STBYM Listener Mail: Bringer of Jollity
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, listener mail. My name is Joe McCormick. My regular co-host Robert Lamb is out today, so I'm going to be recording this episode solo, but Rob is going to be back with me on mic for all new episodes very soon.

We'll get to your messages in just a minute. But first, I wanted to say, if you're a fan of the podcast and you've never written in before, now would be a great time to do it. You can reach us at contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com. All types of messages are welcome. We love feedback to recent episodes, especially if you have something interesting you would like to add to a topic we've talked about.

You can also write in with corrections if necessary. If you've got questions or you're curious about our opinion on something, if there's a topic you think would make for a good episode, or if you just want to say hello, let us know where you listen from, how you found out about the show, what you like about the show. All of that is fair game. Contact

at StuffToBlowYourMind.com. Okay, this first message comes from repeat correspondent Renata. This came in after the series Rob and I did about the great red spot of Jupiter. And JJ, if you can, let's throw on a little bit of Gustav Holst's Jupiter theme from the planets. ♪

Alright, Renata says,

And folks, if you want to go back and listen to the episode that Renata is referring to there, I think it was just called Musical Frieson, spelled F-R-I-S-S-O-N, about that feeling when music gives you goosebumps. I believe I did that as an episode with former producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. So yeah, you can look that up in the archive if you want to give it a listen. Anyway, Renata's message continues.

This is a great opportunity to bring up Joanne Simpson, the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in meteorology in 1949. Joanne Simpson was a pioneering atmospheric scientist whose work dramatically advanced our understanding of tropical meteorology, particularly regarding tropical convection, cloud dynamics, and tropical cyclones.

She got her pilot's license during World War II and flew into scary storms for her early research. Sometimes she would even bring her young son. You almost certainly referenced her work in your research as well as that of Robert Simpson, her husband. No relation to the Simpsons, though I'm sure they did not appreciate the Simpsons getting the Coriolis effect wrong.

Joanne worked for NASA, and while she worked on satellites for studying clouds on Earth, she didn't directly study other planets. However, her work on how individual thunderstorms self-organize into larger weather systems like hurricanes helped scientists theorize how giant storms on Jupiter, like the Red Spot and White Ovals, might form and persist.

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM satellite, which she worked on, advanced the use of spaceborne radar and microwave instruments to measure rainfall and vertical cloud structure, helping to design and interpret data of Juno and earlier missions to Jupiter and Saturn, especially in understanding moist convection and deep atmospheric motions beneath the cloud tops. Anyway, I could go on.

Also, Joanne Simpson was my grandma. She passed away in 2010. It's fun to hear her work coming into play in a Stuff to Blow Your Mind episode. Thank you for all you do, Renata.

Wow. Well, thank you, Renata. That is a really cool family connection. So after we got your email, I went and I read more about Joanne Simpson's biography, including one piece that was her 2010 memoriam in EOS, the News Journal of the American Geophysical Union. This was an article by a UVA environmental scientist named Michael Garstang.

And after reading this, I was thinking about Joanne Simpson's work in the context of Jupiter. And one interesting parallel is that, as we talked about in the episode, Jupiter's weather and atmospheric circulation is driven mostly not by solar energy, but by heat that emanates from deep within Jupiter itself due to gravitational contraction, the gravitational squeezing of the planetary mass.

So heat wells up from below, and that heat coming up from below provides most of the energy that drives Jupiter's weather. Now, Earth is not like that. By contrast, Earth's atmosphere gets almost all of its energy ultimately from the sun. But that does not mean you should think about the Earth's atmosphere and its weather patterns and atmospheric circulation as being driven by heat from above, right?

So Garstang writes in this piece about Joanne Simpson, quote,

This led her to not only contribute to the fledgling field of air-sea interaction, but also to make notable contributions to the concepts of heat islands, land-sea breezes, and other surface-to-atmosphere connections.

So in other words, Joanne Simpson focused on the ways that weather patterns and atmospheric circulation are driven from below by radiation, convection, and also by evaporation, because evaporated moisture from the ocean and from the land that flows.

moisture in the air is sometimes referred to in atmospheric sciences as latent heat. That's still a type of energy that water vapor can then condense and fall back down as rain. So that contributes to the energy of storms as well. But these things, the radiation, the convection, and the evaporation from the land masses and the seawater

that were originally heated by the sun, those are the things that really drive atmospheric circulation and weather and storms. So in a way, though the original source of the energy is different, Earth and Jupiter both have this weather from below principle in common.

There are also a lot of great stories about Joanne Simpson's preference for actual sensing of data about clouds from directly in the sky, like using airplanes equipped with sensors to gather data about clouds from up in the air and being on those flights herself, as Renata was talking about. So again, thank you, Renata. Very, very cool connection. Your grandma was a cool lady.

Okay, next, I think I'm going to jump into a couple of responses to our series on P-mail. This was a collection of episodes that Rob and I did about animal communication based on the medium of urine. Of course, humans have language in its many forms, but lots of other animals from dogs to dolphins to lobsters apparently share vital, sometimes complex information through their pee.

And one of the things we talked about in these episodes was the role of olfaction, the sense of smell, which is the main sense that a lot of land animals like dogs used to read the pee mail of others. And it's amazingly weird to imagine living in the smell world of a dog being so much more sensitive than us.

to olfactory information, being able to read so much of social and even probably emotional relevance from these volatile chemical signals. So I don't know, it's like we talked about imagining a physical environment all marked up with little bits of smell-based poetry.

And from this, Rob made a comparison to a character from a Terry Pratchett novel who is a werewolf detective with extreme olfactory sensitivity from her wolf side. So she could kind of see into the past, like who was in what room, where, even where they stood and so forth because of smells. Anyway, on to this message from Skyler, subject line, P-mail, the nose knows, says,

Hey, there's a cool TV show, The Sniffer. It's a Russo-Ukrainian cop show about a consultant with a superhuman sense of smell that he uses to solve the most impossible of cases. It's quite good. I watched it on Netflix a decade or so ago, though I don't know if it's still there. Great stuff as usual. Skylar.

Well, thank you, Skylar. I've never seen this show. It seems to share an angle with that example Rob was talking about because the idea of is like a super smeller as a detective. And this got me thinking about other characters with super senses of smell.

Obviously, you've got like comic book heroes like Wolverine from the X-Men. I think maybe Sabretooth has super smell as well. And in that vein, for rather obvious reasons, characters with super smell a lot of times have animal connections. Maybe they're part animal or they transform into an animal or they've been injected with super animal serum like they're part wolf or something.

you know, that's a pretty clear connection why that would be because we know a lot of animals have more powerful and more socially relevant senses of smell than us. So that, that kind of, you know, grafts on to, to a humanoid, to a humanoid hero who gets their powers. Of course, a lot of characters like the one you're bringing up from this detective show and the one Rob was talking about tend to use super smell powers as a, as a kind of investigation aid, like sensing the past or sensing things that are invisible and,

I was trying to think about other characters. It's been a long time since I've read it, but I remember the narrator of Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie had a large nose that was always getting infected or congested or something. And then he has a medical operation. And after this, it turns out he can smell lies and smell the future and stuff. But anyway, I started thinking about how in fiction...

heightened physical senses are often not just literal physical senses but they're also metaphors for special emotional or cognitive sensibilities or sensitivities like

I was thinking about characters who are described as having sharp physical eyesight. I think that's a lot of times a metaphor for mental powers of observation and anticipation. Like you see things at a distance and thus see them coming earlier. And it tends to be a physical metaphor for cognitive attention to detail. So there's like an association between visual acuity and the psychological trait of conscientiousness.

Powerful hearing, I think a lot of times is a metaphor for the cognitive trait of discernment, like the ability to judge and decide well, and the ability to isolate relevant information and ignore what's irrelevant. I guess literally the mental power to separate signal from noise, an information term borrowed from auditory senses. So

super sight and super hearing, I think are the most common super senses in, in fictional storytelling, but the super smell does pop up sometimes. One trend I think is that a heightened smell is often treated as a bit more mysterious than super sight or super hearing. It,

is associated with spooky cognitive traits like intuition. You get a feeling about something or someone, but you couldn't say exactly why. And in fact, now that I think about it, smell as a physical metaphor for intuition is already there in common expressions in English, at least like somebody saying of a situation, this doesn't smell right or calling something fishy, you know, that manifests in my imagination, at least as a fishy smell.

And this is what we say when we have a feeling that something is not to be trusted, but it's difficult to spell out exactly why. Like you can't consciously connect to the dots, but something just feels off. And I don't know. Yeah. For some reason, we associate that with smell that may be connected to real physical and maybe neurological things about the sense of smell that, you know, smell is.

It's less connected to our conscious decision making, but it still connects to our emotions like smells are quite powerful in creating motivation states for a smell can very easily create an overwhelming attraction like to food or it can create repellent disgust. You know, there's hardly anything that drives you away from something faster than than like a rotten smell, right?

And yet it's harder to identify the point of origin for a smell than it is for an image in the mind or a sound. Also, it's common in nature for a smell to exist and be highly motivating, even though you don't know exactly what's causing it. Like a putrid smell can repel you even if you couldn't say what it was.

Not sure what all this adds up to, but I don't know. I guess I think it's interesting that we have this tendency to use super powers, including super senses, as ways of illustrating. They're kind of a shortcut to character development in a way. They serve as these metaphors for cognitive traits that you want to illustrate or psychological tendencies.

So I wonder if this applies to this detective, the Russo-Ukrainian detective show that I've never seen before. Like, does this detective character also tend to have a greater sense of intuition about things or something else that we tend to associate with with sensing the invisible? This episode is brought to you by Microsoft.

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Okay, this next message is from Kenna, and it's also about female. This message is referring to how in those episodes we talked about a study of urine scent marking behavior in dogs, which found that the smaller a dog is, typically the wider the angle of its legs when it does raised leg urine scent marking is.

And there could be a number of reasons to explain that. But one of the possible explanations was that smaller dogs were working harder to, quote, lie about their size in your insent marking, hoping to pee up higher on the object that they're marking in order to seem like they're a bigger dog than they are. Again, that interpretation is not for sure. But if that is the

In fact, the reason that's rather amusing, imagining these little dogs trying to pretend to be big. Kenna says, Hi, Robert and Joe. I was listening to your episode on pee communication and was surprised that the veterinarian you cited for reasons small dogs might lift their legs at a higher angle than large dogs didn't mention what I thought was obvious. In general, the larger and heavier the dog, the more likely they are to have hip or knee injuries.

Our vet from my childhood, uh, dog said that this was especially true for some pure breeds such as retrievers, but I'm not sure how much of that is sampling bias since labs and goldens are such popular breeds. You will get a lot more labs and lab mixes in practice than say purebred spaniels. Uh, love the show. Keep peeing scientific information directly into our faces. Kenna. Okay.

This next message is also from Kenna responding to our last listener mail episode. And in that episode, a listener named Jeff wrote in about an old nature book series from the 60s and 70s called Animals Do the Strangest Things. I think there was also one called Fish Do the Strangest Things. Oh, yeah, that was it because they had the archer fish and the angler fish. And among the many funny things about these books is

were that they would frequently refer to mating pairs of animals as husband and wife and also they had these passages with a sad clipped prosody and word choice so they ended up sounding like confessional poetry i remember there was a there was some passage in the fish book that was talking about anglerfish and it was like the husband anglerfish is now fused to his bride's body he doesn't have to go fishing anymore now he will never lose his wife in the dark

Anyway, following up on that, Kenna says, Hi, Rob and Joe. In response to your listener mail, I too had a copy of Fish Do the Strangest Things and Birds Do the Strangest Things. And my brother and I used to try to copy the drawings.

Mentioned in Fish was Granddad the Lungfish, who lived at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. We begged to go meet him. The tickets were expensive, but eventually our parents relented on the condition that we were actually going to spend the whole day at the aquarium and not beg to go see the Field Museum, our favorite part of Chicago, halfway through.

We did keep our promise, but our parents were not impressed by how long we spent with our faces smashed against the glass waiting for a large mud-colored fish to

tube to wake up and move. Sadly, Grandad is long gone, but I have passed the series on by way of a secondhand book website to multiple friends' children, some of whom now quote the passages about bowerbirds building houses for their wives. I guess someone is going to have to explain bigamy to them when they learn about herd animals, but that is not my problem. Kenna.

Well, thank you so much, Kenna. And as a special treat, I went looking for it and I managed to find at least part of the Bowerbird section from Birds Do the Strangest Things on the Internet. So this book, by the way, I believe the whole series, but at least this book is by Leonora and Arthur Hornblow. And it's got a section on the Bowerbirds called The Builder. I'm going to read one of the passages here. Quote,

One kind of bowerbird makes a garden of moss around a tree. Then he builds a house of twigs. Sometimes he builds it six feet tall. He wants his house and garden to be pretty. He puts leaves and moss and ferns all around. He makes little piles of berries, stones, shells, and flowers. When the flowers die, he throws them out and brings fresh ones. Bowerbirds are always looking for pretty things. They will even steal them from another bird's bower.

Okay, this next message is following up from a listener mail discussion after our series on cynicism. We were talking about whether the ever-present threat of digital scams is making us more cynical. Unfortunately, I think the answer is probably yes. I can explain more about that after the message. But this email is from Ian. Ian writes, subject line, digital scammers.

Dear Rob and Joe, I wanted to respond to another listener mail about scams surrounding home purchases and protective measures banks advise people to take, such as never clicking links, etc.

Regarding phone scams specifically, I have read, though cannot vouch for myself, that the scammers deliberately do things that should be red flags early in the call in an attempt to filter out people who are on alert for scams and not waste their time with them. That way, only people who are more likely to go through the whole process make it beyond the first few seconds of the call and the scammers can better focus their efforts.

Yeah, Ian, I've read about this, but it was in the context of email, I think. This was an explanation for why a lot of these initial scam emails have what seems like more grammar and spelling mistakes and weird formatting and things like that than you would expect. The explanation given is that this actually does help the scammer because, yeah, it helps narrow things down. You can imagine that the biggest problem

bottleneck on money flowing into the scam operation is actually the human scam operators time so they don't waste time going through the early steps in the scam with victims who are less likely to hand over the money in the end. Anyway, back to Ian's email. Having said that, I may be telling on myself by admitting that I was recently almost caught by a smisher smisher for SMS text message scamming.

I received a text message purporting to be from E-ZPass that my out-of-state toll road bill was due. By coincidence, I had in fact driven on an out-of-state toll road a couple of months before, but never received a bill. So I had in the back of my mind that I should be receiving one at some point.

When I saw the text, which in retrospect should have raised red flags, my first thought was, oh, finally, and I clicked the link. It was a standard short link format and didn't appear suspicious. It took me to a website that appeared legitimate at first blush, and I made it past the point of entering my address and phone number, and it was only on the page to enter my

payment information that I noticed it was for the wrong state. That set off warning bells. And then in looking closer, I noticed that the URL for the page was a gibberish URL and not something legitimate like company.com or state.gov.

At that point, I closed the page, thankfully, before entering my credit card, but it was a close thing. I'm an attorney and consider myself well-educated, reasonably intelligent, and appropriately skeptical. But because the text happened to catch me at the right time and happened to be something I'd been expecting, I almost fell for it. That's something that could happen to anyone. Thanks for a great show, Ian.

P.S. I have never been billed for my real toll road usage. Well, thank you, Ian. This is weird because literally within about 24 hours of this email coming in, I also personally got an EasyPass branded toll road scam text. And I'd never seen one of those before. So, Ian, I wonder if you and I were both part of some kind of rolling mass text wave that

But anyway, I really appreciate you writing in about this because I think this example illustrates several things about these scams that are really important to remember. You do not have to be dumb or gullible to fall for one of these scams.

Just like Ian says, the fact that you're capable, at least in some situations, of skeptical thinking does not make you immune. And the reason for this is that nobody actually operates in skeptic mode all the time. That would be impractical, obnoxious and absurd. You can't go through all of life and all situations alone.

looking for hard evidence and evidential verification if i'm the grocery store and i'm about to get a bunch of bananas and my wife tells me we already have bananas at home i just blindly believe her i i don't need to go back home and do a fruit check to verify she's probably right the cost of being wrong about this is trivial there's just no reason to put my guard up and go into evidence testing mode

And no matter how practiced of a skeptic you are, even if you're Carl Sagan or James Randi, you have to operate in banana faith mode for most situations in life. In fact, I think one of the core skills necessary for being a skeptic effectively is having a good sense for when to turn off your automatic trust and go into critical evidence seeking mode.

In fact, some of the studies we looked at in the cynicism episodes talked about this. I think the researchers called it a discriminant ability. That's the ability to tell the difference between situations where you should just trust and situations where you should not trust. But nobody is going to have a perfect record at this. Scammers are.

often get around your skeptical impulses by crafting their pitch in a way that is designed to bypass skeptical review. So the scam doesn't exactly defeat your evidence testing powers, but

It manages to slip by without you ever using them, sometimes by disguising itself as a plausible, mundane, familiar type of transaction. I think Ian's email is a good example here. So pay for usage of a road, of a toll road, etc.

Complete this form to receive your parcel. I bet a lot of people out there have gotten this one. You get a text message that's like, hey, you're waiting on a package, but it can't be delivered. Come enter your address. And it turns out this is a scam that's going to lead you to a form to fill in a bunch of information. There's like, oh, check out this email attachment. Just kind of a strange email. Please open the spreadsheet. Update your password, etc. These are all normal technology.

types of or at least seemingly normal types of communications from institutions and service providers. Nothing about them, unless you're on the lookout for scams of this sort, would really set off a red flag. They also take advantage of scale, like the scale of the number of different victims they can reach out to.

to leverage coincidences. This comes back to Ian's example with the toll road. So, you know, maybe the, the toll road scammer has some way of associating your phone number or your email address with usage data for toll roads. But I doubt that I, if I had to guess, I'd say Ian probably just got hit with a coincidence. The fact that he had used a toll road was expecting maybe to get a bill and then actually got one. And again,

This actually wouldn't be very uncommon because lots of people use toll roads. The scammers are spamming lots of phone numbers. And the same thing with text messages about like a parcel delivery. At any given time, a pretty large percentage of people are going to be waiting on some kind of package.

In other cases, the scam tries to bypass your skepticism, not by appearing to be something kind of innocuous and mundane, but by creating a heightened state of emotion and motivation that clouds your judgment.

Sometimes they do this by taking advantage of our desire for something like money or romantic relationships. You know, there are a lot of get rich quick scheme scams or romance scams, or they work by creating a state of fear. Like this message is from the IRS. You owe back taxes. And if you don't pay within 24 hours, we will issue an arrest warrant and you'll be subject to up to 10 years in prison.

They're trying to create a sense of fear and urgency to keep you from slowing down and thinking clearly about what's going on. So anyway, the point in the end being these tactics really do work and they don't just work on dumb people or people who don't have the ability to think skeptically. They work on people who are capable of thinking clearly and skeptically in other situations by getting you to not think that way in this situation.

And this brings me back to what I originally said when we we talked about this in the episodes. The thing that I was saying was that I think digital scams are a much bigger problem than just money.

What happens when the scam is successful than just the resources lost when somebody actually does, you know, make the payment. And those numbers are huge, by the way. I think probably most people listening know at least one person, maybe an older relative or maybe not somebody else in their life who has lost a ton of money to a digital scam like this. But the even more insidious effect of these scams is that I think they have toxic general effects on culture and

Because again, most people, most of the time are pretty trustworthy. This is actually, this was confirmed by experiments that we talked about in the cynicism series. We tend to overestimate the selfishness and the untrustworthiness of strangers. Most people, most of the time you can trust, but

especially in the modern technology age, a relatively small number of people with the aid of digital technology are able to initiate attempts, attempts to scam an asymmetrically huge number of victims. And even though most of those attempts fail, each conflict

contact point between the scammer and the potential victim undermines general social trust. The fact that you are getting, you know, scam texts and scam emails and stuff is just creating this feeling in you that, you know, there are a lot of lies out there. There's a lot of stuff. You've got to have your guard up, which is bad because it makes us feel like

less like we are safe to operate in in banana faith mode even though we really are for the most part uh yeah so these things are insidious this episode is brought to you by microsoft

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With Azure AI Foundry's streamlined toolchain, model choice, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code, you can build the next big thing the way you want. But here's what's key. You can innovate confidently with responsible AI and security that's built in from the start. The future is in your hands. To learn more, go to developer.microsoft.com slash AI. Microsoft. Yours to build.

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So you want to start a business. You might think you need a team of people and fancy tech skills, but listen to me when I say you don't. You just need GoDaddy Arrow. I'm Walton Goggins, an actor, and I like the sound of starting my own business, Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses. But I couldn't do this on my own.

GoDaddy Arrow uses AI to create everything you need to grow a business. It'll make you a unique logo. It'll create a custom website. It'll write social posts for you and even set you up with a social media calendar. How cool is that? Well, listen to this. For a limited time, you can get Arrow All Access for just a dollar a week for 12 weeks. We're talking all the AI power of GoDaddy Arrow plus a domain, e-commerce store, payments, professional email, a unified inbox, all the

All for less money than I spend on deep tanning lotion while sunbathing off the Amalfi Coast. You know what that sounds like? A plan. Get started at GoDaddy.com. Terms apply. Okay, this next message is from Dave. This is about Weird House Cinema. Dave says, Howdy, Joe and Rob. I'm a pretty new listener. First discovered your podcast on your Zoo Warriors from the Magic Mountain episode last year. Ah, that was one of my favorites.

Uh, and Dave says, and have been subscribed ever since. I don't recall how I came across it. Uh, I hadn't heard of zoo warriors before that, but I had a feeling to dive in and I'm so glad I did. I've always enjoyed movies and cinema, even worked in a theater during high school, but growing up in the nineties and working at a theater, I really only paid attention to movies as they came out. So your podcast helped, uh, open my eyes to some of the gyms polished and unpolished from before that time. Um,

One of the other reasons I'm writing is, I'm sure you're already aware, but I recently saw that Mondovision is releasing a 4K of On the Silver Globe later this month and figured you'd be interested. It looks pretty dynamite, features some docs, I guess documentaries, and a commentary from Zuofsky, the director, Andrei Zuofsky, from Mondovision.

2012. I really enjoy your show, standard and Weird House episodes, and please keep up the good work. Thank you both for the countless hours of sharing knowledge and entertainment. Best, Dave from Wisconsin. Well, thank you, Dave. Actually, I was not aware of this. I am looking it up right now.

Oh, yeah, this does look like a beautiful set. Yeah. So I was not aware of this. I also don't really know anything about Mondo vision, but they have a great website. It looks like I feel like I'm in the year 2002. But yeah, the set looks great with the nice cover art. Looking forward to that. OK, on to the next Weird House Cinema message. This is from Pat.

Pat says,

Oh, yeah, this was one of our questions. Pat says...

Not part of the film was a subplot that had Howie's superior in contact with Lord Summerisle. Oh no, set up by his boss? That's rough.

Pat says, on seeing the film as horror, what defines this genre? Is it common tropes from a great many movies or something deeper? There are plenty of reasons to feel horror throughout the film. Howie is horrified by the blatant paganism he encounters. He sees deadly sins constantly. He is a devout Christian witnessing damnation. The residents of the island see a high-handed imperialist threatening their way of life.

Meaning in this film can be found in this duality. Presented is an argument pitting an establishment against an outlying school of thought.

The filmmakers assume that the viewers are aware of the power of the establishment and the dire consequences of Howie's report. Howie represents an established culture well known for stamping out the other. The ending makes sense to me in that it is in keeping with pagan beliefs and represents a victory over encroachment while simultaneously allowing a counterthought on Christian reverence. The viewer must judge. I

I found myself thinking about Joseph Campbell and his skeleton key to Finnegan's Wake. Campbell shows that the scholar, Joyce, meaning James Joyce, the author of the novel Finnegan's Wake, Joyce challenges his reader to look deeply at his content, to see the symbolism in every reference. So too can one look at Wicker Man.

This film is redolent with symbolism. Rich is it with images and dialogue that invite further thought. Why? This seems like it was written in Lord Summerisle voice. Rich is it with images.

The organic nature of the island, which can be seen as a celebration of animism. The blatant sexual worship of the islanders, which can be seen as holy rites. The endless references to reproduction, which can be seen as obligations. The use of song to express ancient pagan beliefs, which could be seen as a reference to oral tradition and a connection to the deep past.

I found myself counting the references to semen, pollination, phallic worship, orgies, sea foam, the foam from the ale offering to the sea, and more. The importance of Howie's virginity cannot be overstressed. His seed must be potent to appease the gods. His struggle to maintain his virginity against temptation proves his worthiness. There is also the element of mystery. What is the nature of the beliefs of the people of Summerisle?

I am surprised you did not suggest a connection to the theories of Julian Jaynes. How do these modern people connect to ancient beliefs, oral tradition? The filmmakers, in my opinion, assume that the viewers have some knowledge of paganism, connections of the ancient calendar. This film is set at Beltane on Walpurgis Eve at a hinge.

I find it compelling to think that the population of the island are experiencing a direct relationship to their past. The filmmakers present us with this mystery. How is this connection made? Thanks again, Pat. Well, thanks, Pat. This is a great question at the end. We talked about this a little bit in the episode, but there is something I've always wondered about the Wicker Man.

In the scene where Christopher Lee is explaining to Howie how his grandfather converted the island from Christianity to the Sumerile form of Celtic paganism,

He makes it sound like there was no force or even effort required for this mass conversion. I think his exact words are, he gave them back their joyous old gods, implying that the people were just waiting to receive them, Nuada and all the rest, like, ah, finally, we can just be pagans again. Like I said in the episode, I do not buy

by the interpretation that the movie is just saying paganism good, Christianity bad. I don't know how you can see the ending and really think that is the point of the film, but I do think it's suggesting that paganism somehow comes more naturally to us, that Christianity is something that can only be maintained with great effort and suffering, that it is a

perhaps noble burden. And whenever it breaks under strain or when it breaks us, Nuada and the rest of the gods are just there waiting. They're kind of a rest state that we return to automatically. And Pat, this comes to your question about the connection in the movie of the islanders to the ancient beliefs.

It doesn't make literal sense that upon abandoning whatever your current religion is,

you would just return automatically to the full semantic content of your your ancestors beliefs from thousands of years ago like how would you know the names of the gods and what they represented all that would have to be taught in some way but I think it is more plausible not necessarily that I think it this is true but it's at least plausible in principle that some type of

types of religions are just more comfortably tailored to biological facts about the human brain and the way we relate to the planet we live on. So it could be that religions based more on nature and fertility represent something more like a rest state for us, easy to return to when a vacuum forms in the absence of another religion. And I think, again, that would be plausibly because we

these types of beliefs are more tied to inescapable facts about like our bodies and our physical surroundings that about us as animals and about our environment but at the same time there's this good question in the movie of like how exactly do the specific beliefs of summer isles lost paganism like the names of the gods and their domains and so forth how do those beliefs make their way to the modern islanders

That's a really good question. And Pat, I think you're right to flag the idea of songs here. That could be a kind of narrative explanation for why folk music is so prominent in the movie. Songs transmit messages from the past, even when the singer is not attempting to do so. And song lyrics are kind of interesting in this way as a meme type, because song lyrics are

can become free-riding or even parasitic information, information content that get repeated and spread regardless of their value to the singer. Think about how often you sing a song without necessarily believing what the lyrics of the song are saying. The lyrics are just part of the musical content of the song, but they're also words, so they do carry a message if you think about them.

But, you know, they're attached to this tune you like. And you definitely discover this weird free-riding information content when you, like, if you have a child and you find yourself singing English nursery rhymes to them, you're suddenly thinking, what is Humpty Dumpty about? Why is Three Blind Mice so horribly violent? And

And so, yeah, there's just this like information content stashed in song lyrics that you often don't think about because the song in your the song, when you think about it, you know, standing back from it is just music, but it does have words. And you could imagine that.

Based on what we see in the movie, the drinking songs, the pub songs of the Summer Islanders may have contained a lot of information about the pagan pantheon long after the island had historically been converted to Christianity. And maybe those same songs persisted across the hundreds of years and helped with the transition back to what Christopher Lee calls the joyous old gods.

So anyway, I guess that's my riff, Pat, on your suggestion about the role of oral tradition in the islanders' connection to their past. Okay, I think I'm going to have to wrap this episode up here.

here. But hey, if you would like to get in touch and perhaps have your message featured on a listener mail episode in the future, as I said at the beginning, you can always write us at contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com. We love all the different kinds of messages we get. We don't have time to respond to all messages or certainly to feature all of them on

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Let's see. Hey, if you're new to the show, what's the deal? What's going on with Stuff to Blow Your Mind? This is a listener mail episode. We typically are a science and culture podcast. You know, science is sort of our main beat, but we smash it in with a bunch of other disciplines. We like to talk about science and history, science and religion, psychology, folklore, all kinds of things like that. We do our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

And on Fridays, we do a different kind of show called Weird House Cinema, where each week Rob and I just talk about a weird movie. We talk about well-known movies, obscure movies, good, bad. The only real criteria is that it's got to be weird. On Wednesdays, we do a short form episode. And on Saturdays and Mondays, we run episodes from The Vault, older episodes of the show.

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