HBM038: Do Crows Mourn Their Dead?

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Kaeli Swift holds two of the masks used in her crow research. Photo by Jeff Emtman.

Kaeli Swift holds two of the masks used in her crow research. Photo by Jeff Emtman.

 

Crows have really strange habits around death. When a bird dies, crows gather, squawking loudly and gathering as many other birds as they can find to come and look at the dead body.

Much of what we know about crow funerals comes from the work of John Marzluff, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. He and Kaeli Swift (one of his grad students) are trying to get to the bottom of these strange phenomena using taxidermy crows and masks and Cheetos and raw peanuts.

On this episode of Here Be Monsters, We look at and listen to the strange behaviors of crows and how they might be able to teach humanity about the origins of funerals and emotions.

 
 

Many thanks to David Kestenbaum of NPR's Planet Money for his help on a short version of this piece made for radio...keep your ears peeled.

Also, many thanks to Brian Emtman for tipping us off to this story.

Some of the crow sounds in this episode came from Cornell's Macaullay Library. Citation: macaulaylibrary.org/audio/45291http…org/audio/45291

In this episode there are some amazing recordings of funeral practices from around the world, including Laos (LukeIRL), Bali (RTB45), Colombia (renatofarabeuf), and Ghana (Klankbeeld). via Freesound.

Music from Flower Petal Downpour, Serocell, and The Black Spot.

 

Potential Energy (Live)

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Here Be Monsters' creator and host Jeff Emtman grew up in a small town in Eastern Washington.

In the summers, he struggled to find things to do, so he started going to bed an hour later each night. During his nocturnal summer, his friends decided to throw a dance party in the laundromat.

This episode is a recording from a live storySLAM organized by The Moth. However, please note that this audio is not from The Moth's much-loved podcast.

Most medium-to-large sized cities have storytelling events monthly or more.  While the Moth isn't the only organization with live events, it is one of the best organized. Check their events page to see if they're in your town

The story on today's episode might sound familiar if you're a regular listener to Here Be Monsters. And that's because it's a much shorter version of HBM021: Potential Energy, our Season 2 premiere episode.

Please rate us on iTunes!

 

HBM037: Uncertain Death

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Recent episodes of Here Be Monsters have been largely about death.  So, on this episode David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg teach us about the exact opposite—immortality, living forever.  Their documentary film, The Immortalists, follows a small community of scientists who think of aging as a preventable disease, not an inevitable outcome.   

Seeking immortality is nothing new, in fact, the oldest known text, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is largely about a king's quest to live forever.  And further, it seems to be a quest of the rich and powerful.  Today, the community of bio-gerontologists is largely white, rich, and male.  Co-director Jason Sussberg calls aging a "first world problem," associating it with Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs.  

One of the film's protagonists is Aubrey de Grey, an incredibly vocal advocate of anti-aging.  He's a computer programmer turned bio-gerontologist.  In 2012, he participated in an Oxford debate against Sir Colin Blakemore where the motion was to defeat aging entirely.  A clip from this debate appears in the episode, and the whole debate is certainly worth watching.

The Immortalists is not yet available for download, but it will be soon (release date is Fall 2014).  In the meantime, you can check your local film festivals and theaters to see if there will be showings.  Also, visit TheImmoratlists.com, @theimmortalists on Twitter, and The Immortalists on Facebook.

If you enjoyed this conversation, you'll probably enjoy HBM010: The Time Traveler's Convention which touches on many of the same topics, but through the lens of retrograde time travel.  You might also enjoy our interview with Sean Dunne, another filmmaker who made a short doc at the annual Gathering of the Juggalos.  We talked to him in HBM016: 10,000 Juggalos.

Music on the show from Swamp Dog and Serocell

HBM033: What One Does

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Ryan Beitz recently experienced a meteoric rise to fame as the Chairman of The World Speed Project, which aims to collect every single VHS copy of the 1994 movie SPEED (Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Dennis Hopper, Joe Morton, Jeff Daniels).

Content Note: Explicit

Please note that this episode contains strong language.

Ryan's presence is bizarre...he never wears pants. instead, most days, he opts for giant shapeless coats and tall hats and sorority girl sunglasses. And he's intensely funny. All this comes through loud and clear in his dozen or so segments on Good Morning America (ABC), All Things Considered (NPR), Vice Magazine, etc.

But I grew up with Ryan, and so I have reason to believe that he's a bit more nuanced than the "crazy guy does something crazy" box most media outlets squeezed him into for their reports.

In this extended interview, Ryan and I sit in his Moscow, Idaho treehouse and talk about German Romanticism, Lacanian Jouissance, Stoicism and the nature of anger, and how The World Speed Project is a rebellion against the "what one does" that society shoves our throats. Then we make nasty noise metal in his friend's basement.

Music on the show was made by Ryan Beitz and Jeff Emtman.  See photo gallery.

The World Speed Project is currently running a KickStarter to get their van painted like the bus from Speed. At time of publishing, the project is just $500 dollars short of its goal.

Donate $ if you can, or donate your old copies of SPEED. Otherwise, just enjoy the amazing KickStarter video...seriously.

 


HBM031: The Roman Slug Death Orgy

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Photo by Jeff Emtman

Photo by Jeff Emtman

 

In a strange, small, moss-covered forest in Bellingham, Washington, Jeff stumbled on to the most gruesome scene of hedonism he's ever seen.

While it's not common for humans to witness slug death orgies, every once in a while, someone's there with a camera in the right time and place. 

These slugs are most likely European Red Slugs (Arion Rufus), which were first noticed in the Western United States by a Californian biologist who found one in a lawn in Seattle.

Now, the slugs are commonplace, and have incredible omnivorous, cannibalistic, and genetalial (not a word) appetites.

Some parts of slug life are akin to aristocratic Roman life under the rule of Caligula,a figure that historians love to hate...incest, murder, insanity, sloth, greed, etc.  While the stories of his perversity and violence are often debated and overblown, no one in their right mind argues that he was a good emperor or even someone you'd want to grab lunch with.

This episode marks the launch of the long-awaited third season of Here Be Monsters.  Be sure to rate us on iTunes and tell your friends.

Music: Phantom Fauna ||| The Black Spot ||| Lucky Dragons ||| Olecranon Rebellion <--New!

Bonus article with a great title: Perverted cannibalistic hermaphrodites haunt the Pacific Northwest!

 

HBM030: Crickets, Cadavars, and Conventional Wisdom

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This episode is a Grab-bag, it contains three segments that serve as follow-ups to the three most recent episodes of Here Be Monsters.

Part 1: Crickets on Tape

In this segment, Jeff takes apart his tape recorder and installs a knob to help him slow down the tape without using digital wizardry in attempts to de-muddy the waters after HBM029: Do Crickets Sing Hymns.  He bought some more crickets and slowed the cassette slowed down to 1/3 speed.  The results were telling, and surprising.

In that episode, we were talking about the confusion surrounding the bit of audio called God's Cricket Chorus by Jim Wilson.  In this segment we’ll clear up exactly what is known and exactly what is not about God’s Cricket Chorus and its derivative works.

Also, a correction to a mistake we made in Episode 29 about how digital audio is constructed for our ears.  In that episode we represented the final product of digital audio to be choppy, yet moving by too quick for our ears to notice its choppiness.  This is NOT the case.  In fact, digital audio is always converted back to analog before it hits our ears.  This is done with a device called a Digital to Analog Converter (DAC).  Here’s an article that explains this process very simply  (Page 4 is where the good stuff starts).  Big thanks to the two commenter s who pointed out this error.

Want to try stretching some crickets yourself?  Download this same set of cricket songs we used for the shows.

Part 2: Conventional Wisdom on the Future of the Four Humors

In HBM027: Balancing Act, Here Be Monsters producer Lina Misitzis delved into the rich history of the Four Humors, which was, for thousands of years, the way much of world understood medicine, the body and the universe as a whole.

While we never heard from Alain Touwaide in that episode, he was central to our research of traditional medicine.  He’s the director of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions in Washington DC.

He spoke with Lina about the foggy past and likely future of Humorism. 

 
 

Part 3: The Resting Places of Medical Cadavers

In HBM028: Johnathan’s Cadaver Paintings, Johnathan Happ, a grad student at the University of Washington, visits one of the cadaver labs on campus.  He spends a lot of time there, studying the bodies, so that he can make paintings of them in his studio. 

While that episode has a lot of information about the cadaver labs themselves.  We never got the chance to talk about  what happens to those bodies after their 3 year rotation in the lab. 

So, in this segment, Jeff goes out to the Evergreen-Washelli Cemetery in northern Seattle, where most of those bodies come to rest. 

Special thanks to two employees of Evergreen-Washelli who helped out with a lot of the background for this piece:  Sandy Matthie (Reception at Columbarium) and Brian Braathen (Funeral Home Manager)

Music: The Black Spot ||| Half Ghost  <-- New!