Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 118: HMS Captain

Episode Date: December 3, 2022

this is a show about holes Tickets still available for the third live show: https://wl.seetickets.us/event/Well-TheresYourProblemPodcast/510223?afflky=UndergroundArts What a Hell of a Way to Die: https://www.hellofawaytodie.com/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

All right. I think we're good to go. Excellent. I understand that. All right. Hello and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. All right, go. I'm Alex Kodwell-Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yeah, Liam. Yeah, Liam. Hi. I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him. And we have a guest. Hey, I'm guest. My pronouns are he and him. And also, my name is Francis. Wrong order. And you come to us from a second podcast. There are other podcasts out there beyond this one. Mother Art. Mother Art, shut up. Part of the extended Bethaniverse

of podcasts. Still narrowly being held together thanks to the England US tie. Yeah, just much like the internet, the entire podcasting industry is held up by one like really stressed out ginger guy in London. Yes. Well, I'm excited to talk to you guys today about a boat. There's two things that I find very funny is when the British fail and when the Navy fail. So when there's a British Navy failure, it just gives me a little. I repeat myself. Yeah. Royal Navy cells are coping and seething over US Navy chads sort of thing. Yes. That's right. Maybe one day England too can build a boat that breaks when it gets wet. I mean, that's just American planning right there. So this is what the HMS captain? Yes, this is a drawing of the HMS

captain roughly 1860s ish. This is a British British. It's a what do we want to call it a experimental kind of ship? It did not really, you know, some of it was they were trying some new stuff. They wanted to do some new things. You can you can kind of tell they were running out of ideas because they named it after like stuff you would find on a boat. So casting around like is captain captain, the lieutenant, the ship's cap. And at a certain at a certain point in time, you know, like anything else on this, an experimental ship is great on paper. And then it ends up killing like 500 people who had absolutely nothing to do with it. Thus, thus is the the story of really anything when we come on to this show is just how is this going to

kill roughly 500 people? I'm going to take those skittles away from you like a grade school teacher. I was about to say, yeah. Oh, my God. But before we talk about the HMS captain, we had to do a German tone. Yes. Oh, we had to talk about it eventually. We recorded an episode before we got the chance to there's a bonus and like I don't think any of us are feeling up to it. Like we talk about a lot of bad shit on this show. But you know, the mass shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs kind of cuts a bit closer to home for me, at least. Yes. Some Mormon in cell fucker who's like dad is a right wing Christian messed up porn star and whose granddad is a sort of maga

California state representative shot up a gay bar killed like five people injured over a dozen, I think. And the headline that I've written here, if you're if you're just listening is I cannot say the headline that I want to say, but we all know who's responsible for these acts of terrorism. Yes. And we've experienced an interesting shift in tone, right? It used to be the time was, and Britain, it's still here. Our right wing is still here is you cry when you get what you want, right? You say, well, no one rid me of this turbulent priest, a drag queen story time, groomers, things of this nature. And then when someone takes you up on it and kills a bunch of people, you kind of you feel bad and you go, Oh, well, you know, I'm actually being insulted by

people attributing this to me. The American right wing has now sort of shifted to a new phase of laughing because you got what you wanted and saying, No, this is good, actually. And, you know, those people have names, you can talk about Matt Walsh or Nick Fuentes or whoever and whoever is like instrumental to this backlash to the backlash to the backlash. And I think ultimately, what it comes down to is someone needs to make those people afraid. There are legal and extra legal ways of doing that. I'm not going to do going to have to cut this anyway, but a canoe ride. Yeah, you know, yeah,

but there is something to be said in, you know, I know that there are people who are uncomfortable with purchasing firearms owning firearms, but at the very least, you should know how to physically defend yourself. Well, the thing is, like, in terms of my, my, my queer friends in the US, it's it went from like a 50-50 divide between very heavily armed and totally unarmed to like 90-10. Yeah. And there's like a lot of people who have very good reasons to like be uncomfortable owning firearms, right? Like, yeah, there is, it's like, it's a, it's a calculus of risk. But if you, if

you have like a history of like, you know, suicidal ideations, don't have a gun in the house, because it's a magical life goes away button. Yeah. You know, there's really no taking that one back. And if you fuck it up, that's going to be even worse for you. So don't get a gun if you don't feel comfortable with it, but at least, you know, take some, take some self-defense stuff. If you can't take, take, take a, take a class on like stopping bleeding, which is always very handy. It's like, or two or four on you, you know, if you don't want to do that, you can do logistics. Yeah. And just in general, run up behind, run up behind somebody with an MRE, just feel like you hungry? Yeah, listen, for every, for every trans woman who like kicks a Massachusetts

face, and there are another 10 who don't do any of the actual kicking, but are necessary to make that process work. Yes. I mean, honestly, I would say this has been a sea change for a lot of people. And the biggest one is, if you are organizing any kind of event, any kind of gathering, you need to be thinking about this, you need to be thinking about safety in these terms, and you need to plan for these eventualities. And that's what I see people doing. It's grim that you have to. But it will make people safer if you do. And it's, I don't know, if you compare this to the shooting at Pulse, which had, I think, something like 50 people dead, it's perverse to say about something so terrible, but there are a lot of ways in which this could have been even worse.

And we should call out the fact that people acted heroically in a time of crisis. You know, and it's one of those things. I mean, that's how it works. It's like a cultural change. And I think it's, I think you're going to look at this in time as being the same thing has happened for hijackings after 9-11, right, is there was a change in how people responded to it instinctively. You can't hijack a plane anymore because everyone's going to try and jump you. And I think that's kind of like, that's the place where a lot of Americans getting to with mass shootings anywhere even before this. You know, I never thought about that of like, there being generational trauma of like millennials to be like, if somebody stands

up on a plane and like looks threatening, at least half the plane is going to be like, nope, nope, taking it down, doing the shit. Yeah. So it's playing me in the side of a building, motherfucker. Yeah. So it's one of the same thing. And so I don't know who our generation's Mark Warburg is. He's going to be like, yo, if I'd been there, we'd have gone down a little differently. But but yeah, no. And this guy, he didn't manage to kill himself or get killed by the cops or anyone else he was taken alive and like badly beaten and humiliated. And of course, you know, he's going to try and troll and like, get grab attention during the trial. I'm not going to pay attention to it. You shouldn't either. But I think it's it's a good message to send out that

like, if you try this, not only are you not going to be able to throw your life away, but you're probably going to spend a long time in prison wishing that you had been able to. And also, you're going to be humiliated into the bargain. And that's that's good, you know, you should be afraid to do these things. Yeah. Absolutely. And it does involve physical. I mean, at some point, it's going to involve physical violence with fasc and, you know, I think it's okay. It's okay to harm fascists or the law to destroy people who seek to destroy you. It's all right. Yeah. Self defense is a thing. It's enshrined in the Constitution. One of the few good things is that you get to own a gun too, is the thing. And I have seen,

I did see a couple tweets about like, oh, there, there should be changes to gun laws because you're not supposed to do guns like that. It's like, what part of shall not be infringed? Like, look, I don't believe in all that bullshit, second amendment stuff. You know, it says in there a militia, you're not a militia, you're just a bunch of dumb shits that are drunk. Which to be fair, that is what militias were in the 1700s, but still kind of hard depending on where you go. Yeah. I mean, I think it's kind of the second amendment's been sort of Pandora's box, right? Like, I would never support like loosening firearms laws here, for instance, for anyone other than me. And I only want to shoot

bottles and cans off of a fence because there's a very low level of firearms proliferation, right? Nobody has guns pretty much compared to the U.S. Whereas even if like, tomorrow you had you just repealed the second amendment, there's millions of guns that aren't going anywhere. And that's just what you have to sort of react to. And that's how you have to change the way that you think and respond to it. I mean, I wonder if at this point, like a program like they had in Australia would even have an effect, you know, where they did like a mass gun buy bag across the country. I don't think so. No, here's the thing. The problem with the idea of a mass gun buy back is that the only people who are going to be doing that are going to be like,

if you've ever seen pictures like here's some of the guns that we got from a gun buy back, and they're like these ancient fucking muskets or rusted out pieces of shit. This out of a log this morning. Right, like nobody on the right. Congratulations, you're not the one true king of England. Right. Nobody on the right is going to give up their guns and people on the left aren't going to be stupid enough to give up their guns at this point. Like, you know, I am perfectly fine with the complete disarmament of America only if cops go first. And this is the thing. Yeah, like the cops take the guns out of every cop's hands. No cop gets a gun anymore. Like even SWAT teams should be very and then you can take everybody

else's guns. But until you're going to take it from the cops, I don't and understand this isn't a real like, you know, belief. It's just I know that nobody's going to take away the fucking cop's guns. So you should be, you know, you should be armed yourself. I guess I guess the other thing is that the entire sort of like firearms owning right, which is to say, I guess the right has been primed for 30, 40 years for the idea that the feds are going to come and take your guns away. And I think that's something that has been successfully forestalled by them. I mean, I don't know who they think that it's very strange to be, you know, the cop left wing ATF agents. Yeah, afraid of like, if you get like the reason you are buying an AR15

is to shoot cops, like that is that is the only thing that you're buying an AR15 for. If you're buying, I'm going to protect myself from the government. That means shooting cops. So, you know, be be cognizant of that. And I'm not saying don't buy an AR because the fun has held shoot. But, you know, they're they're made for a specific thing. And that's to shoot cops. So just in this case, your co workers are just victims of whatever hate crime you have in mind. Right. 30 to 50 feral hogs. Well, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I kind of one thing I will say in defense of the armed left, not that they need me to defend them is that one or other sort of like anti fascist groups don't know who exactly successfully sort of like protected by force

of arms by like standing outside some I don't know drag queen story time whatever. Yes. And the usual parade of sort of like right wing freaks and hogs show up and all they could really do was like, make videos making fun of you. And it's like that. The barrel of an SKS. Yes, whatever. You go ahead. You know, that that really takes the sting out of it, I think. So, yeah, another another vignette in our long second bleeding Kansas, which is it's not good. And living in 2022 is not pleasant. I mean, sort of as a 9 11 analog there, you know, if you have a bunch of, you know, a special group of armed men outside of the the the trans federal gay marshals, because I 100% support this.

Well, I was thinking more like the trans security agency. You just need to put the word around that like maybe one person in like every but just start scratching off all the it from all the logos be like, no, we're reusing this, you know, how much cost to make a logo exactly just station outside the drag queen story hour. No one's going to bother you. We finally we found a way to make this less horrifying to talk about good and bad as long as they as long as they don't put the body scanners in, you know, because that's that. Next up in the

thing. That's right. Kind of good use for that detector. So you might have you may have seen this column doing the rounds on Twitter. Yes. So this is this is at a new building at Ohio State University the Ohio State University building who we should say being the resident asshole on the show lost by one second, please. That's right. Number two, Ohio State lost. Oh, yes, it was I'll just have it in a second. Please just one more second. Damn, where's this thing? Oh, yes, they lost by 22 to Michigan. Ouch. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Number two, Ohio State who I hate. I hate Michigan too, but lost by 22 to Michigan. So good job there, assholes. You saw they lost to you and also the

hospital. Right. Yes. You know, my favorite, my favorite thing is the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad former president of Iran is a Michigan fan. If you do not make a program at random, they're not like a bad one. Saddam Hussein has a key to the city of Detroit, like Middle East dictators and Michigan are hand in hand really. I have retweeted a tweet from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a 16th of September 2018 with a hard work ethic, inshallah, the U of M will return to its glory days. So this is this is like an inpatient hospital tower they're building. They tried to put like a unclear to me if it was a new building or if it was in addition to

I believe it was the addition. Yeah. Yeah. They're putting a like a radiation oncology center like on top of it and a radiation oncology center. That's a place where they like shoot radiation at cancers has a little light in there. It's a very heavy building. The story was that the building was designed. It was in under construction up to six floors. They got a big grant from someone and they were like, well, let's put a new radiation facility and add an extra floor to the building and then repurpose one of the existing floors for radiation therapy. Right. And when you do radiation therapy today, you don't use lead. I believe it's the shielding is all concrete and that means four foot thick floors, four foot

thick walls, four foot thick ceilings. Right. Instead, we developed a unique framing system that allowed the shielding concrete to be cast entirely from above. Hold on. Eliminating the need for concrete shoring. I don't quite think that's right. But the good news is that this is fake news or some told, right? Because if you saw this, do the numbers on Twitter got like 10,000 likes, something like and the tweet was New Tower of the James sank nine inches over the weekend. Ohio State evacuated all crews and are trying to enlist German engineers to look at the problem. These picks from the second floor have 20 plus floors above them. I thought paperclip 2.0 is real fucking weird, but all right.

Just grab the nearest the nearest German man. This is how far how far America has fallen. It no longer needs to steal Nazi scientists for V2 rockets. It's just like, how do we build building German? I always put the building up and you got a guy we brought over German engineers. I work for Mercedes. I have no fucking clue. How do I make a building? A brand new German racism is just assuming they're all accomplished architects. I Ohio State's Ohio State spokesman Ben Johnson said Friday that the cracking was the result of a compression issue on one concrete column. And the problem appears to be isolated to a single column. There are more than 150 other concrete columns on that level of the building

that they think are fine, but they're pausing to like evaluate all of them. They claim that this does not affect the rest of the building. It's just this one column. I don't know whether that's true or not, but that's what they say. And then I do appreciate how many of the compartments flooded. Right. Yes. This is a situation that this is a condition that you as a structural engineer should look at and say, get everyone out of the building now. Because this is, you know, if one column like this goes, I mean, admittedly, there's a lot of redundancy in the building. But if you see one column that looks like this, that is has this much, this is a straight up

structural failure. This is not, it may look like, you know, a little crack or something, you know, and maybe it's still, this is effectively bearing no load whatsoever. And this, this is a serious, serious problem, especially if you have a huge radiation therapy department right above you. The good news is I used to, I used to live in an old house. I used to, my last house was 140 years old, you go down to Home Depot, you get some floor jacks, you'll be fine. They're like four of them up there. Good. My favorite part of Ohio State's sort of like correction about this is they've gone, it's just the one column, so it's fine. We are evacuating the building and

pausing all work on it, but it's just the one building. However, there is, there's no, there is no truth to the reports that the university is bringing in German engineers, the additional third party engineers from Chicago. Yeah, we're bringing in some checks. Yeah. You're in one. You guys want to see Blues Brothers? It's gotta go like that. Are you from the police? No, ma'am. We're engineers. So we shall see if this falls down or not, but yeah, it's bad. You shouldn't, it shouldn't look like that, I don't think. Well, I look forward to the, the future show about this, and we talk about Ohio State Building 7, which is burned for eight hours straight.

No, no relation to this whatsoever. They just let it catch on fire because it's Ohio. It's just a cross from the thing, yeah. Sort of Ohio inversion of Donald Trump calling in to be like, I have the tallest building in Ohio now. Yes. Do you know Ohio spelled backwards is Ohio? Damn. What the fuck he goes into the ticket? All right. Oh, I know. That was the goddamn news. Before we get underway here, does Alice have a bit of a robot voice to anyone else or is it just me? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's bad. Is it, is it workable? If you're recording locally, you should be fine. Yeah, that's probably gonna be all.

Yeah, you should be fine as long as you got the local. Yeah, this is Devon's problem. Hi, Devon. Hope you're having fun editing this. Although I technically Zencaster also records locally and then uploads it at the end. So yeah. Well, hi, Devon. I hope I don't have a robot voice on this because I don't want to have to record this twice, but we will see. Devon fucking rolls, man. Oh, yeah. It'll be fine. I'm sure we can like, I'm sure Devon can artfully edit you out if necessary. Or Devon's got like multiple years of podcasts to use. We could just work you on some different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They definitely have like, my voice like, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Imagine, I imagine if we could, we could figure this out and get like Alice as a Siri voice,

which is need you to make like all the correct, you know, vocalizations and then smash them all together. Yeah, yeah. Yes. I would do this. I would do this. I would upload my voice and let anyone use it for like text-to-speech. I think that would be funny. I can see no downsides to this. Yeah, just Alice yelling, turn left, cunt. In 500 meters, turn left, cunt. A lot of people listen to this podcast while they're driving and I think about that every so on. We look forward to interfering with your navigation operation. There was a compilation of like dash cam video accidents where our podcast was on and one of the accidents. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. What's this? What's this cool raft I'm looking at here? Yeah, I'm looking at a raft here. So this is, so let's talk about the captain. This is not the captain. This is the lady Nancy. The two genders. Let's talk about the boat, but not that boat, this other boat. Well, this is the boat that we're looking at right now. I didn't be that way. Yeah. Well, do you want to go back like three slides and take a look? I got more pictures. It's a fucking boat. It's, you know, I like the lady Nancy. I like this thing. It's a cannon. It's a cannon on a raft. Basically, that's that's what naval war was for an extended period of time. So the HMS captain is the very first ocean going turret ship gunship. And what that means is that,

you know, in the time of naval warfare of the time, you had your broadships and you stuck your cannons out the side. And if you wanted to shoot those motherfuckers over there, you had to turn the boat and you had to line, you had to turn the whole boat so that the cannons could shoot, right? But the one is like, what if instead of just up and down, we can make a cannon also go left and right, which is, you know, what cannons do now, like every, every weapon somewhere is, you know, on a boat is a turret ship of some kind. But this is before turrets. I'm raising my hand here with a question. Is this like free or at the same time as monitors your civil war sort of, what if I put a turret on a ship thing?

It is kind of the same, the same thing going. And I don't know if, if the inventor of the the turret ship who who patented this might have had a case against the CSA at the time. The CSA was too busy killing their own people inside of the very, the world's first submarine. So they had, they had their own things going. Oh, yeah, the Hunley. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Killed so many Confederates. So this is the weapon of the war. Listen, if you, if you're posting like Union wave or whatever, just bear in mind, no one will love killing Confederate soldiers as much as the Confederacy did. Oh God, this is it was their favorite thing is just to feed a bunch of 15 year old boys

into a meat grinder. Almost British stuff. Yeah, this is this is the Lady Nancy. This is the very first turret ship that was created by Captain Cowper Philip Coles. That first name is spelled C-O-W-P-E-R. Sounds like an ad agency. It is. Well, he's British though. I don't know. Of course he fucking does. It reminds me of the little dinghies that go up and down the waterways of the Jersey Shore. Was it just like a dinghy, but the Coast Guard then mounts a 50 cal to it? Yeah. Yeah. I've seen those before. They're great. It's basically a boat technical. Back when I rode in high school, the Coast Guard had those on the Anacostia River,

and they would always pull over our rowing coach because he was making awake into no wakes on. And then they'd give him a ticket, and then they would go away, and then he would go back up to the speed he was before. And then he'd get another ticket, and it was pretty funny. Every time someone's at the shore and makes awake in a no wake zone, I do have to resist the urge to find an RPG7 and let them know my feelings on their way. Going sort of like Somali pirate modes on. Yeah. Yeah. Especially the guy with the fucking Nova Villanova boat, who I hope. Excellent. What body of water are you guys next to? The Delaware. Okay. Yeah. Because I mean, we don't, I don't have like, well,

because I think about no wake areas in like Lake. What I'm talking about is a bay in South Jersey. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah, I don't go, I don't touch oceans. They're gross. Fish fucking up. Disgusting. Are you the guy who, are you the guy on the Mississippi that you're constantly trying to find some freighters or something? Haven't we had this discussion? Do I don't go into the Mississippi either? That's dangerous. The ocean at least won't kill me immediately. The river will. I'm not a fan. If it, if like, if, you know, the undertow doesn't get me, something from fucking Minnesota will. Some goddamn hot plate from Minnesota is one of the tragical diseases. It wasn't. Yeah.

All right. So this is the Lady Nancy. This is the very first, the very first turret gunship. And this is being used to kill Russians during the Crimean War. So this is about 1850s or so. Captain Phillips was just like, what if we put a cannon here, but we can move it left and right as well as up and down. And somebody in England said, that's absolutely brilliant. Make us some ships. So next slide, please. This is a look. This, this man, this looks haunted. Yes. I love over din 1800s. Guillermo del Toro here. This is, this is Captain Cowper Phillips. So a little background on him as, as a young man born in the early 1800s, he joined the Royal Navy at the age of 11 as, as many, many young boys do. Did he actually join at the age of 11 or was he like

signed on at 11 and then, because that was like a real thing was like, you would sign your kids onto the Navy as early as possible to gain them seniority while they were still young, which I really like. I'm not sure if that's, you know what, he may have had aspirations at the age of 11 too. I don't, I don't know the, I don't know how the kids of the 1800s really thought about things like that. It would probably be better than living on the streets. I don't know, but because then you become a powder monkey and I mean, it was kind of like dangerous. It's like a state within a state like the, the Navy had its own schools, you know, all of this kind of stuff. So yeah, that's not, it's not that surprising to me.

Yeah. I mean, who doesn't love government cradle to grave? This is basically socialism, right? Yes. Fully, fully navalized, not luxury, fully, fully navalized austerity communism. Exactly. Yes. So he survived long enough in the Navy to become a lieutenants. And he was commanding a paddle boat in the Black Sea that was named the Stromboli. Oh yes. I too love to command a Stromboli into my mouth and eat it. Commanding the Stromboli along the Black Sea when he came up with the idea with the turret gun, which I assume is just what if a gun went left and right as well as up and down. But he came up with it. He slapped it onto the Lady Nancy, which we saw earlier and

which is literally just like some, some barrels like lashed together, right? Like it's fully an improvised raft. Yeah. What was the christening for that like? Well, I mean, it was in the middle of a short time. It was two bottles of rum, Roz. Two bottles of grog. The christening was probably somebody's brains as they were shoving it out because it was made in the middle of a war. So. Oh, that'll do it. Yeah. Yeah. You don't, you don't have a whole lot of time for just, you know, get a raft, put a gun on it and go kill Russians with it, I suppose. This is the 1800s. I don't know if that's good or bad back then. It was the British and the Russians, so probably both sides deserve to get shot in the face.

Yeah. Well, all of the European wars of the period are very much like everybody's kind of equally bad, more or less, I mean. Right. It was like, if, if you didn't start the war, you probably would have started another one. So it's, yeah. So this was so effective at killing Russians that he patented the design and the Navy commissioned him to start doing some tests of the turret gun because they're like, this is a great idea. Turning the gun left and right. Why didn't we ever think of this? So he had a good idea with the turret, but, and he was really good at designing weapons. He understood weapon systems, but he did not understand boats very well, even though, like he probably understood ships more than any of us do because he, you know, grew up on

ships. But like, this doesn't necessarily mean that you know how to build a ship. You don't really have a lot of like technical training to operate one at that point. Yeah. I don't imagine you join the Navy at the age of 11. They're like, cool, let's get you into our, you know, our naval command and teach you about buoyancy and ballast and sit and shit like that. He says he worked on a ship, but he's no shipwright. Boyancy is like probably what the Navy called recruiting 11-year-olds in the first place. Oh, God. So the admirality. Featuring our lead recruitment officer, Socrates. Yeah. Yeah. So the people that were in charge of the British Navy at the time were called the admirality, I guess. The admirals. Yeah, it was a joke about fucking kids, Roz. Yeah. Well,

Archimedes was also Greek. Oh, we do better than to trade in stereotypes, sir. I will not have it. It doesn't matter. No, we don't. We just we're just, you know, good enough to do the the stereotypes that aren't offensive. Most like how Peruvians love mayonnaise or something. I don't know. We can start that one out. I buy that. Yeah. Let's let's do it. It's a fun one that that is absolutely true. And I can say this confidently because I used to work in a liquor store in South Philly. Oh boy. Cambodians love Hennessy. That's not that's no bad thing for a stereotype, I would say. It's like, oh, you motherfuckers enjoy cognac. It's like, yeah. Yeah. Like it's the damnedest thing because you just get Cambodians coming in and be like, yeah, like let me get like

four handles ahead of you. Be like, all right, cool. Like you got to drink this by yourself or what are you doing? I feel like if you work in a liquor store, you don't want to know the answer to those questions. You just get drunk bombers at 11am and they're mad because you won't sell them like a pint of fireball or some shit. Well, why won't you sell me the half beer? I'm of age. I should be able to drink the the most rotgut shit. Yeah, you can drink that, but you can't be visibly intoxicatable and selling it to your Francis. Oh, shut up, you cop. Visibly intoxicated and like 55 years old and belligerent. Well, but you're having mean drunks. I, you know, I don't really care. You know why they're mean drunks? Because you wouldn't sell them the fucking fireball.

Yeah, he deserved it. He's probably just gonna, he's just wearing blackface to the grave. I don't give a shit. Williams is like, look at this guy having a good time. Better shit all over that. Two bike credit. I was also going through a very bad breakup. So I'm doubling down and hoping that I shout out to friend of the pod, Bruce's mummers troop, which is the not racist and gay friendly one. I can't remember the name of it. Sure. I can't believe you imported Morris dancers or I guess we imported Morris dancers to you. That's so like offensive of us. Yeah, thanks for nothing assholes. Yeah. What is a Morris dancer? Don't worry about it. Traditional English folk ways sometimes involving blackface makeup, where you do a little dance with your friends and like

whack some sticks and read them together. I will say Ross's little giggle makes me so happy. Every year they try to cut, they try to crack down on the various racisms which occur at the mummers parade. And it's gotten better, but it's not there yet. No, no, no, no, no, no. So it's put us taking a brave stance for like liberalism and incremental reform. You know, the arc of the mummers parade may be long, but it bends towards justice. It most certainly does not bend towards justice. That was 105% confidence. Last year there was almost no blackface at all. Yeah, I was only a couple of troops doing it. Just Ross and the tie and suit just being like, racism has dropped 75% on the mummers

board this year. Over the past 50 years, yes. I can't talk. Missouri has its own like racism. We have the like masked ball thing. That's so. Yeah, it's racist prom, right? Yeah. Yeah, racist prom brackets Masonic and like Mason's Masonry is fucking wild. It's very, it's very gross because like the veil prophet itself is usually some like very old businessman who's, you know, like 50, 60 years old. And then the debutante is some like rich guy, 16 year old daughter. Oh my God. Yeah, it's gross. It's gross. And if a, you know, hellfire missile accidentally fell off of something and onto the Ritz Carlton while it was happening, I would say that it's fine. So no great loss. Yeah. Yeah. I like the Ritz Carlton. It's a very

nice hotel, but they can rebuild that. It's fine. All right. So Coles wanted to build a ship and he had some ideas. He had some ways to incorporate some stuff in. He's like, I bet we can do this with the turret. But the admirality at the time was just like, look, man, we're going to take me crazy if you call the Admiralty, the admiralty every time. Admiralty? Admiralty. Yeah. How can we, Alice, how is it pronounced? Admiralty. Admiralty. Admiralty. Admiralty. Yeah, the Admiralty. Whatever upset Alice the most, do that. Just add more syllables to it. Yeah. Unfortunately for you, Alice, I have been saying admiralty in my head for like the last. It's fine. It's fine. I'll just come and see. It's fine. When you become an admiral,

that's admiralification. Yes. It's when you admire an admiral. We're going to start calling you Alice. There we go. A-A-R-O-N. Alice, Admiralty. So they still wanted the, the, the, the, the, the British Navy guys still wanted it. So they were like, well, we're going to start kind of designing our own stuff. Next slide, please. Now, this is another ship that is not the HMS Captain. What this is, is the HMS Prince Albert. This ship came about because, yeah, Coles was friends with Prince Albert as one is, I guess, when you're rich and British. Yeah. I mean Albert, Albert took a lot of interest in the military and, and the Navy for like, in a sort of playing with toy soldiers way. Like he designed helmets and stuff in his free time. So, yeah, he didn't

really have anything else to do. Well, I mean, I guess if you're not the king, like you're just married to the Queen. Yeah, yeah. He's like all, all there is to do is like. Like any dude, you need to have, you need hobbies. You need a pod shack to sing out and you need, you know, you do this, you design some helmets, you get your dick pissed. You know, you're all in there. Yeah, cool. A man, a man needs the putter. So this is the one of the first kind of ships that was built with all of these. It had four turrets on it, but it was not really an ocean going. It was only for coastal defense because these things were really heavy, as you can imagine. The gun, the problem. The Toro combat ship of its day. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's again, Coles is not a ship designer. He's a gun

designer and he made a really good gun. Like this gun could move back and it could go left and right, man. It's all anybody ever wanted. And presumably someone in the Royal Navy did design ships. Why didn't they just fucking throw him at that guy? We're gonna, we're gonna get there, Alice. Don't worry. Okay. Don't worry. The story is unfolding. Next slide. Probably put two guys on this job, I think. I'm not sure, but I think. Yeah, I forgot the part of a civil engineering bachelor's degree that allows you to design warships, Roz. So this is refuse to work for Lockheed. This is why again, you need more than one person on the design team. Don't blame me. I went to school for math. We're gonna, we're gonna get to why all of this happened as well, because

there's somebody who wrote an entire like after action review on why on how everybody fucked this up. But this, this is we're looking right now. This is your modern Turrican. So I want to, I want to showcase the Turrican because we've got to talk about some kind. We got to talk about different, you know, considerations that have to be made for something like this. So at the time, most ships were still powered by by wind. Steam engines were kind of coming in. But the Prince Albert as we were seeing beforehand, that was a steam, a steam ship. But they didn't, I mean, steam didn't go very far at the time. So you still had a lot of sales to do. You have to keep like re-colling them and shit, which is handy for a coastal defense thing. You just throw it back

into port whenever. Exactly. You go, you shovel some more coal onto it and you let it float around a little bit more. So sales need rigging. They need mass. They need gigantic, you know, wood poles that have a lot of rope and sales and canvas on it. So a lot of people who aren't afraid of heights. Exactly. So it's hard to have, you know, when you have your guns low and pointing to the left or to the right, you don't have to worry about all of that nonsense upstairs. But, you know, when you're doing guns that can move back and forth, you want them up higher because you want them to be able to go left and right and up and down. They have to or to go shoot into the back or if, hey, turn it around 180 degrees, the whole purpose of it. But also you don't really want to

shoot through your mass, as it turns out. The only way for these, yeah, well, the only way for these things to be useful is they have to be set high, high, high up onto the ship. Now, if you have been listening to this show for long enough, or you know anything about engineering, high center of gravity, not a great idea for anything. A bunch of like famous warships, all of which just capsized instantly because they fucked up the weight on like where the guns were. That was when it was low down, even like Mary Rose, Vasa, tons of these. Yeah. So all of the original kind of plans. Tons of ship is still one ship. Well, okay, fine. Two ships. Yeah.

So there's a lot of turret ships that were made before this one. There's the, as we talked about, the Prince Albert. There's all kinds of this like, let's just put one, put two on it. You know, very simple, simple things where they say, we have a ship. Let's put a turret on it. Let's float it around and see how it does. And it's, you know, it doesn't really have to go into battle, but people can do drills on it. You know, they do, you know, how long does it take to fire? You know, and each time is like about two minutes with a team that knew what the fuck they were doing, which it wasn't all the time. But if you're doing coastal defense, what else do you have to do other than, you know, drills back and forth about how to turn the thing left

and right? So the original Coles original plans with one turret ship, what it had kind of a a low profile mast and rigging system, and it's called the HMS Monarch. So there's no, this first one that Coles designed was just like, what if we took any old ship and just put this thing on it? And, you know, we're not going to change the forecast when we're not going to change the poop deck. Two things. I know. But the forecast, when you look at a ship, and there's a forward part that's like higher up, and that's where like the captain's quarters are and whatever, that's the forecast. So the poop deck is the same thing, but on the back, it's basically the roof of these, of these kind of cabin areas. So you have now effectively just made well shooting

forward and backward is completely useless because we have a whole bunch of boat here. And this is why they kept kind of saying like, Coles, look, we like the idea, but you got to fuck off with your ideas because they're not, they're not good. You don't have good ideas. So Coles, not a man to be told no, because he was rich and white and British. He decided to launch an entire attack politically in all the newspapers and anything against Robert Spencer Robinson, who was the controller of the Navy at the time. He's basically like, fuck this guy, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He's going to ruin all these things. From that day to this. I'm the only one who can design this.

You're like rice of appeal as a naval officer. If your chain of command doesn't like something, is you just kind of like start attacking them in public in the press and just hope that that works. Like that's how the federation. You're right. They still do that. That's just Twitter. This is Coles didn't have Twitter at the time. He just had to write very long letters to his friends at the newspapers. So he pestered these guys so much that they finally just said, fine, fuck it, go away and you can build your ship, which is not a great start to building the ship, is you're bothering us too much and we want you to stop. That ensures quality control.

It's nothing but nothing but good times and good vibes. Next slide, please. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks to get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at Patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. There we go. Now there is the captain. So let's take a look at this ship. The idea was sin. It's like a cause-of-way demonstration. That's about the same. Here's the plan. This looks like a row, row ship, but like the entire side comes off. Yeah, there's no dual. It's collapsible. Don't worry about it. Yeah, so it's just a balsa wood ship. It's fine. So this is the captain. Now, let's talk about this design as we are discussing that you

immediately notice. So the reasoning for what we're looking at is they decided that they were going to put four guns and two turrets on the top of this thing. But of course, as we said, it has to be up pretty high. So to balance out what they did is they went down below and they said, we're going to cut out all of this lower area. And the freeboard, which is basically the freeboard space is the space between the water line and the deck, which is usually at about 14 to 18 feet, depending on the weight of the ship. Your margin of error for getting your shoes wet. Right. And that's part of the balance in the balance. You go up and down and you want to stay away from the ocean as much as you can, obviously. So he decided here is like, well,

what we're going to do is we're going to actually make this eight feet off. Because the idea here is that when normal usage of this boat, it'll tilt side to side, but the water will simply wash over this lower deck onto the other side and help balance it out. It's a semi submersible. As long as both sides are open, you're not going to get the free surface effect as bad. That's true. That's science. The idea of it is at its core, it makes sense. Somebody thought this kind of through. It makes kind of sense. They've designed this, as you said, about eight feet and really it was more about six and a half feet after they put everything on because it's not just the gun, it's not just the turret, it's all the shielding, it's all the armor and everything.

So they've created this ship and they put this big gap underneath there. They're like, all right, let's get rid of the forecast. Let's get rid of the poop. There's nothing there. No, we don't need anything there. Let's get rid of everything on the bottom. We're going to create this false second deck that everybody's going to be on. Everybody said, cool, that sounds great, but this is not a coastal defense ship. This is not something that you go out and you tool around for a bit and then you go back. This is supposed to be an over the seas kind of long haul. 1860s Royal Navy, ocean going means ocean going. You could sit and take this thing to Hong Kong and back. They want to be able to do that with this. So they came up with all of this

and they said, well, we've got all this space down here and we need a place to put things that you need for a boat like your sailors, the food for the sailors, the water for the sailors, the things for the sailors, all of your ammunition. Are your rats need to be somewhere? Rats got to have a home too. I don't think it'd be porno mags. I think it'd be porno wood cuttings. Look at the toes on that girl. Yeah, look at the ankles. Oh, look how long the s's are. So they have this idea and you know what? They took it out for a couple of trials and they're like, you know what? This isn't that bad of an idea. It kind of works.

But again, where do you put your boat stuff? Where do you put your sailors? So they're like, well, what if we just put a little forecastle down here, just down here, not up on top where it's going to interfere with the turret, just down here between the main deck and the second deck? And then they said, you know what? We got all these things. We have all these boxes of things that we need for a ship. Things like ammunition, things like clothes. Yeah. So you got to put that stuff somewhere. So they're like, well, we got this big open area down there. Lash all that shit on down there. We're going to be perfectly fine. So they took the captain out. They had to do shore and gunnery trials. It did great. It was doing wonderful.

And, you know, the water slashed back and forth and everything was working great. So they said, look, we're going to start taking it out on some real maneuvers. And they took it down to the Mediterranean. They had to be a part of a kind of, I don't know what a convoy of ship is, a flotilla, I don't know. But, you know, a bunch of boats get together and they go boat around somewhere. You know, you don't go out on your own as a military vehicle of any kind. You go out with a group. So they all go out and they have a good time up until about September 6th, 1870. Now we're at a specific date. So guess what? That's how you know it's good. That means something good is going to happen. Yeah. That's how you know the boat will work. That's when it's

going to get spicy. So there's a bit of a squall. Not a big one, but not a small one either. And they noticed that the captain was kind of healing left and right. And they put it at about 18 degrees. And they're like, well, that's fine. It should be able to survive up to like 25. Now, when they say should, that doesn't mean that they went out and tested it and like tipped it. And this is like, does it, if we do it, if we do it this far? The calculations we made a 12 year old do. Didn't they have computer modeling back then? Unfortunately, CAD crashed on them. And so they had to do it all by hand. They're adding CAD. Yeah. Should have called up Charles Babbage for this one. So around midnight, the ship heals and it heals and it heals. And then suddenly,

there's another, there's a small boat with about 27 people on it saying the boat sank. Killed 480 people on this one ship. Which I don't know how. Where were they? I discovered that it's sort of an exhibition thing. It kills the commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean squadron. It kills its designer, which I like. It also kills, and this is a real way to lose favor and lose influence. It kills both sons of the secretary of state for war and the first lord of the Admiralty. So suddenly, very unpopular. Charles is lucky he died on this. Yeah, genuinely. Because he would have died somewhere else. This is like a sort of like a prestige assignment, right? This is something you get your like

fail son on. And you can be like, hey, check out the future. Look at the new boat. You definitely won't die on it. Yeah. It's a new ship. There's like 17 more ships out here. What could possibly go wrong? And what possibly goes wrong is that, you know, you don't really have like technology to talk to each other. So like when it flipped over, it took like 10 minutes to sink. But nobody really knew down, Mr. Bond. Yeah. Yes. Boat tip over and goes goodbye afterwards. So the subsequent court martial, everything about this ship was pretty much fucked from the beginning. The stabilizing weight wasn't wasn't good enough, like the the ballast weight wasn't good enough because they lowered the freeboard. The incline tests were done, but the results were not like

published before they took it out to sea. The inquiry found the captain was built in deference to the public opinion expressed in parliament in an opposition to views and opinions of the controller of his department. They went around the guy by going to public opinion or like let me build my weird boat. The other detail about this that I found is that Coles was also like sick for most of the time they were building it. Don't know with what, like for all I know, or something. Yeah, he was just wasting disease. Shitting out of his ass or whatever. And so, oh, you know, whatever the drawings sort of pass him by, he's like, yeah, probably the best place to shit admittedly. But that's true. If you're using another orifice, that's not so good. Like

out of your ear, that's a problem. Out of your mouth, baby. Yeah, it's just podcasting. Yeah. You guys pay for this. Yeah. Shitting out of his one. Yeah. So yeah, they pretty much found out that everything none of this should have happened. This entire thing was completely avoidable. It had anybody, you know, stopped and thought and you know, just been like maybe maybe we tell this guy to fuck off instead of just saying, yeah, here you go, have some money and like some of our favorite sons and put them on a boat and let's see what happens. Because usually what happens is everybody dies. So so next slide, please. So we're going to get we're going to get some aftermath here. Now this is a

memorial plaque at the Westminster Abbey. There is also an entire stained glass window dedicated to the to the sinking of the captain. They're really not hiding their light under a bushel in terms of how badly they got owned here. I probably saw this when I was 11 and don't remember it. This is like also an interesting use of perishing in the service of your country, because the service you're providing to your country is like your country now. Yeah, your country now knows that this kind of boat doesn't work anymore. Turns out eight feet of freeboard was a bad idea. Yeah. JK Simmons saying, well, what did we learn? I guess we learned not to do that again,

didn't we? I was about to say, I think the Vikings figured that out. Maybe the ancient Greek side. I watched 300 part two and none of those Greeks had turret guns. So Calper was trying to do something different. But I think the Greeks had more than eight feet of freeboard, too. Didn't the monitor itself sink because of like basically the same issue of having like no freeboard? You got to stop like in you have to invent better waterproofing if you're going to have water shouldn't be on the ship. If it is, it shouldn't get in the ship, because the thing about water is that it's very gregarious. And if it gets into your ship, it invites all of its friends. And then they all drag you down and to like hang out with them forever.

Yeah. And also there's lots of salt in it. There's lots of fish poop in it. Also not good. Don't want any of that in area. You want to stay dry because apart from anything else, you know, you make your best decisions when you don't have like wet socks or whatever, which you will have your drowning. Absolutely. So so next slide, please. So governments will absolve themselves of wrongdoing. And that was going to be the case here. Scott, this is Scottish scientist John Scott Russell. He wrote in this period. What's that? Is that Lord Kelvin? Because like everything around here is named after this guy. If so. Well, he's like the father of fluid dynamics. I think he may genuinely be.

He built the Great Easter. No, that was his embarking number now. Yeah, William Williams. John Scott Russell was a Scottish civil engineer, naval architect and shipbuilder who built Great Eastern in collaboration with Isambar Kingdom, Brunel. Literally the first sentence of the wiki. Okay. This is the podcast where we do our research. He's really excited when he's right for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, you know, you know who built Great Eastern? Workers. Questions from a worker who reads, you know, you know who I think built Great Eastern? It's aliens. Yeah, I'll also take aliens because I think it upsets Roz. It was the tartarians.

You did the wave line system and the Doppler effect. We're about to get a bunch of comments. I'm not like the JFK people that like, yo, you actually didn't do the most basic research about the tartarians. It's really sloppy how you didn't do any research into tartaria. You could have at least skimmed the Wikipedia before you mentioned it on the show. Hey, man, what do you think I did most of the research here? Go watch Mia Molder's video about tartaria, actually. That's really good. That's a good one. Yeah, I watched that one. That was good. So Russell in McMillan's goes through pretty much everything that we're talking about here.

A big chunk of technical specifications once they came in. He also points out that this all could have been avoided had the Admiralty just told Coles to fuck off. Every bit of this could have stopped. They had some more self-respect instead of allowing themselves to be bullied. You're the navy. Don't be bullied by a man. How are you as a navy being bullied by a man? I was about to say, he's just a man. You have ships with guns. Right. Shoot him. Shoot him. Like, yes, you can't turn it left and right yet, but you could just make him run up and down and you'll be fine. You get him. He also calls out the shipbuilders. He calls out the House of Commons because no one who

knew how to build ships was actually involved in this. They didn't go find a German, I guess, to help them with engineering. And he points out in this that the military, that the navy is supposed to be war and not for political favor, which is thankfully a thing that we never see happen again after this. Everybody learned. Yeah, that's absolutely true. Yeah. So I have a quote here. In his own business, every Englishman would repudiate and, excuse me, would repudiate and ridicule the interference of an ignoramus in matters of his own knowledge or trade. Is it patriotism or want of patriotism, which makes English citizens elevated to the rank

of legislators dabble most earnestly in those matters of public safety, which they do not understand? All of those questions are answered by the captain. As we see, all these things are going to happen and everybody's going to fucking die because nobody wants to, you know, nobody wants to say, look, you don't know how to build a ship. Shut the fuck up. I know how to build a ship. You build the gun, I'll build a ship like the A-10. Somebody built a gun, they built an airplane around it. Do that. Yes. So Russell points out that everybody, you know, who knew how to do it, like somebody should have stopped it and nobody does. And he blames the politicians for letting Coles get as far as he did, but really absolves Coles because, you know, it's not Coles' fault,

nobody stopped him, which is... You let this idiot sort of fly the plane, so to speak. Right. Yeah. It's your own fault for being bullied by a guy. Like, don't... You're the Navy, right? Get it together. He posted some mean fucking tweets and then you just collapsed under it like this. You can't do that. So in the end, he had a final verdict and that is on our final slide here. Lost by the actors. Yes. It's a mysterious act of God's love. Right, of course. So I hope you all learned that if you're going to make a boat, make it a boat and not whatever the fuck the captain was because that was not a boat. I would say generally speaking, if you are making an ocean-going vessel,

you should have more than eight feet of freeboard. I am holding my lighter in the air and I'm yelling at the band on stage, freeboard. Freeboard. Freeboard. I don't give a shit about the time change signature. Time signature change. Shut up. Play it. Fucking disaster. Yeah, and it killed 800 people and it killed, like you said, I was so many people who were like the sons of important people. Like, this is at a time... Now, I would hope that most people would be smart enough to be like, oh, that experimental ship, that looks cool. I'm not going to put my song on it though. You go ahead and put all those other dipshits out on it. If it goes out and comes back a few times, we're going to be fine. And to be fair,

everybody was lured into a false sense of security because it did all right. It didn't sink. It was involved in an earlier squall and it didn't sink. So everybody's like, how cool. It works. It's not like one of those. It went out and then immediately just sank and everybody died. They were lured. The HMS captain called the siren call of like, no, it's totally safe. Look at me. I go 18 degrees one way and the 18 degrees the other. My water washes from one side to the other and it's great. Let's go to the Mediterranean guys. Whoops, I'm upside down now. Moral of the story is if you see a ship with a big hole in it, don't go to that ship. Don't get on it. Don't put holes in your ship. It's the wrong kind of vehicle

to have a conversable on. Yes. So that's all I have on the captain. Fantastic. Well, I think we all learned a lot and, you know, namely, don't put a big hole in the side of the ship. Or leave the hole open. Don't put a hole in it. Like that was an engineered hole. There was a whole reason for that hole. There are holes in the bottoms of ships that are for like, you know, build something or other, you know, water comes in, water goes out. But like, if you're going to put a hole in there specifically, don't immediately block them up. Something I'm always saying, if you're going to get an engineered hole put in, you have to go to the experts. Right. Like sometimes you need a hole. Sometimes you don't. If you need a hole, put a hole there. If you don't, plug your hole

up. Fine. Water goes in, water comes out. You can't explain that. If the water needs to go into your hole and come back out, then it should do that. Don't deny your hole the water it deserves. Jesus fucking Christ, people. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Hello. Hello, Justin, Alice, Liam and guest. In the field of commercial archaeology. Accidents are thankfully very rare, but they do happen. That's true. I've seen some documentaries where like a commercial archaeologist gets chased by

like a big Rolling Stone bull out of a temple. You know, not sometimes Nazis are there. Indiana Jones is an academic archaeologist, not a commercial one. Yeah, Alice, you're thinking of Jurassic Park, buddy. Ah, OK, OK. They are also not commercial archaeologists there. Shut the fuck up. That's a alien archaeologist. A commercial archaeologist is like. Let's go. Let's go. Tell the story. I want to get drunk. Commercial archaeologists is like when you have somebody who is really pretty and pretends to be an archaeologist for the TV.

So a commercial archaeologist is like the French guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? It's always the French guy. No, a commercial archaeologist is when you are you are doing some kind of infrastructure or building project in a protected area where there may be archaeological remains. So you have to go and do an archaeological dig before you build the new thing. Like if you're let's say hypothetically, you were trying to build a metro station in the Roman Forum. Well, you need to bring in some commercial archaeologists to do some excavations before and as you do the main excavation, right? Which is why that metro station has taken so long to build because they keep finding stuff because it's the goddamn forum.

Right. Fucking Romans and they're building things to last. Fucking Romans and Atreskians and whoever was before that. I heard on a TikTok that Rome wasn't real, so you're obviously just making this up because you're late. The phrase I heard. That's a time hypothesis. Yes. No, no, no. This is a different one. This is like this. That Rome was an amalgamation of, quote, Native European cultures, unquote. Shut the fuck up. No, I wasn't.

No, I'm imagining the idea is that there are no primary sources by Romans, which is not in like that. That is nowhere near true. Only the dumbest possible sense, like if what you're saying is. There's no Rome because there's absolutely no way that Romulus could have been suckling the teeth of a wolf to survive. All right. Yeah, that's fine. That's not possible. Everything else is bullshit after that. I'm just imagining you're in northern Italy and you have to make a land acknowledgement to the people of Cisalpine Gaul. Land acknowledgement for the Visigoths.

The sea beans, yeah. European land acknowledgments go fucking hard. This is going to be from like stolen Pictish land. Yeah. I mean, just living anywhere in the German countryside has got to be confusing as hell. This is on stolen oppression land. Hour and a half long land acknowledgement for every different part of the Holy Roman Empire that's been over those lands. Just finally get up to the Ottoman Empire and then be like, and then the Soviets took over, I guess. So here we go.

This is unseeded Umesh land. Anyway, in the field of commercial archaeology, accidents are thankfully very rare. But if they do happen, especially if people, they do happen, especially if people ignore established safety protocols. This is a story of supervision failure and how a quote common sense unquote approach to health and safety leads to accidents. That matters. Those were single quotes, not doubles. But the rules are there for a reason. But first, what is commercial archaeology? We've been over this.

Indiana Jones sells out. All right, we already went through this. In many parts of the world, archaeology has to be undertaken before any construction work, but it's the not mitigated. The not fun explanation we get. Yes, exactly. It's the not fun kind of archaeology. This is paid for by whoever is doing the development under the polluter pays principle, right?

In terms of the day to day, it involves archaeologists and excavating features like pitches, pits, foundations and graves, not just to recover finds from inside of them, but crucially to build up an understanding of the order in which these features were created. And from there, constructed a story of how a place, which is the site, changed and developed over time. It's basically being a history detective. Here is a picture of a pretty typical archaeological site, showing features and excavated segments among them. Now the story. I turned up midway through a large ongoing project.

It was part of a national infrastructure project, and there are about 40 archaeologists, many of them inexperienced. There was also a gang of ground workers to push our wheelbarrow for us, a highly unusual state of affairs I had never encountered before nor since. Yeah, archaeologists swore off of those guys after they threw them the idle, and then they wouldn't throw them the vine back. Shortly before I arrived, there had been an accident. Now, when we dig features, we typically dig a segment and leave one or two vertical sections

as in a cross section, so that we can see how the deposit sits on top of one another. The section is the weakest part of the segment, especially if you don't dig perfectly plumb and undermine it. As an industry standard, we don't dig below 1.2 meters without shoring or stepping, because being in a hole is a confined space. That's true. It's dangerous. I'm just saying this.

Yeah, because again, this is putting a hole where a hole doesn't really belong, so you got to be careful about your holes. This will be essentialist about this. You can put a hole wherever you want. You can, but sometimes holes are dangerous. That's all I'm saying. On very sandy sites, which this one was, that limit should be even less, because the ground is soft and more prone to collapse.

Well, they had a section collapse in a way that was completely predictable and 100% unavoidable. One of the aforementioned less experienced archaeologists had reached a 1.2 meter level in depth and kept going down to about 1.4 meters, almost out of her own depth when stood up. In addition, she had situated her wheelbarrow right on top of the section, which is the weakest point, right above her, and so was raising the spoil way over our head to load it. It's just like digging and tossing it over her head, just into the wheelbarrow, like a cartoon character. Exactly. Well, that's smart, because then you don't have to move it again out of the spoil way

into the wheelbarrow. It's just like those guys on YouTube who make the secret underground houses, you know? Oh, god. A man's desire to tunnel is just one that you have to let him have. That's true, but this is apparently a woman, though. Well, archaeologists in general, I feel, are just always itching to dig a hole somewhere. They're all technically men. Again, let's not be a sensualist about this.

Below is a picture of this sort of unsafe situation when I drew a box around. That's a steel wheelbarrow with a 90-liter capacity. Sand weighs about 1.6 kilograms a liter. I don't know what these measurements mean. A safe load is about 60 liter, but you can keep piling it as high as you like. You will notice in the picture, I have barely loaded my wheelbarrow because I am not a dumb ass. Well, the inevitable happened. While she was crouched in the bottom of the hole, the section gave way, and with it came

tumbling down on top of her a fully laden wheelbarrow. Luckily, she was quickly extracted, but suffered a concussion and a fractured collar bone. She was lucky and got off lightly. But following the incident, the principal contractor banned us from pushing our own wheelbarrows and forked out for the ground workers to do it for us. No, you don't qualify to use these. I can't. Are you forklift qualified?

Fuck that. Are you wheelbarrow qualified? Wheelbarrow qualified. Can you handle a wheelbarrow college boy? Seemingly not, you know? Apparently not, no. But how is this allowed to happen? It seems like pretty common sense that you don't dig yourself a grave-shaped hole,

put yourself into it, and then position your spoil right on top of yourself at the weakest part, ready to fall in and bury you. But common sense isn't that common. The most confusing, like, suicide attempt by Wiley Coyote here. But common sense isn't that common, and that's why we have rules. So what happened to the rules in this case? Ordinarily. It just didn't follow him, I guess, right?

Ordinarily, you'd have between five to ten archaeologists on a site with one supervisor to run the day-to-day and a project officer looking after the big picture stuff. The site had 40 people, with one project officer we saw once every other day, and two supervisors who'd been hastily promoted above the level of their competence, because they were most experienced of a pretty inexperienced bunch. This is a symptom of chronic workforce underinvestment and the race to the bottom that is British archaeology. Oh, don't tell me that.

Don't tell me that apart from everything else we're underfunding in this country, like, I've made my peace intellectually with the idea that we're underfunding the shit that matters, like the nurses and the teachers and the firefighters, not to say that this doesn't matter, right? But it's a slightly lower priority to me than those, right? If you're telling me that the rot is setting in there too, and we can't even fucking like, yeah, like, dig the fucking Roman coins out of the ground without that being like- You can take my nurses, you can take my doctors, but my fucking commercial archaeologist,

where does it- Yes! Yeah, genuinely. We draw our line this far, no further. This is meant to be like private sector shit that makes a profit, like, even by its own logic capital is failing here, and yeah, no, I don't know why that bothers me, but it really does, you know? Just pick up any old guy with an archaeology degree. It's a very common one, right?

You know, that's one of those- No, but like, I'm like, I understand the idea of we're not training enough doctors, not enough people are going to medical school, right? But in my head, part of that was like, oh, everybody's doing a bunch of other stuff, you know, maybe all the like, doctors are doing archaeology degrees. Nobody's doing the fucking archaeology degrees either. Where did all these people go? What happened?

I remember when I was- Don't say COVID to me, because I know, but like- When I first started working for the city of Philadelphia a long time ago, I came across a book showing all the prevailing wages, and that was like, you know, you get like, one of the first wages noted was an archaeologist. I was like, what the fuck did they need archaeologists for? Now we know. This, yeah, and it turns out archaeology is actually very important

to the construction process, which is surprising that they're so underpaid, considering, you know, archaeology is like, you know, that's certainly one of the- I know archaeologists, it's not strange that they're- You become an archaeologist because you love the dig holes and like study old shit, not because there's a lucrative like money gain in this. Yeah, my cousin- The highest paid archaeologists are the ones who consistently come in and say, yep, nothing here.

That guy is so good at his job. Not to be too into the whole sort of like managed decline thing, but is there a single field of like study or expertise or work that isn't like, sort of on its knees at this point? Yeah, it's called crypto. Yeah, that's not even true anymore. Business schools, Harvard law schools, and crypto mining. When I was at law school, there were the beginnings of this happening,

even at like prestigious law schools. If you are in a field, right, and you feel that your field, whatever it is, is doing good, is doing well, you're happy with what you're doing, please write in in the comments, because I would love to hear from someone, whether that's like HVAC guys or a fucking brain surgeons, I would love to hear someone say, yeah, it's going great, no problems here. Just for my own mental health. I went to business school, I got a degree in addition,

then I went and got in my MBA, I can do long division now as well. I work with accountants, and I do often just be like, wow, you guys got a degree in doing math, huh? And reading the law and filling out the account. Accountancy is an actual profession, I will say that. I know I fuck with them, but I know because I do know how unnecessarily complicated our taxes are, but it's not like this, because of anything other than societal decline, I suppose.

Yeah, I hate living in societal decline. I'd like to be living in societal good, more go up line. Well, look, everybody always thinks that they're living in the end times. So, and eventually it will be because you'll die too. So it's fine, but one day, take heart because one day you too will die. So it's fine. And I'll get dug up by a commercial archaeologist, maybe.

And also shut up about it. Yeah, they'll dig it up, they'll dig you up and just be like, look at this man. Look at this. Just fold both of my middle fingers up so that when the rest of me rots, like the bones are still in that position, put me in a museum like that. You should bury me face down so when you dig me up, you can kiss my ass. We should find a way to do bone tattoos so that when you dig me up.

Oh, I don't like that. I don't like that. I like that. I heart mom and, you know, don't use my dead name right on my femur. You want to hear an unsettling statement that is absolutely true? Your bones are wet. Yeah, of course. Of course they are.

One of those things that doesn't make sense and isn't intuitive unless you've taken one anatomy class. I haven't. So like, for instance, when you pee, the pee is coming out of, that's blood. That's blood that's getting filtered. It's not coming. It doesn't have anything to do with your digestive system directly. It's coming through your blood.

Yeah, there's correct pissing blood and then there's incorrect pissing blood. Yes, yeah. The important thing is to know the difference. Exactly, you know, the human body is disgusting. That's right. That's what I always tell you. Yes, but people think that they piss out of their intestines or stomachs or something and then it goes to the kidneys.

It's like, no, it doesn't. I challenge any woman to know where she pees from. You can't do it. Thank you. Let's wrap this bitch up. Yeah, my seven-year-old daughter last night was her way of... You don't know where you piss from. That's not my problem.

She was asking me if she didn't want to have kids because she doesn't want to have to have surgery to have the babies taken out. It's like, I don't know. I don't know. Like, she's homeschooled, so this is obviously our fault. But I was like, I don't know where you get these ideas, but we're going to have to get a book from the library, I guess. I mean, they do say this area in sections, you know.

I told you that I had no idea where I peed from. And then I cried and you know. You said it was not possible. I said, oh, it is. And I started asking people and you found out I was right. What? How are you 27 years old and you don't know where you pissed from? What?

I have a general idea. I mean, I know the rye milk, milk lemonade around the corner fudge is made, right? I know again. This entire show is I have a general idea. Oh, my God. That's all right. That's that. That's a podcast.

That's a podcast. Have a good night. No, we didn't. We didn't quite finish the safety third. Oh, god damn it. I still got to plug my pot in my podcast, too. Don't run away yet. Yeah.

I don't know whether it was because the supervisors were stretched too thin to timid to call out and correct unsafe working practices. Or if they were willing to put getting the job done quickly above getting it done safely, maybe a little of all three. Either way, it was a colossal failure of responsibility on their part. Keep up the good work and thank you for making my work day a little more interesting from Mike. Oh, this is going to be interesting. Thanks, Mike.

Sorry you have to live in that one row house in Franklin with all of the other mikes. Yes. Mike, you do good work. I'm glad that we have commercial archaeologists. Yes, I also was fucked up to try and like punch Indiana Jones into that propeller. But you know, you do you. You do you go to do. Our next episode is on the Boston molasses disaster.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go? 01:23:39,820 --> 01:23:42,780 We have your time to shine, buddy. OK, yes. So yes, I am on I have a podcast called what a hell of a way to die. If you are a listener here and maybe you've got some tangential connection to the military, maybe you were a soldier yourself and you got out and you're like, boy, that was real fucking stupid. But you know, you want to listen to a little soldier soldiery media that isn't full of a

bunch of right wing chuds with gigantic beards. What a hell of a way to die is the podcast for you. We have a Patreon. We have a Patreon. We have bonus episodes. We have a store where I sell all kinds of things like stickers and patches and whatnot. So go do all of those things. Twitter is collapsing.

So this is this is what we have now is just being on each other's shows. Yes. Asking you for five dollars. It's a pleasure to have you on. And we are all asking you for five dollars, all of us. We have we have live shows to advertise, don't we? We have one live show to advertise underground arts in Philadelphia December 8th.

It is show number three. Show number three is different from shows number one and two because shows number one and two will be the same. Show number three will be different. I just restated the same thing. Come see two shows in a row if you want, you know, if you want. Yes, if you want to see podcast delirium in person. Yes, that's right.

Yeah, it'll be it'll be a horrible rolling disaster show. Come see it. I will call in try not to sound like a robot this time. It'll be a good time. Yes. Yes. Well, we got to go down there and actually figure out the audio setup. But yeah, this is December 8th.

It is I'd forget the time. It's at underground arts in Philadelphia. The third show has not sold out yet. I will put a link to the tickets. But if you bought tickets to show one or two and you want more show, come to show three because again, it will be different. You won't be bored unless it's bad. Which it could be.

I don't know. And jump on this because given the speed with which the first two sold out, this will sell out pretty fucking quick. So buy tickets, buy tickets quickly. Our next our next show is Boston Molasses Disaster. And we will see you next time. Next time. Yes.

Next time. Same bad time, same bad channel. That's right. Yeah. Good night. Bye everyone.