The BrainFood Show

⁠⁠In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start by looking at whether poinsettias are actually poisonous or not. Moving on to the main content today we’re looking at one of the more remarkable things ever to happen in modern warfare- a completely impromptu Christmas truce, in which both sides in WWI randomly got up out of their trenches up and down the line and threw a party together.

We follow that up with some interesting bonus facts including a rather bizarre requirement the British military had for their soldiers for about a half century, among other things.

On another note, if you could do us a huge favor and rate and review this show in whatever podcasting platform you’re using (including hopefully giving us some feedback related to the new format), we would be extremely grateful. Thanks!

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⁠In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we look at one of my favorite stories I’ve ever researched. But before that, we begin by looking at what could have been wrong with Tiny Tim that simply throwing money at the problem could have fixed given 19th century medicine.

Moving on to the main content today we’re looking at what Charles Dickens’ called his “Sledgehammer for the poor man’s child” and the backstory that led up to a six week stint furiously writing of one of his most famous works, as well as some interesting references within it that modern readers may have missed, but those in his time would have implicitly understood.

We follow that up with some interesting bonus facts related to the story at hand, including why it’s “Dead as a door nail” and not something like “dead as a coffin nail” as Dickens himself mused.

On another note, if you could do us a huge favor and rate and review this show in whatever podcasting platform you’re using (including hopefully giving us some feedback related to the new format), we would be extremely grateful. Thanks!

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Nature abounds with weird and wonderful defence mechanisms, evolved over millions of years to protect their owners from predators and allow them to live - and breed - another day. Some organisms like crabs, turtles, and armadillos, are clad in tough suits of armour; while others, like rosebushes and acacia trees, porcupines and hedgehogs, and lion and stonefish, ward off attackers with an array of sharp - and sometimes venomous - spines. Other defences are more active, like the clouds of ink released by squid and octopus, the stinky musk sprayed by skunks, or the sticky, choking mucus secreted by hagfish. But all these formidable defences pale next to those of a small, humble-looking insect. Armed with the biological equivalent of a rocket engine, when threatened these creatures unleash a burst of caustic, boiling-hot steam from their abdomens, blinding, wounding, or at least convincing would-be attackers to think twice. It is an ability so extreme and unlikely that it is often cited by creationists as evidence against the theory of evolution. But how does this tiny insect flamethrower work, and how did it actually come to be? Let’s find out as we dive into the fascinating world of the Bombardier Beetle.

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When thinking about the various elements that went into the United States declaring Independence, we tend to think of things like the Stamp Act, The Boston Massacre, and the Tea tax that led to the Boston Tea Party, but these were things that were more in the vein of “this is the last straw” and all a symptom of the real problem. As the colonies started to grow and prosper, Parliament across the pond in the homeland both began wanting to take advantage of this in generating revenues for Britain, as well as to try to suppress some of this in other areas where the British American colonies were now threatening the parent nation’s own industries- a remarkable feat for settlements so relatively new on the world stage. This brings us to the story of today- John Winthrop Jr. and the first known operational iron works in America, The Braintree Furnace, which spawned an industry that within a century saw the colonies supplying 1/7th of the world’s supply of iron and iron based product, surpassing Britain’s own production. This all led to Britain passing one of the early acts that helped spark the revolution, the Iron Act of 1750 intended to severely suppress American iron manufacturing.

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On the morning of November 30, 1989, a trio black Mercedes-Benz sedans pulled away from a house in the quiet Frankfurt suburb of Bad Homburg vor Der Höhe and turned down a shady, tree-lined lane called Seedamweg [“zay-dam-vehg”]. They had taken this route many times before, and it seemed like just any other morning. Slowing down to pass a school crossing, the drivers may have spotted a man in a jogging outfit standing behind some bushes, adjusting his walkman and headphones. Or they may have noticed a child’s bicycle chained to one of the white bollards separating the street from the sidewalk, a small package strapped to its rear rack. Nothing out of the ordinary. But at 8:34 AM, just as the lead car began turning onto Kaiser Friedrich Promenade, the early morning quiet was shattered by a powerful explosion. The blast engulfed the middle car in the convoy, launching it 25 metres across the road. When police arrived on the scene and pulled open the charred smoking vehicle, they found its passenger, 59-year-old Alfred Herrhausen, dead in the back seat. Herrhausen was no random victim. As the head of the Deutsches Bank, the largest bank in Europe, he was one of the most powerful and influential men in West Germany - and a prime target for political violence. Indeed, as police searched the crime scene, they soon found the bomb’s detonator hidden behind some bushes. And beneath this they found a piece of paper in a protective plastic cover, on which was printed an ominous symbol: a red five-pointed star overlaid with a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun. It was the logo of the Red Army Faction or RAF, a notorious left-wing guerrilla group which had terrorized West Germany for nearly three decades. Coming just three weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen marked the culmination of a unique period of political tensions in German history, one that would soon give way to new tensions as the long-divided country attempted to unify. Yet despite the high profile of the victim and the RAF claiming full responsibility, the actual perpetrators of this act have never been caught, and thirty five years later questions continue to surround just who killed Alfred Herrhausen - and why. This is the story of the mysterious and surprisingly sophisticated assassination of Germany’s top banker.

Author: Gilles Messier

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Host: Simon Whistler

Producer: Samuel Avila

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Agencies like the CIA and MI6 are tasked with collecting and processing data deemed potentially vital to their respective counties’ national interests, and then, in an ideal world, making sure those who need to know this information to inform their decisions and plans know it. In order to do this, they need people on the ground, so to speak. So how do these agencies actually recruit those who work for them both domestically and in more clandestine roles abroad?

Author: Daven Hiskey

Host: Simon Whistler

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History books often remember underground political groups like the Communist party or the Social Democrats, espionage groups like the Red Orchestra, or militaries from America and Britain as the primary resistance against Nazi forces. But you may be surprised to learn that, in fact, the most vocal and visible resistance came from young people, mainly teens and those in their early 20s, with the four largest and most prominent of these youths being The White Rose, the Edelweiss Pirates, the Swing Youth, and the Zazous. So let’s dive into their respective rather inspiring stories, shall we?

To begin with, The White Rose: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!" These are just a few of the powerful words published and distributed throughout Germany by a group of students at the University of Munich in an effort to incite their fellow countrymen to rebel against Nazi forces throughout 1942 and 1943.

As for notable figures in this group, perhaps the most famous of all were siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl. So what inspired them to rebel in this way?

Authors: Arnaldo Teodorani and Daven Hiskey

Host: Simon Whistler

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Modern entertainment such as movies, fictional books, and TV shows aren’t exactly known for accurately depicting how things may or may not go or have gone in the real life scenarios that they depict. From injecting substances directly into your heart a-la Pulp Fiction or The Rock, to Yarr’ing pirates, let’s just say there’s a lot they get wrong. On the former, ya, don’t poke a hole in your heart. That’s not helpful to, you know, not dying. See our video on the subject before you start arguing in the comments. And on the latter, one actor set the standard there for pirate speak in the 1950s and everyone has just sort of run with it as if it had a basis in reality for how pirates talked instead of just something he came up with for various reasons.

Moving on to Medieval times, don’t even get us started on things like medieval chastity belts or the supposed ideal of the Chivalrous Knight protecting damsels in distress… Far more likely the knights were the ones causing the damsels to be in distress in reality and said damsels would have traded their left butt cheeks for a device like a chastity belt for some level of protection, as we have covered in excruciatingly facepalming detail before. But we’re not here to talk about the fact that real life knights were mostly- and we cannot stress this enough- just massive dicks to women and like, honestly, almost everyone, even each other. No, we’re here today to talk about what they and their cohorts actually got up to on the battlefield when deciding to siege a castle as a means to conquer, rape, and pillage for fun and profit.

Author: Daven Hiskey

Host: Simon Whistler

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Countless films produced in the United States feature use of rather expensive military equipment, and often also real world military personnel. Given the extreme expense of all of this using things paid for by the U.S. taxpayer to benefit for profit companies, how is this allowed? Further, how are projects that the military will support selected? Can just any U.S. citizen apply for use of such equipment and personnel for their particular project to make it fair to all? Just how much does this cost the U.S. taxpayer in cases like, for example, the recent wildly profitable Top Gun: Maverick? And why and how did all of this get started?

Author: Daven Hiskey

Host: Simon Whistler

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While something like the holocaust isn’t exactly unprecedented in history, with mass genocide popping up an unnerving number of times the world over throughout our time humaning, perhaps no other instance of this has shocked the modern world more than the Nazis systematically murdering somewhere in the ballpark of 5 or 6 million Jewish people along with another 5 or 6 million people of other backgrounds, such as the lesser talked about Romani genocide. In this one, the Nazis murdered upwards of a million Romani, which was about half the entire Romani population of Europe at the time. That any civilized people could allow something like this to go on seems unthinkable to our modern selves, but the question becomes from this- how much did the general public actually know about what was going on at the time it was happening?

It turns out, contrary to what is often stated, quite a lot actually both on the global scale, and even within Germany itself evidence pointing to at least the idea that it was happening being relatively common knowledge, as we’ll get into shortly. But also, paradoxically, by accounts from many people directly after the war, they didn’t really know at all…

So which is true?

To really get to the bottom of this, we must discuss events leading up to the holocaust and how much of these the German people and wider world knew about.

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Author: Daven Hiskey

Host: Simon Whistler

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