My Favourite Monster

In this episode we vet Slimer from Ghost Busters as a potential pet. Including in-depth consideration of wet chickens, Instagram bikini shot ruination, nuke transportation, hot dog insurance, bird based signing and immortal floating pugs. 

We discover the "only" difference between Slimer and Twilight vampires and Tony invents a high efficiency reciprocating automatic ghost feeder. 

We look at the different types of zombies, their causes, the evolution in DnD over the years and learn about: walking storage, optimizing zombie density per square meter and undead assisted farming.

Today we're looking at Totoro from the epic movie My Neighbour Totoro. We may have made the remarkable discovery that he is, in fact, Dark Matter!

Today we're having our minds flayed, and possibly going mad auditioning the mind flayer for its pet potential. All the wrongness ensues! 

In today's episode we're considering Trogdor for his pet potential. We discuss his many skills and qualities, which include burninating, coming in the night and being majestic with consumate v's!

Ok, so if you are one of the few people (*cough cough*) who have not heard of Trogdor then here are some references to prove we are not making this up...

The original source of Trogdor, now uploaded onto Youtube as Flash software is now kaput.

Trogdor the board game... it has peasants running around on fire as a game mechanic, what more would you ask for?

And for some Trogdors drawn by people not wearing boxing gloves...  I mean, just write "Trogdor fanart" into your search engine and pick one to complete you. My personal fav is the one of Daenerys with a little Trogdor rampaging on her shoulder...

DnD stats for Trogdor you ask... Take a dragon (red species... but give him a green paint job), remove one arm, give it a punch instead of a claw attack, reduce intelligence to 8, add 4 to strength (burly!), halve his movement rate (little legs and wings) and let him rage like a barbarian. You're welcome!

In today's podcast, George pitches Bruce the Shark from Jaws to Tony who has vital questions about Bruce's diet and exercise habits. The vital question about Bruce's bathroom habits are asked and sharks and swimming pools are discussed.

Some fun stuff:
An article about how the film was shot based around which of the 3 Bruces was working on any given day. It also has the picture of Spielburg with an arm stuck up Bruce's mouth.

This article about the animatronic shark's used for Bruce, it has the picture of Spielburg using jaws as a hammock.

Squalus Squalus ... appears to be a made up Latin name. Not many people speak Latin however so no one really noticed.

The Great White Shark is an endangered and protected species in Australia, New Zealand and North America (at least 2 states).

George used to go swimming in a Great White sanctuary in Tasmania. No one told her until much later. 

As a very small child George also stared a Great White in the eye from a meter away while sitting in a small dinghy overladen with beer while a whale gave birth (the shark was attracted by this). We are not sure what the shark thought about her. 

George one day wants to be buried in a Great White, Tony is not sure how he is supposed to do this but is open to suggestions (so long as it doesn't hurt the shark).

In today's episode, Tony suggests a black hole as being the perfect pet while George wonders what an accretion disk is and why she'd want to smear the neighbours on it.

Vital questions are asked like:

• Will our black hole suck in our neighbours?
• Does a black hole clean up after itself?
• And, most importantly, are the goats on the mountain upside down?!

Tony's notes for this episode are as follows:

Pōwehi, a Hawai'ian word meaning "the adorned fathomless dark creation"
Star sign: Pōwehi is a Virgo! (Got it wrong but we don't know what that is anyway)

Bonus factoid: The apparent size of our supermassive black hole (the amount of night sky it takes up when we look at it from earth) is about the same apparent size of M87's SMBH in the night sky when we look at it from Earth - whilst M87's is about 2000x bigger it is also about 2000x further away. However, the actual size of it's event horizon is about 3x the orbit of Pluto. The accretion disk (orange bit) is about 0.4 light years, so its an absurdly big object.

Super recent addendum: After we made this video there has been some buzz about a recent paper suggesting that our SMBH is actually less massive but surrounded by a dense dark matter halo making up the rest of the mass. Basically, some objects (stars?) have been passing very close without being torn apart, and this is the explanation. In any case, it's an observation that may help us narrow down what dark matter is! (We have our own theory - see EP 7)

**Some recent Blackhole videos from some channels I follow pretty religiously.**
Anton Petrov, Dr Becky and Scott Manley are excellent for translating recent scientific papers into something understandable and explaining recent space related events and concepts.

Dr. Becky's video about the 5 Types of Black Hole (we missed intermediate ones!) and I kinda assume quasars are just big supermassive ones, but they are very far away so it is hard to tell!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeKLKyzsJ2g

Anton Petrov's video on the M87 black hole (Pōwehi) nicely shows off the size comparisons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2BFxfC8Ehk

Scott Manley's amazing 360 degree VR video (you can move it around!) that shows what it looks like as you fall into a black hole. He does great space videos, covers a lot of recent space exploration news (his breakdowns of launch failure videos are my go to whenever "we are not going to space today").
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDNZBT_GeqU

These two are also fantastic:

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell's Ultimate Guide to Black Holes. Kurzgesagt's videos are cute, beautiful and spectacularly well put together.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqsLTNkzvaY

PBS Space Time This channel was recommended to me by a friend who works at the Arcetri Observatory in Florence. They do some deeper dives into a range of topics we frankly brutalised. I always learn something new watching these, they are masters of making some of the most complex concepts in physics understandable. They have lots of great ones, too many to list here. Here are some tricks you can do with a rotating black hole...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjgGdGzDFiM

Today George is pitching xenomorphs to Tony as our new pet. Whether they be an ovomorph, a face hugger, a xenomorph or the Alien Queen, we're considering them all. And asking the important questions like:

Do xenomorphs use litter boxes?
Will they snuggle on the bed, and
Will they eat our friends?

We're only covering the beasties from Alien, Aliens and Alien 4 in this episode. Yes, we know there are so many more sources, but these are the movies George loves, so they're what we're sticking to. 

Sources George used for this episode are: 

https://www.hrgiger.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(film)

https://www.avpcentral.com/xenomorph-types

For our monstrous premier episode, Tony is pitching the Bulette to George for its pet potential. Along the way, he reveals that this particular beastie has a fascinating, and unexpected history. 

The source articles Tony used for this podcast can be found at :

https://diterlizzi.com/essay/owlbears-rust-monsters-and-bulettes-oh-my/

https://ultra.fandom.com/wiki/Gabora

https://www.cercatoridiatlantide.it/en/bulette-who-did-it-better/

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