Behind the Scenes Minis: Friends and Bubble Guns

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: Wilson. We talked about John Grant this week. Huh.

00:00:19
Speaker 1: I kept wanting to call him John Gone, which is not that's not right. I didn't tell you this while we were recording, because you had said that during recording that I had to. I typed it that way a lot of times too, and I didn't want to say it and cemented in your head as that way because.

00:00:33
Speaker 2: I was like, that won't help the problem. Here's what I want to talk about.

00:00:37
Speaker 1: First, Okay, James the First's Book of Orders regarding how they were all going to get through the plague together. Because there's a bit of advice that was no good but that I love.

00:00:48
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:00:49
Speaker 1: He wanted people to eat more butter. Uh, I'm good with that because he thought that butter was somehow protective against the plague. Okay, like specifically just eating a lot of buttered bread. I don't know what the logic was exactly. Did he think like germs would stick to the butter and not get it on your body, but it's going in your I don't know. He just thought that Butter laminated your insides in some sort of way. I'm like, cool, I don't think I'm gonna get to plague. Then we love a little Butter. It just made me giggle to end. The other thing that made me giggle a lot while I was working on this, aside from John Aubrey's kooky versions of people's lives, was that John Grant And some of this is simply because London was so much smaller at this time than it is today, that like every intellectual knew each other. But the way they all know each other just I was like, this is like an episode of Like Friends sixteen fifty. Like Peeps is talking to all of them, visiting everybody. Everybody's up in everybody's business, all of the dudes at the Royal Society know each other. It just cracked me up a little bit in terms of like thinking about a city that we know today as being that large. I mean, it's hard to imagine people even knowing everybody in their neighborhood when you're in London, it's so populous that like the idea that all of these guys were just buds. The Jeeps was at their houses all the time, looking at their stuff. It just cracks me up somehow.

00:02:31
Speaker 2: I don't know. It's like, oh, this little band of friends cute.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: And I kept when I was working on the episode, because of the timeline of his life. I kept being like, wait, did he become friends with these people after he got, you know, famous for writing this thing? But he knew Petty before that, and Petty was already kind of in with a lot of those people, So that's I think he at least had acquaintanceship with most of them. The other thing that's interesting and a little sad. We mentioned specifically in the episode that he was friends with a number of artists, right, two of whom were famous for their portraiture. Do you know how many images of John Grant we have? Is it none? It's zero? It's a goose egg, We don't have any. He may have known a lot of portraitists, but either they never painted him, or if they did, it got lost and nobody even knows it happened. Yeah, which is a pity. Maybe it's one of those things where it's still somewhere, but it's been handed down in the family and nobody knows. Maybe or maybe he was just like a person like today that don't like to have their picture taken and he's like, no, not me, Let's look at numbers instead.

00:03:41
Speaker 2: Numbers are good.

00:03:42
Speaker 1: I want to write a TV series about the Searchers because every time I read more about them, I'm like, this is excellent. And you could go a number of ways. It could be a drama, it could be a comedy, it could be it could be a murder mystery. Sure, sure, I just love the idea that you know, there's a story, there is a story to be examined there. Because they were picking primarily elderly women because if they did get exposed to plague and consequently died, it would feel like less of a loss because they had lived their lives. They were also more capable at that point because most of them had outlived their families of living in quarantine without that causing as much distress. But it also just like, it's just fascinating to me that they also a lot of the time were already the people that were also taking care of the six. So there was like a perception of like you probably were, you probably have already been exposed to everything, and you're still all right. So it's okay for you to go into this house where somebody might have died of plague. I think of the Eddie Wizard bit about how Grandma's live forever. I'm a Graham, I lived to a million. They're just in destruct to bullet that point. Yeah, it's very fascinating, very fascinating. All of this sort of not William Petty, but Petty things amongst all of these accounts and letters and whatnot, are quite interesting. There is an aspect we didn't go into it regarding the money arguments that Petty and Grant were getting into towards the end of Grant's life that are probably not what you think they were. They were not about how Grant was spending money. Remember, Grant had power of attorney and he has some say in Petty's finances, and he kind of like would withhold money when he was handling his accounts because he thought Petty was spending it irresponsibly, and Petty was basically like, it's my money, it's my problem, get out of my business. And that was a big part of their rift. Although they clearly loved each other very much right to the end even though they were having those issues. But it's just fascinating, yacinating. Also, man, that whole plague plus fire in just a couple of years, London went through it, man, Yeah, which also did enable the city to rebuild in ways that were more prepared for its growth up to that point. But that's kind of bright siting something that's really yucky. So yeah, anyway, John Grunt, thanks for demography, sir. Hooray, hooray. Yeah, I've wanted to talk about him since we did the episode on Actuary Science. Yeah, because he's just interesting to me. The fact that he was like not I mean, it's literally like if I just tomorrow was like, you know what, I'm going to do some analysis of these government reports that we have and that I became famous for it, and that's the work that I'm not, yeah for their except it's even weirder because I at least look at things like that as part of my job. Was just like, nobody's doing anything with this. Maybe I do some with this other than deciding whether to leave town right.

00:07:09
Speaker 2: Or to have a chit chat and be like.

00:07:11
Speaker 1: Oh, two people died of purples this week. I still do that, Like I look at the I look at like the flu report yeah, to determine what precautionary steps I want to take regarding the flu that kind of stuff. Oh yeah, I mean, I think that's perfectly normal. It is really interesting too, that nobody had been using any of this available information to actually establish at least baseline numbers of what was going on in London while they were repeating complete falsehoods based on assumption, and like, just right, the accepted wisdom of the day was not that wise.

00:07:53
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:07:54
Speaker 1: The part about people assuming there were way more women than men, uh huh reminded me of the little tidbit that you will see circulating sometimes about how people perceive women as talking a lot more than I talk in a group. It reminded me of that a lot me too, And I was like, is it that perception?

00:08:14
Speaker 2: Is it that.

00:08:16
Speaker 1: The men of London were like, oh, women everywhere? Or I don't know, was there some other thing? Was it that women were doing so much of the various kinds of like day to day labor, that people saw women everywhere even though they were not They were just busy and constantly about I don't know, I don't know what flavor of bias may have led them that incorrect assumption, because especially when you consider the fact that they thought a lot of people believe there were two million people in London, so at that point they thought there were one point five million women, yeah, and half a million men, many, so many guys. This should have been so much more obvious than what you're doing. Fascinating, fascinating. Thanks John Grint for all your work. We talked about old inventions that most people probably think are newer inventions this week, which I loved, and I will say this, I could read Heron's books all day long because a lot of his little inventions, which like he wasn't inventing things to be like I've invented a thing, it's the new thing.

00:09:32
Speaker 2: This is going to change things.

00:09:33
Speaker 1: It was all kind of like theoretical expressions of mechanical concepts, but some of them were wild and potentially manipulative. There was one invention in the Pneumatics that is called temple doors opened by fire on an altar, and it is basically a way for temple priests to trick whoever is there into believing that a god has opened the doors. Well, okay, and I'm like, Haron, yeah, what are.

00:10:07
Speaker 2: You doing, ma'am? Did we talk about him at all?

00:10:10
Speaker 1: This is so long ago you may not remember either. But did we talk about him at all in the Automata episode? I don't think so. And I went looking I don't have my outline for that episode because it was so long ago, and I looked. I don't remember where I looked for it, but anyway, I lost the thread of it. So I don't think so. But I'm not positive. But he has a lot of really interesting stuff in there, and I really love his little vending machine.

00:10:37
Speaker 2: It's quite cute.

00:10:39
Speaker 1: Although I will say this, when we were discussing it and you, I had put in the outline that it looked like a samovar. Yeah, and you said it's just like a cylinder for making tea. And I was like, what, I've only had coffee out of a samovar, but I think I'm a coffee girl.

00:10:54
Speaker 2: Is all that it is?

00:10:55
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:10:56
Speaker 2: Well, And when I saw the word samovar, I was like, what is?

00:11:00
Speaker 1: And then when I googled it and saw a picture, I was like, I know exactly what that is, but I thought other people might also have just not heard it called that. I feel like I always heard it be a tea urn This is like one of those fascinating things where it's like your life experience is difference from someone else. Yeah, because I have never heard it called a tearn. Yeah, not doubting you, just I clearly moved in a different circle where it was always full of coffee. This has reminded me of a like one of the first or I guess the first actual writing job that I had after getting out of college, and I was writing catalog copy, and the copy in the catalog already referenced Bruins. And I am not a sports person, and at that point had only ever lived in North Carolina, and so I was like, do people know what bruin means? And now, obviously, now that I know about things like sports teams named the Bruins, it made it made a lot make a lot more sense when the marketing manager looked at me like she could not believe I was asking this question, and I was like, I in hindsight, I'm like, yes, this is because I lived in North Carolina and did not watch any variety of sports, and now you live in the greater Boston area where everything is Bruins hockey. Baby, I love it, love it. Though that was never my team. No, I wish every room had a disco ball in it. Oh, I was going to share how we got to this show.

00:12:41
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah.

00:12:42
Speaker 1: So my husband, who I love very much because he is precious and who knows me, sent me this very funny Instagram reel by someone who was saying she was in a public bathroom and there's a button on the wall and if you push it, the lighting goes out in the bathroom for a second, and then a disco ball starts spinning and lights come on. And this is like, I don't remember where they said it was, because in a different in a different post, they mentioned where that was. And I we are in the middle of a multi year prepping to redo my bathroom, and I'm like, thank you for this information level of my life because he's, of course like, you want to disco ball in the bathroom? Right, yeah, I had not thought of it, but it's gonna happen now.

00:13:31
Speaker 2: Well, and I can.

00:13:33
Speaker 1: I can think of specific locations where I would be unsurprised to find a disco ball in the bathroom.

00:13:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:13:41
Speaker 1: I would be unsurprised at a gay bar for there to be a disc.

00:13:45
Speaker 2: I'm trying to bathroom.

00:13:47
Speaker 1: Remember if Lips Atlanta, which is a drag a drag venue here in Atlanta, has disco balls in the bathroom there, Hold de core is adorable. Yeah, we have a Death Star disco ball in our tiki lounge. Sure, sure, it doesn't go in the cantina. Because you've never seen a disco ball on Star Wars, So it does not go in our immersive cantena space.

00:14:08
Speaker 2: Yeah right, I have such rules.

00:14:09
Speaker 1: I'm so rigid about what cannon can't go into cana. No disco balls, if ever they show one, Yeah, Star Wars, It's.

00:14:18
Speaker 2: Going to go right in there immediately, I'm sure.

00:14:20
Speaker 1: I honestly don't know, because the whole premise of the cantena is that it's a dive bar on tattooing.

00:14:26
Speaker 2: Yeah you know.

00:14:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, when the dive bar on Tattooing comes under new management and they turn it into a drag cantina, which would be pretty funny, I would like that. I would find that hilarious. I'm thinking about various Star Wars characters that would make yeah, make great drag kings or queens. Yeah, so of course I associate mirror balls with disco balls.

00:14:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course.

00:14:53
Speaker 1: So when I initially saw that there was this like description of one from the late nineteenth century, I had a moment where I was it's like whoa. But then I thought about it and I was like, self, you have for sure seen pictures of performance spaces and dance halls and stuff like that with disco balls in them.

00:15:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, from way before the disco era. It just hadn't really clocked.

00:15:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it is one of those things. A lot of times there are pictures like that. Now, all I can picture is that photograph from the shining of the Overlook Hotel where they sort of are dappled with light, and I don't know that you see the disco ball in it. Yeah, yeah, but you see the effect that is very obviously from a Mirrord ball.

00:15:35
Speaker 2: Of some type.

00:15:36
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that's the thing. Is a lot of times you're seeing the dappled lighting effect and not necessarily the ball right too.

00:15:44
Speaker 2: It's fascinating. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah.

00:15:48
Speaker 1: I'm sure glad somebody thought to do that, because I love it. He's very sparkly, so sparkly.

00:15:54
Speaker 2: It's so good.

00:15:55
Speaker 1: It's so good, it's unconsitably good. How much a simple device can bring joy. Yeah, just I'm like a kiddie chasing it around the room.

00:16:05
Speaker 2: Love it. Love it.

00:16:06
Speaker 1: The best I'm thinking about the machines that blow bubbles, which like the first time I ever experienced one of those, I'm pretty sure I was in Boone, North Carolina, when I was in high school or maybe early college age, and I was just like walking around downtown Boone and there was some kind of store that had a bubble blowing machine in the window that was just blowing the bubbles out into the street, and I was like, this is the best thing I have ever seen. Yes, because it also it also paired very well with one of my favorite things to do, which is just to like walk around a little town and see what all the shops are. Yes, one of my favorite developments in mheld technology, if you can call it that, in the last I don't know fifteen years, has been and bubble guns, so people can carry because they sell them in Disney parks, okay, and so there will be time and kids of course go bananas for them. Like you hand one of those two kids and they're just bubblegun in it left and right, So they're kind of like populating the parks with bubbles without having to do any effort on their own, like they're just little kids running around making magical things happen all the time, which I love. There's nothing better than just walking through a surprise cloud of bubbles to me. I'm sure there are people that don't like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I love that, love that. I have a prism that was a present from my mom many years ago, hanging in the window in this office, and there are certain times of year when the sun hits it at the right angle and mikes rainbows on the wall and I love it. I have a stitch of Leelo and stitch bubble machine where he's actually blowing the bubbles. It's like its own little uh huh automata. Yeah it's the best.

00:17:59
Speaker 2: Oh, it's the best.

00:18:00
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:18:00
Speaker 2: Best.

00:18:01
Speaker 1: But the problem is, have you ever messed with speaking kitties the catnip bubbles? So our cats don't really care about catnip, Yeah, but they might care about bubbles, and that way you know their cat safe.

00:18:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay, that's a good point. That's a good point.

00:18:14
Speaker 1: Because we used to have a kiddy named Zisu who she loved a bubble and We discovered this because of that stitch bubble machine. Like I just reminded myself of it thinking about it, and she would go after them. But I was always worried about all the soap getting on her paws because she would bath them closed. And I started buying the catnip one. She didn't seem to care much about the catnip of it, but she really loved to jump after a bubble and it made her very happy. So I would fill the machine with the catnip bubbles and she'd be occupied for hours. Yeah, I feel like Opel might particularly. So we have various small toys that Opel will knock out of the air if you throw them past her, And so I feel like bubbles, I sort of. I think we tried some kind of bubble something many years ago. It didn't really work, but let's try again. I know I haven't tried it with any of our newer girls. I wonder if they'd be into it. Ye're gonna have to get some and fine down any excuse to make a bubble. What Onyx is really into is pressing the one button she has figured out, which is the button that says treat, and we throw a piece of her regular kibble and she chases it and eats it. I also think disco balls. I've seen some cats get pretty excited about disco balls. Also, yeah, they like laser pointers, so they'd probably like disco ball.

00:19:35
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:19:36
Speaker 1: I know there is some debate among cat behaviorists about laser pointers and similar things because they don't get the satisfaction of like catching prey, and that it can make some cats kind of neurotic. So one, this isn't veterinary advice.

00:19:52
Speaker 2: But yeah, I have.

00:19:53
Speaker 1: Had a cat before that I could not play with laser pointer because because of that, like it was clear that she to catch it and that was never gonna happen. But these two will chase it for a while and then they'll just wander and do something else.

00:20:07
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:20:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kitties, breath mints, vending machines, Yeah, and disco balls. This is where my brain's at right now. This is what my brain can handle.

00:20:19
Speaker 2: Uh huh.

00:20:20
Speaker 1: Silly amusements.

00:20:22
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:20:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, my episode that we recorded in this session session, I couldn't say it was not silly amusement. So thank you for bringing some levity.

00:20:33
Speaker 2: Great, happy to do it.

00:20:35
Speaker 1: Listen, It's all because my husband sent me a disco ball reel, and I went, where did disco balls come from? Who invented this magic that can make happiness so easily?

00:20:45
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, that's really all it takes. What a good question. Huh, thanks mister Weastie.

00:20:53
Speaker 1: Again, I wish I knew what the like motivation was there where he was like, you know what I'm going to do? Oh, thanks the whole little stick them on a ball. I'm gonna make it his first patent drawing. Anyway, his are not the way we see them today where they're all little flat mirror pieces. They were like little almost like tiny contact lens stock size mirrors that had that same kind of dome shape to them, at least in the illustration. So interesting, interesting, and I think it was Omega when they picked it up and started me and they started doing the flat once because they had developed a material that could go on the balls more easily. Thanks to them. Anyway, if this is your weekend coming up, I hope you look at sparkly stuff as long as it makes you happy. Have a party. Spin your disco ball, be it death star, kitty Cat, or pumpkin shaped or just a classic. All of them are good there's no shame in the disco ball game. Seriously, find whatever brings you a little bit of in these trying times that we are all living in. If you do have to work this weekend, I hope that you also find some joy. Maybe you could bring your own tiny disco ball with you places just to look at and make your happiness happen, whatever it takes. I want everybody to take care of themselves and each other and find joy and delight. We are going to be right back here on Monday with a brand new episode. We will also have a classic tomorrow. 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.