Stuff You Should Know

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

His cousin, George Morton wrote, he was a separatist and he wrote this book or an account.

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

It was basically like a lengthy, in-depth brochure to attract investors.

And what are you going to say? You're not going to say, we're starving to death over here. Right. We're having a really hard time. We're probably not going to make it. People are committing bestiality.

Elizabeth Henry sent us a signed copy of Who Killed Mr. Moonlight by the one and only David Jay of Bauhaus.

And by the way, if you like s'mores like I do, I like s'mores anything. Sure, me too. You can thank the Girl Scouts for that because they are the ones with the first recorded recipe for s'mores.

Back in 1927, there was a Girl Scout handbook that had the first printed recipe for s'mores. It was so old timey they were called some mores.

It wasn't turned into a contraction until the 70s.

Apparently in this 1927 article, it says that while they're called s'mores, just one is plenty filling basically. I'm paraphrasing.

And you know, it's not like he wrote a book called Garter Snakes.

Oh, wait a minute. He did.

I feel bad if this gets back to him. I'm sure it's a great book, Doug.

Yeah. And well done.

Yeah, you can get it. It's published by Power Kids back in 2001 and it's probably basically evergreen. Plus it's not like he's just a slouch too. He's with the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University in Philly.

It's really, really worth reading. Uh, it's called why Baltimore blew up. It was in Rolling Stone like a month or two ago.

By modern day, of course, I mean the 1630s. Yeah, the first mention of palindromes in English is in Camden's Remains by John Philippot from 1636.

His record Stoneflower is just a masterpiece from beginning to end.

Yeah, that's good party music.

If you're talking about a printed book in the understanding of printing that we have here in the modern world, well then that's easy to settle. The Gutenberg Bible or the book printed right before the Gutenberg Bible.

And he was also the author of the book, The Fourth of July.

But I think it was Edward O. Wilson who, he's kind of known as the, you know, the 21st century Darwin. He's a biologist and a writer and a philosopher and an ant specialist. But he wrote a book in 1984 called Biophila.

And I think that was where, huh? I think it's biophilia.

Confusingly Blake also wrote his own epic poem called Milton which was inspired by the story of Milton's writing Paradise Lost.

Blake was a true renaissance man who spearheaded the romantic movement.

And there's like a whole book called the light list where it has pictures of them and it has...

There's a dude, I love this guy. His name is Carl Bantz.

It is an entirely tongue-in-cheek but totally played straight account of the extinct species mermaid.

It's called Mermaids, Their Biology, Culture, and Demise. You can find the full PDF online.

And this is just sort of a setup of these books and a very kind of neat little factoid that lies within.

Yeah, like these two books right here were like Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton all rolled together.

They were huge.

Because in Lasergas de Esplandien, a lot of the action is the sacking of the town of Constantinople held then by the Turks, by a bunch of different countries and nations and armies sacking the city together as allies.

So he described their homeland. Apparently, the homeland was called California.

They think this book was written in 1510, but apparently the author of the book based part of it on the Song of Roland, which is a French poem written in the 11th century about Charlemagne in the 8th century.

And in this poem, Charlemagne lists a bunch of people that he expected to like combat him and come after him and rebel against him, including men of Africa. This is in quotes, men of Africa and those of Califern. Or California? Either way. C-A-L-I-F-E-R-N-E.

There's a book called The Feud by Dean King.

And he said where was their next meal going to come from and how could they feed the children in the winter? They were lucky enough to have one pig or razorback for sell or trade.

And a lot of this is informed by writers and not even like biblical scholars, like people like Plato.

There's a story from Plato's Republic where a man named Er, E-R, goes into a coma, journeys through the underworld, and then wakes up and then tells everyone what happened down there.

And he directly influenced St. Augustine.

And Augustine definitely influenced some of these later guys like Drithelm and Tundale.

And their idea of hell, but Augustine was influenced by Plato.

One of the greatest, one of the other great conceptions of the afterlife, not necessarily hell, but hellish, is found in this, I think I've mentioned it before, Joyce Carol Oates short story called Nightside, where there's this seance and like the spirits that are contacted are like all freaked out because there's no, it's all just chaos.

Nobody, I think they keep saying like no one's in charge and like everything's just out of order.

And it's a really like unsettling read, like Joyce Carol Oates is so good with horror, but that particular one is super disturbing.

I highly recommend everybody reading it.