Behind the Scenes Minis: Whoopsy Whimsy

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the Friday edition of Stuff You Missed in History Class. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about drugs this week. We talked. Yeah, we talked a lot more explicitly about drugs than we normally do on this podcast. Yeah, because it's such a I mean, it's such a fascinating moment in history in terms of how much people are still learning about the various ways that militaries have deployed stimulant use. There is one thing that I want to mythbust a little right out of the gate. Okay, there is footage of Adolf Hitler at the nineteen thirty six Olympic Games that has been shown in a number of places with a number of people weighing in, and a lot of people are like, oh, he's one hundred percent tweaking, He's on meth. At this point, that does not actually appear to be the case. Arian Hitler was a mess in many ways. However, nineteen thirty six was before purvetson was developed. Okay, he certainly was probably on some stimulants. Although it looks like that video is probably looped, it's also worth noting that he had idiopathic Parkinson's disease. Oh so he had some uncontrollable movements anyway, and I think somebody picked up one of those and kind of looped it. And it does look very much like he is, you know, tweaking. It's a lot of him rocking and kind of like a frantic mo thing, repeating movements the way you would associate with someone that is is on methamphetamine. But while he did certainly take it later, that particular piece of footage at the Olympics, I think most historians do not think is actually showing that happening. Just FYI, if you see somebody saying that's what that is, fact check it. One of the things that I kept thinking about while doing this research, which was not enjoyable research. This is like hard aside from the fact that there's a lot of German language stuff to figure out. It's yucky to hear about the things that people were going through, and I tried to not get super graphic in things that were happening in terms of side effects. But one of the things that kept my brain functional through all of this in terms of like associating it with something lighter or more enjoyable. Did you ever play Call of Duty? No? Not really. My husband loved it when it had first come out, and you know, it has some very beautifully rendered in terms of historical war games, some really beautifully rendered for the time maps and whatnot that are in many ways quite accurate. But the funny thing was, you know, you kind of get to this point where there appear to be like zombies that are on the Nazi side, and I was like, this was this game inspired by somebody reading about pervertent use? And I don't know, but it made me think of video games and that always helps. Sidebar having nothing to do with pervertent use, but just as a fun factoid for all of my movie people, and particularly movie soundtrack people, if you love the work of Michael Giacchino. He did the score for Call of Duty, I think for two of those games, and they're beautiful. That's where we discovered him. I remember bro, my beloved saying to me at one point, Man, the score for this game is like unnecessarily good. Yeah, and it is, which I find interesting. Anyway, I have a kakamemy. It's not even a theory. I have a kakamemy. I wonder if anybody's ever explored this. Okay, we mentioned in the episode that both East and West Germany had kind of stocked up on pervetin as their tensions, you know, went on forever, and that pervetin was taken off the market in nineteen eighty. Like that was when it stopped being manufactured, which seems so recent. I know that's a long time ago for many people, but like that's during our lifetimes. Yeah, yeah, that a methamphetamine was relatively easy to get with the prescription. But then I was like the Berlin Wall fell a year after they stopped making it. Yeah, chill out when you know, I was reading the outline and you were talking about East and West Germany, and I was like, what what ear? Did the wall come down? Huh? So I had kind of a similar thought. Well, I'm glad it wasn't just me. Then, Yeah, I'm glad it wasn't just me. I had one particular tricky bit early on in my research, which is that and I say this in case anybody else starts to go looking at things. M hmm. Some accounts including I mean it's an older article, but including a Time magazine article. Get Fritz has shoulds name wrong? And they call him Friedrich? Huh? And it made the searching very confusing for a little bit. Yeah, so if that happens, it's it's Fritz. So it's not like his name was Friedrich and Fritz was a nickname or anything like that, not based on anything I saw. Okay, I could be wrong, but everything I saw had his name only like that was that really had accounts of his life and like pharmacological papers that talked about his life that gave his full name. I don't remember his Middley moth. The top of my head. It was always Fritz, no Friedrich. But I could be wrong, but it does create some confusion if you're searching. Have I ever told you about I'm so this is embarrassing, but it wasn't my fault. But it was hilarious after the fact. About the time I accidentally took speed at work. I this is ringing a bell, but I don't remember the details. This is not at our work in the long time we have worked together. It preceded this, and I was working at a company that I don't want to call out because I don't want anybody to think like that they're black A day'sical. I think this is literally just an instance of things falling through the cracks because this company contracted with another company that would maintain and manage our first aid kits. Like we had a breakroom had a big first aid kid on the wall that had all of your standards stuff like things for actual emergency use, but also things like you know, yeah, your basics, like your end SAIDs, you know, a little tail and all, et cetera. And I listen, this was in the early two thousands when you still went to work when you had a cold. Sometimes. I know that's not great, but it was definitely a job where I couldn't afford to take a day off in what I was doing in the projects that we had going on at the time. So I had a bit of a cold and I went to work and I took cold medicine from the cabinet right and about an hour later, I was just like like, I was like Eve Bruele. I was crazed. And I remember saying to my work husband at the time, I feel crazy, I'm I'm and he looked at my trash can and picked up the little packet, the single use packet, and he flipped it over and it was expired. It was from pre two thousand and four. Had a drin in't it? Okay? Wow? I just had to ride it out that day. Yeah. I felt so sweaty and weird all day long. Yeah, did not enjoy it. Did not enjoy it. Listen, I did a lot of stupid things when I was very young, but as an adult, I'm so boring. I drink a lot of coffee and I like a cocktail, but that's I'm very boring. I feel like that story is just one hundred percent not your fault, and no it wasn't. But it was like I just had that thing of like, uh, oh, I'm working in a big corporation and I'm on speed. What if today's the day? HR asked me a question. Oh no, yeah, because you get paranoid and I'm already a little anxious, and it just triggered it in the biggest way. It was so funny. Yeah, in retrospect, but at the time, I was like, I don't know how this one packet and I mean it was if I had paid attention, which this parts on me you know, if you've ever used one of those like big cabinets of meds. Yeah, it's like a little tiny It's like it's a little tiny thing, just big enough to hold whatever tablet is in there, with tiny tiny print on it. But like, in looking at it after the fact, I was like, the other cold medicines in that cabinet were all very clearly newer, but it had just not occurred to me that I was taking a packet that looked a little long in the tooth. And so that's what happened. But again, I hope that never happens to anybody, because it's not fun. A little surprise adrenaline is not enjoy I'm not an adrenaline junkie to begin with. I'm like, lie down, adrenaline, let's all chill out. But that was not enjoyable. I also wanted to ask you if you are old enough to remember the episode of Family Ties where Alex p. Keaton starts taking speed. I said yes, really confidently, because I think I thought you were going to say a different thing. Oh, because that was an era of very special episodes of television. Yeah, so I'm pretty confident I have seen that because I have I watched that show, but I'm also thinking about, well, what was the what was the name of it? I don't I'm blanking out on the name of this show that I watched. All of it is just not in my brain currently. But there was a whole plot line in one episode where one of the characters took a lot of some sort of stimulant in order to prepare the bell. It was stay, thank you, it was saved by the bell. Thank you for saving me from losing my mind. Yeah, but they also had one not remember saved by the bell. I mean, all that fine work to memory. Here's what I will say if anybody in our listening audience is curious and is like what. There was an episode of Faveratized. So the plot was that Alex needed to study for a big exam and he convinced his sister to get diet pills from her friend. Okay, I should give him an energy boost. Yeah, and then he of course becomes addicted, which is very funny because like the concept if you never watched Family Ties, was that their parents had been like these Berkeley hippies, and Alex P. Keaton was like this very straight laced, yeah, right wing kid like that was his former rebellion super uptight, but the parents did not. It took a long time for them to be like, oh, something's up with this kid. But if you ever go looking for this episode, be fore warn that there is a lot of really really creddy fat phobia in it. Oh no, yeah, because the deal that gets made is that this friend will give him diet pills if he will go out with her, and he doesn't want to go out with her because she's a fatty. Like it's really gress, it's really gross, So just know that going in. But it is also like eighties television, yeah, which you know, which was an era of incredibly obvious fat phobia on TV. Yeah, very unkind, And I mean it comes up repeatedly throughout the episode where it's like we got it, we got it. Anyway, I all of this was top of mind this week. It's not about an amphetamine episode, but like that has reminded me of Designing Women. Wound up on one of the streaming services and I remembered loving that show so much and started watching it and was like, wow, this show is really fat phobic all the time, like all oh yeah, oh yeah continually, which I just you know, having grown up in an era that was steeped in it. It had not really registered until twenty however many years later, thirty forty years later, how many decades later, Oh my goodness. I mean that's the case with the lot of a lot of shows that we loved growing up. When you go back and revisit them and you're like, like, I struggle with Maud, which I loved, I should which probably says a lot about I ended up who I am and I love me some b Arthur Goodness knows, But like when I go back and rewatch it. She was so needlessly mean to her husband a lot of the time, I'm like, that's not feminism, that's just kind of being a mean spouse, like right right, But that was the guys of it anyway, speed use methamphetamine right in the military, I do. I do marvel at how much it was, Like we kind of know that people aren't like accurate about things, but they're they're so energetic, and I'm like, why is that? Okay, sure I don't I don't get it, but I'm not a person commanding Nazi troops. No, I don't know. If they tried to explain it to me that I would get it any better. But yeah, okay, it's kind of where I land. It does really really freak me out that that Kanti is positioned sometimes without the context of who he really was. It really really riles me up. Like, don't make it sound like this dude was competent or like ethical in any way. Do not like I feel like anytime you talk about it, you had to do what we did and make clear like no, no, please don't think because he was horrifying anyway. I know there's not always room for all of that context for everybody writing an academic article or a quick news article. But man, no, we talked about an earthquake in Lisbon inspired by a trip to Morocco. Yeah, which still feels a little weird. I thought as I started researching it that I might have more Morocco to talk about than I did. Yeah, because even and when I tried to find things that were specifically about Morocco and about this earthquake, they were vague and did not add a lot of substance. Yeah. One of the things that I watched was a video. It was a video lecture. Now, I'm not going to get into the specifics, because I do not want to anyone to go harass this person. But the person who was speaking clearly did not speak English as their first language, and they described the catastrophe of this earthquake with the pronunciation catastrophe. And I was so delighted. That sounds beautiful actually about catastrophe. And it made me really appreciate all of the beautiful whimsy and delight that you can find when you just appreciate that it's fine for people to pronounce words different. I knew exactly the word that was meant, the word that was meant with catastrophe. The pronunciation of catastrophe brightens my day a lot. That also would be a great pet or character name. Yeah, yeah, Monsieur Catastrophe is here for tea. Yeah. And as he walks in, things just break all around him. I'm just there's a whole animated series pooling out in my head now, a catastrophe. It's funny that you mentioned animated series. Oh yeah, because the whole time we were talking about this, I was wishing that someone would make maybe an animated series, maybe a comic book, maybe a movie that's like a prequel prequel, prequel, prequel to Pacific Rim, where all of this is an unsutt old Kaiju that happens to be in the Atlantic. Oh, I would sew one hundred percent watch an eighteenth century Pacific Rim. Yeah. I mean, you can't have the Yagers because there's no Yeager program yet, but the rest would be Listen, Gierm del Toro wants to make a movie. I'm showing up. That's all there is, sure, And I loved Pacific Rim, But I did think about kaiju a lot while we were talking about the various places that reported unusual seismic or oceanic activity during the kind of yeah, the surrounding months. Yeah, well, and it makes sense that if you don't really know what has happened on the other side of the ocean, that you might attribute it to some other weird thing. But I did really like how clear it was that once people in other places that saw these effects knew that there had been an earthquake in Lisbon on that same day, that they made the connection it's kiju, And yeah, you just rolling over or just rolling over in his sleep, it's all. Maybe it's two of them and their babies and they're having an argument with each other. You got a whole fan fiction. I wasn't even ready for there. Yeah, I don't know. It just occurred to me. Jim Henson's Kaiju babies be like Muppet babies, only Kaiju. That's the joke. Okay, it's the joke. That's why I said Jim Henson's gotcha babies. I didn't hear the word Jim Henson's over the sound of my own giggling, and so I missed the joke. So one of the things, the other things that I thought about a lot in this episode was just about what goes into a natural disaster, Like there is the thing that happens, the event, the earthquake or the flood or the hurricane or the avalanche or whatever. There's that thing that happens. But then also what can turn it into a very horrific story is the response to that disaster, Like does a government take any kind of action and what action is that? And we have had other episodes that have been about other events in history, maybe not a thing that would we would think of as a natural disaster, but where the response to it made everything so much worse. So like the Great Famine in Ireland was made so much worse by a lot of it government in action, and some of that in action being maintaining the status quo of food products being shipped out of Ireland because they were they had been raised to be sold, not to be food for the people who were living there. And I just was that kept thinking about stuff like that as I was working on this and seeing all the all the steps that were taken to try to make things as undeadly as possible and the aftermath of this earthquake. Yeah, I mean, as disaster response initiatives go, this one seems like it was led with concepts of kindness and genuine care, which theoretically should be how it always is, but isn't how it always is. Yeah. I would be willing to bet that if you really dug into things like who was prosecuted for looting, you would probably find trends there that would be reflective of society rights and prejudices within society. Oh yeah, But it also definitely feels like there was a just a coordinated effort to save as many people as possible, rebuild in as sensible a way as possible. We didn't really get into them, but there were definite efforts on the parts of academics and scholars to try to save as many records as possible from you know, the rubble of buildings that had been destroyed, or trying to peace to gather collections that had been lost from other collections that were unaffected. It was really across the whole spectrum, and this whole effort, like what was this thought of sometimes as like the first modern disaster response disaster response effort also being a part of the modernization of Portugal, which other countries thought Portugal was really behind on before this happened. That really struck me that here's the country that the rest of Europe is like, oh, Portugal, and they're the ones that are like, we got this, we have a plan, we're putting initiatives in place, we're moving very quickly, we have a bias for action, like that's the goal. It's an interesting juxtaposition, and I wonder I'm sure there's been writing about how perceptions of Portugal changed in the wake of that. Yeah, it was alluded to and things that I read but not really talked about. The There is also a Lisbon Earthquake Museum about earthquakes in general and also this earthquake specifically, and I'm like, I kind of want to go to it. Get The website has lots lots of helpful information, but also the museum itself looks really interesting to me. So yeah, maybe someday in the future we will have a history trip to the Portugal. I don't know book it can say? Book it? Who can say? I'm not sure if there are any spots still available in our upcoming trip this September slash October for Octoberfest. Checked in a minute, I know we were getting pretty slim yeah, on remaining spots, so we were sold out on single rooms, but there was still availability for double rooms. I'm looking, I'm looking it up, you're looking, Holly's looking, uh, sold out, sold out. The trip is you can join a waitlist if you are interested and didn't get in on it, because other people do cancel sometimes and other people slide into those slots. Define Destinations will reach out to people I presume in the order in which they got on the waitlist. Yeah, but yes, right now it is listed. If you go to the main page, it says like few remain, But if you go to the actual booking page, they both say sold out. It says sold out. Okay, Well, if anyone is curious about it, want to see if maybe you want to get on the waitlist. It is at Defined Destinations dot com is the website where that all that information is. And then I've already forgotten what the name of our tour is this time, since we've been talking about Morocco this whole this whole time, Munich, Octoberfest and Prague. Yes, that is the one where you will find the description of this and the place to get on the waitlist if you would like to do that, whatever's coming up on your weekend. I hope it's gonna go as well as possible for everyone, and I hope you know, if things are busy, if things are stressful, I know they're stressful for a lot of people, that you're able to take a moment, some moments for yourself. We'll be back tomorrow with a Saturday classic and something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.