The BrainFood Show

Scapa Flow lies barely seven degrees below the Arctic Circle, in the cold, windswept Orkney Islands at the northern tip of Scotland. Measuring 10 kilometres wide by 8 kilometres long with an average depth of 30 metres, this natural anchorage is bounded to the north by the mainland, to the east by the islands of Burray and South Ronaldsay, and to the west by the island of Hoy. In 1904, Scapa Flow was chosen as the home base for the British Grand Fleet, allowing the Royal Navy and German Imperial Navy to glower at each other across the North Sea. It was from here that the Grand Fleet sailed to the historic 1916 Battle of Jutland, and to here that the German High Seas Fleet sailed to surrender in 1918. In the years leading up to the Second World War, Scapa Flow was thought to be impregnable, and came to symbolize the supposed invincibility of the Royal Navy itself. But in the early morning hours of October 14, 1939, a lone German U-boat succeeded in doing the impossible, penetrating the harbour’s defences, sinking a 30,000-ton battleship, and slipping away undetected. It was one of the most daring feats of the war, and one which shattered the Royal Navy’s illusion of invulnerability. This is the incredible story of the U-47 and Captain Günther Prien, “The Bull of Scapa Flow.”

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On the first of April, 1945, a combined American and British Empire fleet appeared off Okinawa, the southernmost of the Japanese Home Islands. Operation Iceberg, the final naval battle of the Second World War, was about to begin. As hundreds of aircraft roared overhead and enormous shells fired from battleships pounded the shore, landing craft streamed ashore carrying tens of thousands of troops into battle. The battle for Okinawa is remembered as among the most savage of the Pacific Campaign, marked by extreme resistance by Japanese soldiers and civilians alike. Equally savage was the aerial battle which raged over the invasion fleet, as pilots of the Japanese Special Attack Units - better known as the kamikaze - brought their bomb-laden aircraft screaming down into the Allied ships. While by this time Allied sailors had weathered kamikaze attacks for nearly six months, the Battle of Okinawa brought with it a terrifying new threat. Just after 7:00 PM on April 1, the crew of the Colorado-class battleship USS West Virginia - a veteran of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor - saw a tiny white aircraft screaming towards them at terrifying speed, a fountain of flames streaming from its tail. Though West Virginia’s gunners quickly filled the sky with a wall of tracers, the aircraft rocketed through the defensive screen and slammed into the battleship just forward of her No.2 gun director, setting off a massive explosion that killed four sailors and wounded seven. West Virginia had been struck by a Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka. Effectively a manned, rocket-propelled bomb designed for a single, one-way mission, the Ohka was one of the most ghoulish weapons of war ever devised and a perfect distillation of the sheer desperation which fuelled late-war Japan. But while the kamikazes have become infamous, less-well known is that halfway across the world, the Allied fleet which invaded Normandy in June 1944 nearly suffered a similar fate at the hands of Imperial Japan’s Axis ally, Nazi Germany. In the desperate, dying days of the Third Reich, the Nazis attempted to assemble its own kamikaze squadron, whose pilots, like modern-day viking berserkers, were to ram their jet-powered flying bombs into enemy ships and bombers, inflicting - it was hoped - such horrific casualties that the Allies would be forced to sue for peace. Thankfully, however, lack of resources and ideological differences among the German high command prevented this insane plan from being carried out. This is the story of Leonidas Squadron, the forgotten Nazi kamikazes.

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Anybody reading remember the film Jingle All The Way, you know the one where Arnold Schwarzenegger body checks his way through a crowd of harried single mums, is an accessory to a bomb threat and physically assaults like 4 retail workers, all for the chance to get his hands on that year's hottest toy? Of course you do. That film is great. Okay so let’s talk about the time all of that happened for real, here in our world. Only instead of a turbo-tastic action figure with Booster accessory (don’t worry, there’s always plenty of Boosters left) we’re talking about a foot tall vibrating Elmo plush.

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In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start out by discussing in more detail the events surrounding Caesar’s momentous decision to cross the Rubicon, then jump into the real story of what happened on the Ides of March which isn’t exactly the one popular history remembers largely thanks to the notable play by Shakespeare.

Over the course of the episode we also discuss why likely most every quote you’ve ever read from Socrates was not actually something Socrates said, among other tangents.

And just a small correction: “Sherlock” not “Shakespeare” (You’ll know when you get there.)

This is part 3 of our 4 part series on Julius Caesar.  Stay tuned next time for when we look at a variety of interesting facts related to what we’ve discussed in parts 1-3.

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In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start out by discussing how a teenage Julius Caesar became the head of his rather prominent family. We then move on to his little month-long or so pirate adventure and finally discuss where exactly the Rubicon was, which interestingly enough is only something that has been relatively recently discovered.

This is part 2 of what will be a 4 part series on Julius Caesar.  Stay tuned next time for when we look more deeply into why Caesar chose to cross the Rubicon and his rather unorthodox and bold strategy in doing so, as well as look at the true story of the Ides of March.

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People have been referencing sentient reptilian entities, sometimes

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Contrary to popular belief, a decent percentage of the human population has known definitely the Earth was roughly spherical for over two thousand years. Hardly impressive, as noted in our BrainFood Show podcast, bees also use this fact in their own absurdly fascinating navigation and in communicating directions to other bees.

As for humans, we took a little longer to realize this, with Pythagoras (6th century B.C.) generally credited with being the first known person to have suggested a spherical Earth, though the idea didn’t exactly catch on at this point. Aristotle (4th century B.C.) agreed and supported the hypothesis with observations such as that the southern constellations rise higher in the sky when a person travels south. He also noted that during a lunar eclipse the Earth’s shadow is round. Much more definitively, the 3rd century BC head librarian at the Library of Alexandria, Eratosthenes, built on their ideas and managed to calculate the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy. How? ...

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Regardless of your politics, I think we can all agree that Donald

Born in 1869 in a small village located in what was then the Kingdom

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In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start out by discussing the fact that, contrary to what we speculated in a previous episode, World’s Fairs are actually still a thing. We then jump into the meat of the show, discussing whether Julius Caesar was actually born via a Caesarean operation and then look at the remarkable story of Margaret Bulkley, who is better known in history as Dr. James Barry- one of the first people to perform a Caesarean operation in which both the woman and baby survived.

This is part 1 of what will be a 4 part series on Julius Caesar.  Stay tuned next time for when we jump into his life more directly by discussing a rather hilarious pirate adventure he had as a young man.

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In this episode of The Brain Food Show podcast, we wrap up our discussion (for now) on one of the more remarkable individuals in modern history- Theodore Roosevelt. In particular we look at the truth about how and why the Teddy Bear was named after him and a boatload of fascinating Teddy Roosevelt facts conclusively demonstrating he was more awesome than we could ever hope to be. And as a little bonus to the Bonus Facts at the end, we discuss what the famous song The Rose has to do with the undisputed greatest show of all time- Star Trek the Next Generation.

(Also we very casually allude to the fact that Teddy Roosevelt probably helped delay WWI by several years, but then completely forget to mention HOW he did it later on. We’ll remedy this in an upcoming episode. And let’s be honest, there’s always more interesting stuff to talk about concerning Teddy Roosevelt, so I’m sure we’ll come back to him for more episodes at some point in the future as well.)

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