Tumbleweeds, Part 1: The Wind Witch

In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe explore the world of tumbleweeds. While it’s easy to dismiss these amazing plants as overused symbols of the American west, these detachable diaspores are more than meets the eyes.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. Like
many of you out there, I've been familiar with with
tumbleweeds for a while, but almost almost exclusively as just

(00:27):
this um sort of mundane symbol of the American West, right,
you know, mainly it's this type of thing you see
popping up in old westerns or perhaps more to the point,
old cartoons inspired by old Westerns. Anytime you need the
audience to understand, this place is is desolate, this place
is in the American desert, or this place is a
ghost town. What do you do? You have the old

(00:49):
tumbleweed roll by, Yeah, tumbleweed means nothing's going on. In fact,
I think it's even a common gift. Right. You can
meme a tumble weed if you are to indicate the
thread has died or or you know, nobody's got anything
to say, Yeah, there's nobody in here. This is It
comes to represent like not only desolation, but also uh

(01:10):
emptiness and tedium. You know, it's just in boredom. It's
like this, this place is empty, This place there's nothing
going on. This is the domain of tumbleweeds, and therefore
it's easy to think, well, tumbleweeds themselves are boring tumbleweeds. Uh,
there's nothing going on with tumbleweeds. There's it's not the
kind of thing you could do a two part series
on for a podcast. Oh but you would be wrong, yes, yes,

(01:35):
uh and uh and hopefully we will we will prove
that in uh, in this pair of episodes that we're
gonna be doing. Um. But but before, just a couple
of weeks ago, I was very much of the mind
the tumbleweeds. They they pop up in movies sometimes a
lot of times they look fake. Um. Yeah, for we
were actually looking at some clips prior to recording these. Uh,

(01:57):
you know, does this look like a real tumbleweed or
a fake tumbleweed? Um? And I wasn't always in a
good place to judge this well. I think one way
in which movie tumbleweeds often fall short is in size,
just the size shown, Because the tumbleweed in a movie
it's always pretty much basketball sized. It's very round, or
maybe you could say like turkey sized. You know, it's

(02:18):
like a good Thanksgiving turkey. But it's made out of twigs. Now, obviously,
tumbleweeds can vary in size and reality, and we'll we'll
explain more about that as we go on. But you know,
a lot of real tumbleweeds I've seen, especially in some
of the more dramatic tumbleweed footage where where humanity is
really doing battle with with tumbleweeds. Uh, they get big.
You know, they're more in the like beach ball to

(02:40):
bean bag chair range. Oh absolutely, yeah, you know, thinking
about the cinematic ones. Yeah, a lot of the times
when you see a kind of essentially a fake looking
tumbleweed and obvious plant, a plant that is is self
a plant. Um, it will be that beach ball or
turkey sized, uh tumbleweed just big enough to where it

(03:00):
is amusing but not a threat. Uh, it'll just kind
of be, you know, lazily rolling by in the background.
And Uh, one film that that I was looking at,
it was pretty interesting because you can see both examples
of this, and that's the film The Petrified Forest starring
Leslie Howard, Betty Davis, and Humphrey Bogart, which in and

(03:21):
of itself is a tremendous film, but some of it
is is obviously on more of a set or a
sound stage, and other bits of it are filmed outdoors. Uh,
perhaps in actual Arizona or at least somewhere in California
that that you know, fit the bill. Yeah, and in
the location shot, in fact, there's an early location shot
where you see Leslie Howard's character walking down the street

(03:44):
there and there's a fair sized tumble weed that that
comes in at a at a pretty swift pace. I
don't know if they filmed it in during an actual
windstorm or they just have some you know, some big
fans going. But uh, there's a moment there where I
when I was rewatching and I'm like, oh, jeez, I
hope this doesn't hit Leslie Howard. That would uh you
know that that that wouldn't be very becoming of such
a suave character. Well, isn't the beginning premise of the

(04:07):
film that he has traveled out west in order to
maybe commit suicide. So is it possible that he wanted
suicide by tumbleweed? Well, I don't know how romantic would
that day. Uh? Yeah, I think he says that he
he's hoping to one day see the Pacific Ocean and
perhaps drowned in it. But but I can't imagine saying
I hoped one day too to uh run across the

(04:28):
six feet tumbleweed and be demolished by it. I hope
one day to to be absorbed by a sea of thorns. Yeah.
So yeah, to to get back to the to the
point here. Yeah, these tumbleweeds can get rather large. And
I never really realized this before until this holiday season,

(04:49):
this that we've just gone through because this year, or
this previous year rather just after Christmas, my family we
found ourselves, um driving south from Phoenix to Tucson, Arizona,
and then west towards Las Cruces before cutting up to
Albuquerque and then Santa Fe and um, and we were
doing this because we originally are going to take a

(05:10):
northern route through Flagstaff, but winter weather forced us to pivot.
So here we are, Uh, we're going on Interstate ten
between Tucson and Las Crucis. And what during my stretch
of the driving, we begin to enter this uh, this
this this uh you know, the you know where in
the desert is you know, desolate. We get these advisories
about possible you know, wind, possible uh dust storms and

(05:35):
uh and then I begin to see the first tumbleweeds. Uh.
And you know, I've been going out west for a
while now, and I don't think i'd ever really seen
a tumbleweed in action. Maybe i'd maybe i'd seen one
small like turkey basketball size one. But this was the
first time I started seeing some real bad boys, some
real monsters rolling around. Uh. For first of all, at

(05:58):
the you know, sort of the side of the road,
were sometimes like stuck up against a fence. But then eventually, uh,
they're they're crossing the road. They're being blown across the
the highway, and it's quite alarming because again, some of
these are are huge. There we were we were commenting
at the time, perhaps overreacting, that they look like they're
the you know, about half the size of a Voltswagen.

(06:19):
Did you hit one? Oh yes, yeah, eventually let's started
hitting them and that they explode. Yeah, they kind of
or it's kind of like, um, it's like frosted, uh
not frosted. What were they? Yeah, but not the many ones,
the big ones. Oh yeah, Okay, it's like a shredded wheat,

(06:39):
like shredded many wheat, of the shredded wheat hitting the
front of your car. They just kind of, uh yeah,
crumple and implode, and um, part of it gets stuck
under the vehicle. But it's alarming because they're so big
in volume at the size at the time. I don't
know why I thought of it this way, but I
was imagining it's like running into a ball of about
five thousand tooth brushes and toothpicks all loosely taped together. Yeah, yeah,

(07:06):
and it's it's like that. And yeah, you're seeing them
slam into other vehicles in the the opposing side of
the highway. I'm watching them just slam into the fronts
of tractor trailer rigs and and it's weird to watch
them because on one hand, there there's something about the
tumble weed moving around that is kind of comical. There's
something absurd about it. And so I'm kind of freaking

(07:27):
out about the driving of My wife is just like
cracking up laughing at these things in the seat next
to me, and um. And then the other thing is
the way that they're you know, they're they're not perfect spheres. Uh,
they're not perfectly round. They have this kind of oblong
shape to them, so they kind of tumble and bounce
and especially with the you know, the uncertainty of the

(07:50):
wind and also the aerodynamics of the high speed traffic,
the way that they behave kind of comes to to
mimic that of an animal. You're trying to figure out
what's it gonna do. Is it gonna cross, is it
not gonna cross? Is it gonna halfway cross? And then
change direction, and so all of this adds up to
this this anxiety I was feeling about these tumbleweeds because
I'm I'm trying to to to figure out what they're

(08:12):
going to do and if I'm going to hit them,
and then I have to make sure I'm not going
to swerve and make the situation worse. Well, so with
us talking like this, I immediately wonder if it's like
if it's like us also talking about trying to drive
in snow. I don't know if you've seen the stuff
on the internet where anybody who lives up north makes
fun of people from the South. You're like, you know,
there's like an inch of snow on the ground and

(08:32):
suddenly nobody can drive. Yeah. I imagine that there are
some some desert dwellers out there who are who are
having a laugh at um that at how we're talking
about this here, and I mean they're probably used to it.
Uh yeah, I just I don't think i'd ever been
down there or and I wasn't in the right place
at the right time to encounter like full blown, literally

(08:54):
full blown tumbleweeds season. And I was I was actually wondering,
why are there no signs advising tourists about this, Like
they're warning us about what to do during the dust storm,
But how about it, like don't swerve, just go ahead
and hit the tumbleweed. Uh, you know, some sort of
a poster to that effect. Anyway, I afterwards, I started
looking around because I was curious, well, you know, does

(09:15):
this ever get out of hand or is this just
something where if you're if you live around at you're
used to it. Well, Uh, I did some research online.
I started running across news stories with headlines featuring things
like tumbleweed Nightmares from as recently as last month, in
which winds basically blocked certain New Mexico roads with tumbleweeds,

(09:37):
or a NBC headline quote thirty foot tumbleweed pile up
traps cars, semi trucks on Washington Highway, or another one
this this was quite impressive tumbleweeds bury New Mexico town.
And if you start looking up footage or images of
some of this um it's it's not as much of
an exaggeration as as you think, like you're looking at

(09:58):
a two story like suburban homes and the tumble weeds,
which again you're talking about tumbleweeds that can reach you know,
sometimes like six ft in diameter. They're piling up, they're
reaching the second floor of the house. Yeah, piled up
like heavy snow drifts, except probably even more difficult to
deal with than snow, right because snow, I mean you

(10:19):
can at least shovel out of the way. I don't
know if I could say easily, but to some degree easily.
Tumbleweeds are notoriously difficult to handle and deal with. I
think because of their size and their shape and the composition,
like the thorny nous of them. It's difficult to just
grab them because they're usually thorny and and in some

(10:40):
way repel your flesh. And uh. It's also difficult to
to sort of scoop them out of the way because
they tend to break. Yeah, with snow, Like one of
the great things about snow is that even if you
don't shovel it. Um. Usually what's gonna happen is it's
gonna melt. Right, the sun is gonna na come out,
temperatures are gonna rise, That snow is gonna melt. The
tumbleweed is not going to melt. The tumbleweeds a mass

(11:02):
against the side of your house might not distribute on
their own and they might catch on fire. They might
catch on fire, yeah, because they're basically they're dried out,
lifeless brittle um vegetation. So they're they're they're a fire
has it. They're a legitimate fire hazard clumped up against
the side of your house. So you've got to get
rid of them. Or if they're not, again, if they're

(11:23):
not against the side of your house, then they're perhaps
blocking the road. Uh. They can also cause other issue,
you know, they build up against fences. They can interfere
with with drainage systems um because again, a lot of
the environments we're talking about here are very dry most
of the year, but then there will be a deluge
and during that time you need to have sufficient drainage

(11:44):
systems in place. You don't need those drainage systems and canals,
etcetera clogged with old tumbleweeds. They can also interfere with
irrigation systems. They can can cause a huge mess, and
they do cause traffic accidents. Um i'm reading. I was
reading about one in Jadito Wash that was apparently so

(12:05):
impressive that the Arizona Daily Press did a ten year
anniversary story about the incident, and I included a photo
from the story in our notes here, Joe, it does
look quite impressive. You ever like comb a shedding dog
and end up with all these clumps of hair that
you need to get rid of at the end. But
then now imagine that, but it's twenty ft high. Yeah,

(12:27):
it's like like Clifford the Big Red Dog or Marmaduke
sized pile of of of shavings. Here now, like you
were saying, yeah, it's difficult to clean all this stuff up.
What do you have to do? You have to get
a work crew out there. They've got to to gather
these materials up. You've got to put them into vehicles, uh,
and and take them somewhere, take them away. And they're

(12:48):
mostly air, so you end up like really filling up
a vehicle. But then you know the weight volume isn't there, so, uh,
you know, you start doing the math on you know,
the the cost of labor, the cost of materials, the
cost of transportation, and and the cost end up really
skyrocketing for the various counties and towns and cities that

(13:10):
have to engage in this kind of cleanup effort. One
of the articles we were both reading for this episode
is a PBS article about tumbleweeds by an author named
Gabriella Ciros, but citing information from somebody named Ariel of Vario,
a deputy agricultural commissioner at the county's Weed Abatement Division
in Lancaster, California. U Ciros writes, quote, in the cities

(13:34):
of Palmdale and Lancaster, tumbleweeds are such a big problem
that Los Angeles County spends a hundred thousand to a
hundred and fifty thousand dollars yearly mowing and chipping dried
out Russian thistle that's the name of one specific dominant
species of tumbleweed in vacant lots and abandoned agricultural fields
before they can tumble away. So this is above a

(13:57):
hundred thousand dollars a year of a problem for one county,
I mean big county, but uh, every year it's enough
to make you wonder. Um, you know, there's got to
be a better way, right, It's got to be some
sort of technological improvement, uh, that that we could make
that would uh, that would improve this situation. Uh and

(14:18):
uh And indeed I found evidence of a of a
really promising and and frightening looking project that I'm not
sure ever really quite got off the ground. But I
want to read verbatim from this n l A Times
article by Eddie Pell's go for it all right, there
we go Los Cruces, New Mexico. It looks like a

(14:41):
contraption straight out of a Stephen King novel, huge metal spoke,
squirreling away, shredding everything in its path. But the invention
from New Mexico State University's Advanced Manufacturing Center is out
only to mow down the bane of the West, the
ever present tumble weed. So you shared video of this
man alur with me, and it does look like a beast. Yeah.

(15:04):
I found this this archived video that was put out
I think by the by New Mexico State University UM
or perhaps the State Highway Department. I forget which, but
it was it was all about this, this promising new project,
and it included footage of the prototype for this that
The invention we're talking about is the tumbleweed crumbler. It
was developed via a forty contract at the time to

(15:26):
New Mexico State University from the State Highway Department develop
a better way of collecting and shredding the tumbleweeds. And
the prototype was essentially a pair of rotating, like inwardly
rotating metal spokes hooked at the front of a snowplow truck. Um. Yeah,
so it's like drum barrels imagine that are sort of
rolling inward as if you know, to to roll things

(15:48):
into the gap between them, which is pretty small, and
that it's got spikes sticking out of the drums. Uh.
And there's a really excellent part of the video where
a guy is standing right in front of it while
it's running, kind of feeding tumbleweeds into it, and we
were thinking, like, oh, is he going to reach in
there to try to clear out a jam by hand? Yeah,

(16:08):
it's gonna be like one of those like shake hands
with dangerous safety videos. It just looks very unsafe and
and I don't. I don't know. I the guitar twine
comes in. Johnny thought he could save time because the
I mean, it's terrifying, but it also looks really effective.
They show it, uh like running into mounds of tumbleweeds.

(16:28):
These uh, these wheels with the with the spikes on them,
they grind up these these tumbleweeds and then the ground
up remnants are like sucked up and shot into the
back of the snowplow truck. So uh, you know, this
seems like it seems like it would it would have
been a great fix because first of all, you have
the snowplow trucks anyway that are being used during parts

(16:52):
of the year to to deal with keeping the roads clear,
and then snowplow trucks without this kind of spike contraption
are apparently sometime times used to clear the roads of
tumbleweeds anyway, though of course they're just mostly pushing them
out of the way and not really you know, not
collecting them. So it seems like this would have been
a cool way to to deal with the problem. But

(17:12):
so are these machines day wegur Now, No, I don't
think they are. That's the thing. You know you you
see uh, you see an article like this, and you
see if you see footage like this, And again this
was ninety six and as far as I can tell
this this ended up not really going too much more
beyond the prototype phase in the video they're talking about
they're going on to another phase of development. And I

(17:33):
don't know. Maybe I couldn't find an answer as to
why exactly they didn't go with this. Maybe it just
came down to something as mundane as uh, you know,
the money or politics, UH, cost effective or something. Maybe
it just wasn't cost effective. UM, I don't know, maybe
it was too dangerous. I have no no way of knowing,
and I wasn't able to find out. But this seems
to be a trend with a lot of issues related

(17:55):
to the problem of tumbleweeds, particularly in the United States.
I kept running across UH promising sounding scientific solutions UH
from years past, solutions that in many cases may still
be in development, but but but have not reached that
point where someone is out there saying, yes, this is
the thing we're actually doing tumbleweeds, watch out because we're coming.

(18:19):
Though some of these solutions do get more sci fi
than the mangler. Yes, yes, all right, Well, I guess
it's worth explaining at this point what are tumbleweeds? Uh,
And I think the most important point to say the
beginning is that technically tumbleweed is not a single species

(18:41):
of plant. Tumbleweed is a common morphological feature of a
number of different species of plants spread out across different families.
Though in the American context, there is one single species
in the in the amaranth family that tumbleweed most often
refers to, but it's by no means the only one,

(19:02):
and we'll talk more about that species in particular later.
But the broader category of features of a tumbleweed is this. So,
a tumbleweed is the above ground structure of a plant
which at maturity dries up and snaps away from the
roots structure and then is blown around by the wind,

(19:23):
scattering seeds as it goes. Yeah, it's sometimes referred to
as a detachable diaspore. Yeah. And and a diaspore is
basically any seed and other structure that helps the seed spread.
So diaspore could include, like say, a little parachute like
thing that catches the wind, or it could include like
a fruit to that you know that an animal would eat.

(19:45):
It's the thing around the seed that helps the seed
get where it's going. Yeah, but in this case it's
pretty much the entire above ground part of the plant. Uh.
And so there are variations between different species, but in
most cases you can picture, for a tumbleweed, a bush
like plant that becomes very brittle and dry and has

(20:06):
a big tangle of different stem segments, and eventually it
breaks off at the roots at roughly the place where
the stem meets the ground, and then it rolls around
on the planes, driven driven on the wind, like a
giant inflatable ball. Now you might think, okay, most plants
don't break off at the place where they meet the

(20:26):
ground and then get their bodies blown around, dead and
dry by the wind. So why do tumbleweeds do that? Well, Actually,
the answer is similar to the answer to the question
why are fruits delicious? Uh. The answer is it's for
seed dispersal, meaning the transportation of seeds and thus the
next generation of plants away from the parent and UH.

(20:49):
A lot of plant species actually spend a great effort
at seed dispersal, and there are a host of different
strategies available. So, for example, there is animal dispersal. So
you can think of the seeds of edible fruits. The
fruit is tasty and dense and calories, so animals want
to eat it. The animal will be attracted to the fruit,

(21:09):
they'll nom nom, they'll swallow it, and then they will
travel elsewhere on their their wings or their legs, and
then they will defecate and deposit the seeds in a
new home. But that's not the only method of animal dispersal.
They are also the burrs that cling to the fur
of mammals, that that brush up against the parent plant. Uh.
You know, I don't know if if you've got pets

(21:31):
that are burr magnets like my dog is. But you know,
sometimes Charlie will will get into some bushes and then
when he when he comes out, it's a problem he
has probably like you know, a thousand of these things
stuck to him, and and there are a bunch more
that there. For example, there is a whole class of
of diaspores that are spread specifically by ants that you

(21:52):
know that they have specific relationships with ants that will
maybe bury them underground in a way that's preferable to
to the land. But there's also wind dispersal. So you
can think of the seeds of dandelions. They contain a
natural parachute, like a structure that catches the breeze and
allows the seed to be picked up by the wind
and blown to new lands. There's water dispersal. Coconuts are

(22:16):
a great example here they float on the water and
allow currents to carry them to New German nation sites.
There's gravity dispersal, that's what it sounds like. There's explosive dispersal.
That one's fun. Yeah, yeah, bursting pods and so forth.
So there are a number of different methods uh, and
there are some primary reasons that a plant would want

(22:37):
to disperse its seeds to get the seeds away from
the parent plant. One idea is that doing this reduces
competition between the seed and the parent plant and with
other nearby adult plants. So, just like animals, plants need
access to resources. And one example here would be sunlight plants.

(23:00):
It's sunlight in order to power photosynthesis. But if they
fall straight down off of the parent this could limit
them right because they could be trying to grow in
the shadow of the adult plant. And you can imagine
other competitions for nutrients in the soil for water and
so forth. So one reason seeds might be dispersed is
that the is that it allows the parent plant and

(23:22):
the offspring to grow separately without competing with one another
for access to the same resources. You know that that
does make me think of the old thing the apple
doesn't fall far from the tree. But that's saying really
kind of misses the point, because it's not the The
apple is not supposed to just fall off the tree
and remain there, and then the seeds are going to
end up in the soil right there beside the parent tree.

(23:44):
Like the idea is that this is animal dispersal, that
those seeds are in this lovely, delicious apple that's going
to be consumed or carried off by some other creature.
That's a very good point. If the apple stays too
close to the tree, that could be really bad for
the young apple or the young apple tree, I guess um.
But then there are other reasons. So that's just one

(24:06):
possible motivation in the evolutionary sense. Other evolutionary motivations for
seed dispersal would be saying, limiting bad things that can
happen to young plants when they tend to be densely
congregated around the parent plant. Uh. So these bad things
could include contagion, could include the you know, the spreading

(24:27):
of pathogens that would spread among densely congregated plants, or
the harvesting of predators. So if say seeds are potentially
edible and they all fall in one place right around
the parent, this often results in say an animal that
would eat those seeds or would eat those young plants
the seedlings, uh, coming gobbling them all up at one

(24:48):
time in one big buffet. But if they spread out
all over the place, the risks of things like pathogens
and predators are reduced, And then other motivations could be
things like colonization of new areas without competition. So you
might want a way to spread your your offspring plants
to areas that don't really have any other plants in

(25:09):
them right now, you know, just kind of some bare
ground if it can be located. And in the cases
of tumbleweeds in particular, that often is located because tumbleweeds
can grow in areas that many other plants can't tolerate
or haven't been able to take root in yet. And
that's going to be key moving forward. So keep that
in mind, right, Uh and uh. But another thing might

(25:30):
be that seeds would be dispersed so that they could
target a specific germination spot where the plant is likely
to thrive. And you can interpret that in a couple
of ways. For example, some animal dispersal would mean that
the seed ends up either buried in the ground or
maybe surrounded by dung which can protect it and provide

(25:51):
other benefits. Or in other cases, Uh, this might be
methods of dispersal aimed at getting the seed to a
certain kind of landscape or environment. Yeah, and I guess
one thing to keep in mind. It kind of goes
back to the whole day about an idea about the
apple falling far from the tree. It's not about where
the apple initially falls, it's about where the seeds end up.
And with the tumble weed, it's actually quite similar. It's

(26:13):
not about it's not about really where the tumble weed
ultimately goes. It's about the seeds it drops along the way.
That's right. So if you apply what we've been talking
about to the tumbleweed in particular, how does it disperse
its seeds? Generally? What what the detachable diaspore of a
tumbleweed plant does is dry up with a bunch of

(26:34):
seeds in it, and then it will be blown about
by the wind, dropping seeds as it goes, because it
will be kind of dry and brittle, so it bounces
over the landscape, uh, sort of degrading and breaking apart
as it as it blows around, and it will drop
seeds intermittently, so all over the place you get. You
get vast seed dispersal with this method now, and thousands

(26:56):
of seeds. Yeah, yeah, totally. And also if there are
any seeds left in the tumbleweed when it reaches its
final destination, whatever that is, I mean, I guess there
probably usually are some seeds still left in it. Uh,
it can, it can try to germinate from wherever it
comes to rest, especially if it finds a water source,
if it happens to land in a place with moisture. Yes,
But one of the interesting things to keep in mind

(27:20):
is that, again, this is a plant that does extremely
well and barren environments. Uh so like an abandoned agricultural site.
Oh that's that's that's pristine for the tumbleweed, you know,
a vacant lot. Yes, it wants to get in there.
But one of the things about say, tumbleweeds accumulating in
a well irrigated yard is that I've I've read that

(27:40):
those those tumbleweed seeds, if they land there and they're
not going to really be able to compete with the
grass that's growing there. So yeah, this is ultimately a
plant that is at its best, uh in the worst
of environments, at least from uh, you know, from from
from a typical human perspective, in the worst of environments,
or environments that have for some reason been cleared of

(28:03):
their natural vegetation, which often happens in the case of
human development. Yeah, and I think it's worth this is
something that I saw pointed out in a couple of
different sources. It's easy to get to get in this
mind because again, tumbleweeds, and we'll discuss more about this.
You know, they're they're a pest. They're there, and they're there.
It's it's a problem that people having to deal with.

(28:24):
But you can't just look at the tumbleweed like a disease.
You also have to look at the tumbleweed as a
symptom of land degregation, land degradation. Yeah, yeah, so uh,
let's talk about the life cycle just a little bit here. So, um,
so what happens once that seed lands in just the
right spot. Well, they don't need much water at all
to start growing, and they have this kind of like

(28:46):
screw like shape. They're they're kind of interesting to see
the close ups of the seed. And then when they
start growing, they start out looking like just blades of grass.
They have kind of like a pinkish, uh, like a
white and pinkish um section towards the bottom. They almost
look like it almost looks like some sort of weird
onion grass or something. Oh yeah, yeah, Now I want

(29:07):
to be clear at this point, we're talking about one
species of tumbleweed in particular, the one that that Americans
usually mean when they say tumbleweeds. So now we've narrowed
it from the broader class of tumbleweed structures to the
plant people are usually calling tumbleweed, which is known as
Calli tregas or sell Sola tregas, or more commonly prickly

(29:28):
Russian thistle. But yeah, that's the one we're talking about now.
And yeah, and and I'll get into a fascinating little
history lesson about that one in a bit. Yeah, and
if you're a singing cowboy. This is the variety you're
probably singing about. Yeah, unless you hear like a really
uh like you're singing botanist cowboy. And then perhaps you
have a more robust um uh you know, lyrical treatment

(29:49):
of the whole situation. But yes, your your description is good. Yeah.
So like usually white and pink lower stem areas branching
out into green grass like structures above and in in
this young form, you know, this plant doesn't look quite
so quite so threatening. You know, it's not thorny yet,
it's not dry and brittle yet. And uh and according

(30:10):
to the way it looks, in fact that this this
young form can be eaten by some animals. Yeah, and
it it should be noted that the initial leaves here
are long, but then these spring leaves eventually fall off
and or they're replaced by shorter leaves. Each flower contains
a fruit that develops into a single seed. But then
in the late fall. Uh And and again we're just

(30:33):
talking more or less about one variety. You see some
some differences depending on the variety of tumbleweed that you're
you're looking at the different species. But during the late fall,
they begin to dry out and die and the wind
eventually breaks the dead tumbleweed free of its roots, and
as as described in that that PBS source wee we
referenced earlier, it's a clean break. Um, it's it's the

(30:54):
sort of thing you could compare to like a lizard
shedding its tail due to a microscopic lay ear of
cells at the base of the plant called the abscission layer.
Uh so this allows it to just snap off. So
the part of the stem that was made to snap clean,
it's like the part of the lizard's tail that can
that can shake off for autautomy. Yeah, yeah, so it's

(31:16):
it's you would be forgiven if you just, you know,
casually thought, well, you know, it's it's a dry place
and these bushes they just get so dry and dead
and then they gets so windy here it just snaps
the bushes off and they roll around. Um, but no,
it's it is that. But it is also a species
that has evolved to take advantage of this environment and

(31:36):
to snap off it just the right place and it
just the right time. Now, I saw some wildly different
numbers about how many seeds and individual tumbleweed plant can
drop as it rolls around. I assume. Obviously this varies
by species, but even just with reference to Calli tragus
or the Russian thistle. I saw people mentioning that, you know,
one can drop a few thousand seeds, like maybe two,

(32:01):
and then I saw estimates of like hundreds of thousands,
so I really don't know which one is more at
the correct end there. Yeah, I saw tens of thousands. Um.
I guess the tacome here is that we need to
think of it again, not as like a single seed,
but a depositor of many, many seeds. It's not about
where the where it goes. It's about the seeds it
drops along the way, as it tumbles, as it bounds

(32:23):
across the landscape, as it weaves in and out of
traffic and collides with semi trucks. Um, it's just gonna
spread out the seeds across the way, and all the
ones that land in just the right spot are going
to have a shot at growing into plant, into adult
plants themselves. It's one of those evolutionary marvels, which is
in fact neither of these things, but kind of strikes

(32:45):
you somehow as stupid and genius at the same time. Yeah,
and I think that's that again kind of cuts to
the reason that tumbleweeds can be both frightening and impressive
in person, but also innately comical. There's just something kind
of ridunculous about this large bush bumbling and bouncing across

(33:05):
the landscape. So I was curious about the you know,
the physics of the of this thing. I was like,
and my and my wife even brought this up, just like,
surely somebody's looked at the physics of this. So I
was looking around and I found a wonderful book by

(33:25):
Ralph D. Lawns, a planetary scientist and engineer at the
John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. It's titled Spinning Flight Dynamics
of Frisbees, Boomerangs, Samaras and Skipping Stones, And uh, there's
a there's there's only a brief part of the book
that really gets into tumbleweeds um and ultimately he ends
up talking more about tumbleweed rover designs, which I'll I'll

(33:49):
touch on briefly in a minute, but uh, first I
want to read this quote from the book by Lawrence. Quote.
It is worth noting that the center of mass of
a tumbleweed is generally off set from the geometric center.
To what extent this is an inevitable consequence of the
dendritic architecture of a plant, in that the branches must

(34:09):
converge towards an apex which is linked to the roots
system is unclear. It may be that there are dispersal
performance advantages in such a departure from spherical symmetry. Tumbling,
bouncing rather than rolling, may enhance the shedding of seeds
from the plant. That totally makes sense to me. So
if it were a more perfectly round dry shrub that

(34:32):
were to roll away, it might roll better, but it
also might shake. Uh, it might shake seeds loose in
a less even way. But by having a kind of
oblong or uneven structure, it's always kind of bouncing while
it rolls, and with every impact as it bounces, it
can have a greater chance of shaking some of those

(34:53):
seeds loose. Yeah. Absolutely, And he also points out that
that the tumbleweed is naturally porous. So and we look
at the airflow. The air is flowing not only on
and around it and against it, but also through it
um and he discusses He discusses most of this in
connection again to the tumbleweed rover designs. These are various
UH engineering approaches to creating some sort of a you know,

(35:16):
a rover or probe that will work on the UH.
Generally we're talking about the surface of another planet or
another planetary body of some sort, or a moon or
or something. Yeah, Mars is often a target here because
again we have to remember there is wind on Mars
and UH and if we could take advantage of that, UH,
that would be a way to to move a rover

(35:37):
across the landscape. UM. So you have various takes on
this that are you know, and some are inflatable, some
are non inflatable, UM, you know, roughly spherical designs to
allow a rover to roll more or less like a tumbleweed. UM.
But it sounds like the you know, while this is
a promising area of study, the tumbleweed rover nut remains

(36:00):
to you know, remains to be fully cracked. But a
lot of the science around it UM. I thought was
interesting because it kind of helps illustrate what really works
about the tumbleweed the plant as a as an as
an evolved solution and as an as as an evolved
approach to the landscape and what wouldn't work, uh for
a probe or a vehicle. So some of the designs

(36:21):
do tend towards non smooth surfaces like the real tumble weed.
And there have even been some experiments with oblong shapes,
but these produced bouncing due to acquired kinetic energy, something
Laurens rights is quote not recommended for an attractive vehicle design.
And I think that's quite telling again because with it,

(36:42):
with these tumbleweed rover designs, we are trying to solve
a human vehicle problem, how to move a thing from
one place to another and potentially to other locations, and
to control the movement as well. The tumbleweed plant, on
the other hand, is not trying to arrive at a destination.
It's again all about the journey and that it and
it's going to drop its various seeds along the way

(37:04):
and bouncing far from being a danger to sensitive cargo
and and uh you know, sensors and whatnot. Uh, this
can help free the seeds that need to be dropped
and um, you know, and again naturally, tumbleweed plants are
not perfect spheres. They're they're they're vaguely spherical and are
I guess more bush shaped than anything um as opposed
to like, you know, ball shaped, they're more shaped like

(37:25):
a turkey than they are shaped like a beach ball.
If if a turkey were likely to be like one
to two meters in width, yea, and was like, you know,
light enough to be pushed around in the wind. Yeah,
they're they're really it's it's really remarkable. All right. Well,
I think it's time to talk abouit about the history
of the tumbleweed. And one of the strangest facts about

(37:47):
the tumbleweed, this icon of the American West, is that
it is not actually native to North America. It's a
fairly late arrival. In fact, one of the most common
plants categorized as a tumbleweed in the United States today
is the one we focused on a good bit already
uh known sometimes as callie tregas or previously known as

(38:10):
Salsula tregas. The common name again is prickly Russian thistle.
The name gives it away a bit where it actually
comes from. This is a species originating in the steps
of eastern Europe and Western Asia, probably around the area
of Ukraine. And I found a very interesting description of
tumbleweeds in an eighteen fifty two botanical reference book by

(38:35):
an English surgeon and botanist named Arthur Henfrey. It's called
The Vegetation of Europe Its Conditions and Causes, published by
Javan Vorst in eighteen fifty two. And uh, he gets
to talking about tumbleweeds in the section of the book
where he's cataloging the plant life of the Russian step
So again you have to imagine that at the time

(38:57):
this was written in the eighteen fifties, there was probably
no trace of this type of tumbleweed in the United States.
But here's what Hinfrey says. In these regions, the wormwoods
and thistles grow to a size unknown In the west
of Europe. It is said that the thistle bush found
where these abound is tall enough to hide a Cossack horseman.

(39:20):
The natives call all these rank weeds useless for past
yere burian, and with the dry dung of the flocks,
this constitutes all the fuel they possess. Oh, and I
should note, by the way, that while he keeps saying thistle,
because that is the common name and what they were
classifying at is back then, I think technically, in the
in the modern botanical sense, the tumbleweeds referring to are

(39:43):
not true thistles. They're not thistles, but that's what they're
called here, So Henfrey goes on. One curious plant of
the thistle tribe has attracted the notice of most travelers,
the wind witch, as it is called by the German colonists,
or leap the field, as the Russian name may be translated.
It forms a large globular mass of light wiry branches

(40:08):
interlaced together, and in autumn decays off at the route,
the upper part drying up. It is then at the
mercy of the autumn blast, and it is said that
thousands of them may sometimes be seen coursing over the plane, rolling, dancing,
and leaping over the slight inequalities, often looking at a
distance like a troop of wild horses. It is not

(40:30):
uncommon for twenty or thirty to become entangled into a
mass and then roll away, as Mr Cole says, quote
like a huge giant in his seven league boots. Oh
my goodness, yeah, this is this is exactly what I
was saying on the highway a couple of weeks ago,
Because sometimes you would see two that were I saw

(40:50):
at one point two of them that were bound together,
and this monstrosity was what jumped in front of a semitruck. Wow.
I kind of wish I had seen that, But I
gotta finish the last thing he says, because he describes
the demise of this, uh, this, this giant in the
Seven League boots uh quote. Thousands of them are annually
blown into the Black Sea, and here, once in contact

(41:12):
with water, in an instant, lose the fantastic grace belonging
to their dry, unsubstantial texture. They are like, oh, it's
it is like a witch like melting in the water
because it's so good the wind, which that I've been
captivated by that ever since I read it. These things
are are wind witches. Um. But so, okay, this is

(41:34):
describing something in like the what they're calling the Russian Step,
probably the area around the Black Sea, the Black Sea basin,
or probably around Ukraine. So how does this type of
plant end up in the United States? Well, beginning in
the later decades of the nineteenth century, reports of a
similar plant. I can't be sure they're talking about exactly

(41:55):
the same species, but it seems likely to me. Uh,
They're They're at least definitely talking about the same type
of plants, some kind of tumble weed. UM. Reports of
a similar type of plants start pouring in from places
in the Great Plains of North America, places like South Dakota,
UM and UH. It's hard to know exactly when they
showed up, but a commonly reported claim put forward in

(42:17):
a source I'm going to mention in a minute here
is that they arrived in the United States around the
year eighteen seventy or sometime in the early eighteen seventies,
possibly in shipments of flax seed contaminated with these Russian
thistle seeds UM. A commonly given date is eighteen seventy three.
It is interesting to read reports from the early decades

(42:40):
of their proliferation on the continent. By the eighteen nineties,
invasive Russian thistle had become such a problem that the U.
S Department of Agriculture Botany Division issued a Farmer's bulletin
on the subject, authored by someone named L. H. Dewey.
The l H stands for Lister Hoaxe Dewey, So you

(43:00):
can actually look up a PDF of this yourself online.
It's called the Russian Thistle and other Troublesome weeds in
the wheat region of Minnesota and North and South Dakota.
This document is actually more interesting and fund to read
than you might expect for a farmer's bulletin. Uh So,
so there's a number of tidbits I want to discuss
from it, but first of all, I just want to
read directly from it, as it is discussing the difficulty

(43:23):
that farmers in the planes were facing due to the
proliferation of tumbleweeds, probably from from Russian thistle. So Dewey writes,
some of its special characteristics render this thistle much more
troublesome than other weeds. Again, it's not actually a thistle.
It is armed with spines quite as sharp and much
stronger than those of common thistles. Because of these, it

(43:46):
is difficult to drive horses through a field where the
plants are abundant. In some sections, the farmers find it
necessary to bind leathers about the horses legs while at work.
Horses running in the pasture are often injured by having
the skin in on their legs badly lacerated. The spines
breaking off under the skin caused festering sores. These sores

(44:07):
are caused by the irritation. However, not by any poisonous property,
as is frequently supposed. Hunters find difficulty in getting their
dogs to work well for prairie chickens in the stubble,
and the dogs are sometimes injured by the sharp spines.
Thrashers find it almost impossible to get gloves thick enough
to keep the spines out of their fingers, yet thin

(44:27):
enough to work with. Oh, and then he talks about
how these tumbleweeds can be a fire hazard. Of course,
so he says, the Russian thistle is the worst rolling
tumbleweed on the prairie, and in time of prairie fires,
is easily blown across a fire break of any width,
carrying fire to stacks and buildings. Yeah. So, yeah, this

(44:49):
is the thing. Not only can they potentially be a
fire hazard once they arrive at sort of a termination point,
you know, when they're stuck against the fence or a house,
but they can be on fire and be in motion.
Uh and uh. And probably one of the more outrageous
examples of this um was making the rounds on the internet,
I think back in uh and it took place at

(45:12):
a hundred and fifty acre um prescribed burn at the
Rocky Mountain arsenal near Denver, Colorado. And if you haven't
seen this footage, look it up. I think it was
making the rounds, especially on like BuzzFeed news and stuff. Um.
But you know what you see is you see firefighters
out there, you know, engaging in this um, you know,
intentional burn of the of the landscape there, and a

(45:33):
dust devil kicks up, so you know, like a small vortex,
and what does it do. It starts pulling tumbleweeds up
into it. And uh and and this is I've seen
footage of this occurring um with tumbleweeds elsewhere, except in
this case the tumbleweeds are also on fire, so it
is essentially a dust devil of flaming tumbleweeds. Yeah, it's

(45:56):
like it looks like a tornado made out of tumbleweeds
that are on fire. Right, it seems that, I mean,
it just sounds like a shark nado sort of a situation.
But no, it exists. I mean, it would seems like
the main characteristics that are the problem here that tumbleweeds
are so they're brittle, you know, fuel their their would
so they're they're highly flammable, and they're very low density,

(46:18):
so they can easily be moved around. And of course,
when there is fire, that creates drafts of air that
that suck and blow things in different directions on its own.
So yeah, tumbleweeds plus fire just seems like a nightmare
to try to control. Now, Naturally, one thing you would
do to prevent fire from spreading, say in a prairie regions,
you would have what are known as fire breaks. You

(46:40):
would have you know, like ditches or areas of cleared
land where there's no fuel, you know. So it's just like,
if there is a fire, it's going to be stopped
here because there's no fuel for it to spread across.
But if you have tumbleweeds, first of all, they're they're
likely to gather in fire breaks anyway, because that's the
kind of you know, they will fall. They will settle
their seeds in cleared land and grow grow there, so

(47:00):
they can grow in firebreaks. When they're tumbling, they'll probably
get stuck in fire breaks and pile up there. And
uh and even if there's nothing in the fire break,
if there's tumble if there are tumbleweeds burning on one side,
they can easily leap over the break and then just
spread it to the other side. You know, when I
first encountered this, I also was thinking, Okay, maybe this

(47:20):
is just a rare thing though, a flaming tumbleweed. I mean,
just because it's on BuzzFeed news doesn't mean it's an
accurate representation of reality. Um. But then I was looking
around at some various folkloric references to tumble weeds, most
of which I'm gonna say for part two. But there
was this one bit from a folklore's by the name
of Thomas Edward Cheney, who lived nineteen o one through

(47:44):
who specialized in Mormon folklore and folklore of the bad Lands,
and he wrote this in nineteen fifty nine in Scandinavian
Immigrants stories quote, A story glows like a tumbleweed on
fire as it passes on. It may die after or
a brief and flashy existence, or it may be retained
in the mind of a jokester until he dies and

(48:06):
leaves his legacy to members of his family. They in
turn recall sporadically the stories which particularly resemble their experiences.
Many such stories die without the folklorist or anyone else
getting them into the written language. Now that's just a
good quote. About just sort of the nature of storytelling.
And I just kind of like what he's actually trying
to relate there. But I also love that, like that

(48:29):
that here is the flaming tumbleweed as a as a
metaphor to explain that, and clearly like one that's not
so novel as to be foreign. I guess two people
of of of this part of the country, Like, he
doesn't have to stop and say, let me tell you
a story about a tumbleweed that once caught on fire,
and how gonna use that to make my point? No,
like the tumbleweed on fire seems to be just you know,

(48:49):
more or less off the shelf, even if it feels
a little novel to many of us. But I like
that metaphor. Actually it has both, uh in terms of
oral storytelling. It has both its strengthen its fragility there
because a tumble wheat on fire will burn up pretty quickly,
and so it's it's very fleeting, it's very ephemeral. But
on the other hand, it's you know, it spread super easily,

(49:11):
so if it if it reaches another fuel source, there
it goes. But anyway, so in this document, this Department
of Agriculture document, from the eighteen nineties. LH. Dewey goes
on to talk about some of the same kind of
problems we've already discussed in the modern age. You know

(49:33):
that they will pile up against buildings, that they will
pile up against fences, that they will will choke fields,
that they will even if you kind of mulch them down. Uh.
That they may do some good in in nourishing the land,
but just that they're hard to deal with when they're
in their bulky form. They just get stuck in all
kinds of stuff and and cause these huge problems. Uh.

(49:56):
There was another very interesting note I came across in this.
There was more just to kind of uh something mentioned
in passing in this document, but I thought it was
sociologically interesting. So, in discussing where Russian thistle comes from,
Dewey says, all the evidence points to the idea that
it was imported in contaminated shipments of flax seeds that

(50:16):
were received in in the States around eighteen seventy three
or in the early eighteen seventies, And then he goes
on to say, quote, there is evidently no foundation whatever
for the theory which is too often related as a
fact that it was first sewn in South Dakota by immigrants,
either for forage or to inflict an injury on an enemy.

(50:38):
So at least as early as the eighteen nineties, people
were spreading a completely baseless rumor that this invasive plant
was due to immigrants who had sowed the weed on purpose,
possibly even with the intent to cause harm. Very much
uh mo on the Simpsons immigrants, I knew it was them.
But then later Dewey is talking about how quickly he's

(51:01):
trying to document how quickly the Russian thistle spread. Uh.
He says, quote in many localities where a few plants
were first seen four or five years ago, every spot
of land where the sod has been broken is now occupied.
On every badger burrow and overfed spot in the prairie,
on every roadside, railroad, embankment, firebreak, and neglected garden, On

(51:23):
every field of early plowed land or stubble, maybe seen
a patch of thistles. Again, not thistles. These are the tumbleweeds. Uh.
The seeds are not here and there as with eastern weeds,
but they are everywhere. The few plants introduced four or
five years ago have seeded the land for miles in
every direction. Um. And then the last thing in the

(51:44):
document is a section I actually found somewhat hilarious where
he issues recommendations that are they're like pure just like
vilification propaganda. I mean not like obviously, you know, these
tumbleweeds can be a huge problem, and I'm not saying
like I'll just ignore them, but he like recommends that
every school house in America should have a Russian thistle

(52:06):
in the school house so that the pupils may become
familiar with it quote and teach them to kill it
wherever they find it, as they would kill a rattlesnake.
Oh my goodness. I really feel for for many of
us that, you know, they didn't grow up in tumble
weed country or haven't been visiting tumbleweed country during the
times that they're on the move. Like this is just

(52:29):
kind of a uh, this this great adversary that's been
there the whole time and we and I feel like
I didn't really recognize it until just now. Well I
think it is technically now in all forty eight contiguous
US states, so it's everywhere. Yeah, Like I mean it
is in Georgia, the state where we uh, we record this,
but I do not recall ever having seen it or

(52:50):
you know, identified it as such while I was here.
I certainly have not had that experience of you know,
the herds of of them moving across the high ways.
So I can only imagine how Georgia drivers would would
would respond to that. We don't take kindly to stuff
invading our highways. Now, I just wanted to mention a

(53:11):
few other interesting facts that came across in another article.
I was trying to look for a a more recent
article about the spread of the different tumbleweed species, especially
ruscent Russian thistle and related species in the US. So
there was one I read from eighteen in the UC Boulder,
Colorado Arts and Sciences magazine by a UC Boulder professor

(53:33):
of evolutionary biology and ecology named Jeff Mitten and Mitton
covers some of the same ground we've already talked about that,
for example, that tumbleweed is a is a structure. It
is a type of strategy for reproduction that is employed
by many plants, but that in the American context, most
of the time when people see a tumble weed or
talk about a tumble weed, they're usually talking about this

(53:55):
Russian thistle species A Salsula tregas or Calie tregas. And uh,
he said, is interestingly that genomic analysis in California has
revealed that the tragus the main species, was introduced to
the US multiple times, at least twice from different places,
so there were multiple introduction events. And he emphasizes again
something that that has come out from multiple sources we've

(54:17):
looked at that tumbleweeds became especially common as they took
hold in otherwise barren areas or in quote over graized sites,
So abandoned farm lands or or overused ranch lands could
be especially good places for uh, for for these things

(54:37):
to take root. They do better in cleared land where
they can scatter freely, where their seeds don't have to
compete with native grasses and shrubs. So it seems like
one way to have a place resist colonization by the
by the tumbleweeds is just to have plenty of natural
native vegetation covering the land. One last thing I want

(54:58):
to mention that that Mitton brings up in the article
is that, uh, you know, sometimes discussion of of aggressively
spreading non native species of plants can I don't know
it caused people to think of a plant as being
wholly without use or merit in any You know, it
can provide no nourishment to anything at all. And while

(55:20):
tumbleweeds can certainly be a big problem for for humans
and other life forms, uh Mitten points out that some
animals can eat the sprouts of of these tumbleweed plants
and and can get nourishment from them, especially when they're
young and green, but he says that herbivores do tend
to avoid them once they've reached their their thorny brittle
adult state. Though he points out one interesting historical fact

(55:43):
about their use as nutrition in in American history. He
says that tumbleweeds quote were one of the last plants
growing during the dust Bowl nineteen thirty to nineteen thirty six,
when many farmers and ranchers were unable to keep anything
growing to feed cows and horses. Russian this sole hey
is credited with saving the beef cattle industry when other

(56:04):
sources of hay disappeared. Oh wow, So this is a
species of plant that that plays rough, but when when
nobody else can hack it, it is still there and
you know, in its young form it, it can be eaten.
It may not be the best food source in the world,
but but the bovines can ingest. Anyway, I think that'll

(56:25):
have to do it for part one of our series
on the Wind, which the tumbleweed. But we've got a
lot more interesting stuff to talk about in part two.
Oh yeah, we've got some some crazy tumbleweed variants that
may interest you. We've got we've got we've got a
few Mongolian riddles we're gonna share. Uh. So there should
be a lot of a lot of interesting territory to cover,

(56:48):
but we're gonna go ahead and let this particular tumbleweed
episode snap off at the roots and begin tumbling its
way uh to listeners out there obviously, even though fire
Uh yeah, with creativity in the metaphoric sense. Right. Um. Now,
I'm sure we have a number of listeners out there

(57:08):
who have a lot more experience direct experience with tumbleweeds,
and yes, we would love for you to share your
experiences with us, uh, encountering tumbleweeds rolling across the highways
and into your house and so forth. Um, let us
know you know how to get in touch with us,
and we'll share that information here in just a second.
But hey, in the meantime, if you would like to

(57:30):
listen to additional episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
you can find them in the Stuff to Blow Your
Mind podcasts. Feed Core episodes published on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
On Monday's we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do
an artifact or a monster fact episode. On Fridays, we
do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside

(57:52):
most serious matters and just to focus in on a
strange film and discuss a strange film. Um oh. I
should also point out that I was just looking to
to revamp some of our you know, placeholders social media presences,
and our Instagram account has been locked up for over
a year. Nobody knows how to get into it. It's

(58:13):
a ghost house. So we have a new Instagram. If
you're into Instagram and you want to follow us, you
can follow us at st b y M Podcast. That's
our handle there. But I should also point out that
we also have a separate Instagram for Weird House Cinema,
and that one is just Weird House Cinema. That's the
that's the Instagram handle, and uh, that one I've actually

(58:36):
updated so it has like a still from every episode
of Weird House Cinema that we've done this far. So
that's a fun way if you just want to follow
Weird How Cinema stuff. And I'll probably be updating that
because because every now and then, when I'm watching a
movie for a Weird House, I'll have to like take
a picture of something on the on the on the
TV screen, um, and this might be a place where
I would share that. So so yeah, I'm liable to

(58:58):
actually use that account for things beyond just the mentioning
of new episodes. This is this is phone camera photo
of a TV screen. Yeah, that medium has more heart. Yeah.
I think the first one the post I did on
that Instagram account was it was just a picture I
took off the screen during Hands of Steel, where it

(59:21):
has the text at the end that pops up and
says it was a day in our near future the
era of the cyborg had begun Arizona movie, so it
ties in to what we're talking about here today. Not
unrelated to Tumbleweeds. There you go, drifting along with the
tumbling cyborg. Okay, anyway, huge things. As always to our
excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like

(59:44):
to get in touch with us with feedback on this
episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hi, you can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.

(01:00:04):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i
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