lot of the things that I read brought up elephant poop, of course, because elephants produced quite a lot of poop. Right.

Just by volume, it's mostly in the elephant poop in there. I feel like they could probably, like, get money by specifically being like, I'm trying to think of like, what's an herbivore that people are really into being like. Panda poop? Right. Delete this from the episode. because I'm incorporating it. Yeah, but being like genuine panda poop here in this soil.

Yes. For your little succulents. Or like these strawberries were fertilized with panda poop only. Right. Yeah. Like when you feed an animal, like when you feed cows just a specific grass or something, you can advertise with it. Yeah.

Wow. It's like that, but opposite. Guys, we're going to be rich. Yeah. And that's a brilliant idea. people would die for that because it's like, yeah, it's your favorite charismatic megafauna, ideally endangered. Oh, you're supporting by turning, I mean, it's awesome that they're like turning literal excrement, literal waste into a renewable resource. And also like it's in like New York City, like the Bronx Zoo is like the closest nature we have.

Like in some way it's like truly hyperlocal because like where else would you get? Elephant poop? Yeah. Yeah. That's wonderful. Great fact. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Penises. Just the very concept. Hadn't heard of them? Pretty overwhelmed. Yeah, I'm excited to read your book. Oh, I'm excited to finally finish the process of pre-writing it.

It turns out when you write a book, you first have to spend a long time not yet writing the book. But yeah, more on that soon, hopefully. Now your dust cover can say, Weirdest Thing, award-winning book. That's very true. Thank you for that. Getting to email my agent right now. The Weirdest Thing I Learn this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms.

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