Stuff You Should Know

You know where I first heard of it? A Time Life Books ad.

Henry Ford wrote a book about this called The Story of Mary and Her Little Lamb.

Henry Ford wrote a 60 page book just basically touting Mary Sawyer's story, much to the chagrin of the town of Newport, New Hampshire and its historical society.

And then the greatest short story involving seances in the spiritualist movement written by arguably the greatest American writer of all time, Joyce Carol Oates, it's called Nightside.

It's a short story. It's the same title as a collection of her short stories from the 70s, I think 1977, um, Nightside, look it up and thank me later.

It's seriously just bone chilling how good it is.

I would read any of her stories.

And she, in fact, referred to him as the Beast, which was from the Book of Revelations and a name that he would later, I think, kind of keep on using for himself.

He wrote about it in his autobiography that I read last year.

Another good example of it being tongue in cheek is there's this great article from Alex Meyasi on Priceonomics where they were talking about how very frequently on like forums and just basically hangouts for rock, paper, scissors aficionados, they'll mention the book The Trio of Hands by Voyek Smoltsova.

And that it's basically like the Bible about rock, paper, scissors and wisdom about rock, paper, scissors. And I've seen that Smoltsova is compared to Lao Tzu. And that he was just this great rock, paper, scissors kind of champion, I guess.

This person is totally made up. The book is made up. None of it exists.

They apparently were inspired or the Sr. Daniel was inspired by a Samuel Beckett play called Crap's Last Tape where the protagonist in the movie or I'm sorry in the play tapes himself speaking at different points in his life and so the O'Keefe family used a tape recorder to record their Festivus and some of these tapes still exist apparently from little Dan's life which is great.

So, there was a book called The Secret Life of Houdini where the author said that if one were to suspect Houdini a victim of foul play, the section of organized crime that was composed of fraudulent spirit mediums must be considered likely suspects.

Yeah, and you can understand why if you've ever seen what's called pamphlet number one now, which is part of the church doctrine.

This is like the sacred writings. The idea is that Ivan Stang is the sacred scribe who took down the words of Bob Dobbs.

And by the way, Bob Dobbs, the Bob is always in quotes. Not just when you say J.R. Bob Dobbs, like even if you say Bob Dobbs or even just Bob, it's always in quotes.

That's how you write his name. And that Bob was getting his divine inspiration from Jehovah One, that alien overlord that runs earth.

And this was kind of like the conceit of the pamphlet. In the front of the pamphlet said things like, the world ends tomorrow and you may die in all caps.

And they wrote a book that wasn't too far off that pamphlet called Consumer Engineering, colon, or at least of a colon and a title, a new technique for prosperity.

And they called it creative waste and just basically flat out said, we should make things that are less durable because, you know, people are going to buy more stuff.

In this article, the war on hookworms by Andy Borowitz, he says that up to something like 740 million people around the world are thought to have hookworm infections, right?

I think the first time the rhyme itself was in a book, it was in 1797 in Juvenile Amusement by Samuel Arnold and the third line instead of all the king's horses and all the king's men, it said four score men and four score more.

I found an article in the Journal of American Folklore by Robert M. Lawrence from 1896 that is just a page-turner.

And if you're interested in that kind of thing, also go back and read Dr. Jared Diamond's The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, which talks a lot about this transition and basically argues that we were all better off as hunter-gatherers.

Mort's Relation written in 1622 by William Bradford, who was clearly the governor, longtime governor of Plymouth.

But as it turns out, as you point out, because you wrote this, Mort's Relation was written to attract funding for Plymouth.

And what are you going to say? You're not going to say, we're starving to death over here.

People are committing bestiality. Buggery is what they call that.