Behind the Scenes Minis: So You Hate Waffles

Tracy talks about how current events are causing disruptions in work on the podcast. She also discusses the way headlines often misrepresent alleged discoveries.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frye. We add our quarterly installment of Unearthed this week.
We did beginning with just an incredibly long introduction on

(00:25):
my part, because who knows this could be the last Unearthed,
saying yeah, yeah, great. Obviously, I want to reiterate again
that is not everything that is happening in the world.
I know, it's not everything that's happening in the world.
I feel like the one of the things that has
happened in Internet culture that I really hate is the

(00:48):
thing that has started to be summed up as the
oh so you hate waffles discourse. Yeah where this is from.
I think back when it was Twitter, someone's Twitter tweets
in which they talked about people saying I like pancakes
and the response in places like Twitter being oh so

(01:11):
you hate waffles. And sometimes it feels like there is
a jump to if you don't specifically mention something an
assumption that you don't know or care about it, or
if you say that you like something an assumption that
you hate some something else, or in this case, if
you list off a ton of things that are affecting

(01:32):
your work directly, an assumption that you don't know or
care about all of the other things also concurrently happening. Yes,
that's that's not the case. This happened to quite recently
on the internet. Oh yeah, do you want to have
detailor just yeah, just how it's going? Yeah, I mean minor.

(01:54):
I'm unconcerned with that particular iteration. Yeah, that just made
it an incredibly weird time to be working on this.
This has been a weird time to be working on
this podcast. Like ye acknowledge that before, Like in the
early weeks of the COVID nineteen pandemic, we talked about

(02:16):
how incredibly bizarre it was to be working on something
while clearly living through like a historic moment. This is
clearly also a historic moment. I am not enjoying it. No,
I'm trying to finish my work a few minutes early
today so that I can get on a train and

(02:37):
go to a protest. It feels like every time I
turn around there's yet another thing, and a lot of
it is incredibly disruptive, not just to our work, but
also to our work. So I had a very difficult
time focusing on putting these Unearthed episodes together. And then

(03:00):
I also felt like in some ways it was weirdly
conspiring against me to try to work on Unearthed. Like
we mentioned that we have comparatively fewer than normal shipwrecks,
Well there's only three in this in this episode, which
is like not many compared to a lot of our
Unearthed discussions. I had a whole lot more than three

(03:24):
bookmarks about shipwrecks, but they turned out to all be
about the same three things, right, But they were like
written or framed or headlined in a way that they
did not sound like all of the same three things.
And so it was as I was writing up the
shipwreck part that I was slowly winnowing down the number

(03:45):
of links to only be the ones that were the
same three things. And I was like, do we really
only have three right now? That's weird. We found all
the ships? No more, there's none, none left to look at,
no more ship out there. I really did not realize
that the stuff that everybody was talking about regarding Jack

(04:07):
the Ripper seems to have traced back to something that
was published in twenty nineteen something. Elderly, Yeah, yeah, I did.
And here's how this came out in my life. Okay,
So I have a friend who has long had like
a pet project that they're working on that involves a

(04:27):
fictional interpretation of the Jack the Ripper story and they
have you know, done a ton of research and they're
always you know, working with the latest of to date.
And they messaged me and they were like, I don't
believe this person did it. I'm so mad. And I
was like, my darling, please look at the date. It's fine, Like,
it's fine, Yeah, don't sweat it. This changes nothing from yesterday,

(04:51):
I promise you. Yeah, the various articles had just expressed
it so confidently. Yeah, I was like, I was like,
number one, I'm pretty sure that other sources are gonna
not be so confident about it. That was not surprising
to me at all. But yeah, I just I was

(05:12):
unaware that this was really something about research that had
been done years ago. Similarly, I was really into the
research into how many of the medieval illuminated manuscripts were
created by women scribes. Yeah. I love those manuscripts, and
you know, I like when it has come up on

(05:33):
the show that you know, various ones that have been
created by women or you know, by a religious order
that was a women's religious order. So I thought the
research to try to sort of quantify, like what was
the contribution of women here and something that is stereotypically

(05:53):
thought of as like like there are even illustrations of
the monks with their tonsures over or the thing drawing
on them. So like the idea of like, let's quantify
just what was women's contribution here. Some of the headlines
about that research made it sound like it was really
women all along, and I was like, Okay, now it's

(06:14):
still a small percentage overall that were created by women.
It's not nothing. It's still important. But this did not
fundamentally rewrite our understanding of illuminated manuscript production, although it
gave me a great idea for a story. Oh yeah, yeah,
I want to do a fictional a movie that all

(06:37):
of the very charming times we have seen illustrations of
cats in illuminated manuscripts does seem odd and slightly out
of place. Are a secret code among the women illustrators
that are all communicating to one another like this is
my work, this is my work, this is my work.
It's their whisper campaign of kitties. They're the original cat ladies. Yeah, yeah,

(06:59):
that is my fanciful Blogoney. Please don't anybody take any
of that as informed information. Mary Robinett khol who has
been on the show before, has suggested some of the
topics we have covered on the show, has a short
story that is set in a world in which the
giant snails that you see in illuminated manuscripts are real

(07:22):
things that people have to contend with. Oh, it's slight story.
I'm gonna sit here. I'm going to Google to see
if I can google the name of it. Mary Robinet
Khalal snail story Marginalia was published an Uncanny magazine. If
you want to go look that up again. Marginalia by

(07:44):
Mary Robinett Khlole. I would like to thank Google for
actually delivering a great result to me with what I
put in. Mary Robinett Kohlal snail story. One of the
weird rabbit hole isn't the right word. The thing that

(08:04):
we talked about that was about the tent, the real
tent probably depicted in a fresco in Italy. The news
releases about that research kept describing it as an Islamic
tent and I got very tangled up in whether that

(08:27):
is correct terminology, Like, definitely, this is a tent from
the Islamic world, but like, did this tent have an
Islamic religious purpose? Right? And that I did not really
get to the bottom of. But boy, did I spend
just an inordinate amount of time thinking about whether that

(08:50):
was the way that made sense to describe that, because
I immediately was like, how exactly was the tent Islamic? Right?
I'm trying to remember if I had anything else from

(09:10):
our unearthed things that I really wanted to talk about
in our behind the scenes today. I have two things,
Oh tell me so. One is the Luxury Bathing Complex. Yeah,
because it's you know, we talked about in the thing
that it is off of a banquet hall, and I

(09:33):
just had that moment of Hey, you guys, you want
to come under my house and dinner and take a
bath with me? Yeah? How weird that is to me culturally? Yeah,
I mean I'm not even like a spa person, Like,
I don't the idea of it's going to be a
very luxurious night at so and so's house, We're all
going to have a spa together, And I'm like ending

(09:54):
in a cold place. It's a hard pass no thank you.
I am a small, a spa person, So the general
idea of that did not seem that strange to me. However,
the fact that, like the banquet hall is connected to
the changing rooms, and at least I don't recall there

(10:18):
being it did not seem like there was a sense
of privacy in the changing rooms. It seemed more like
it was like a room with benches and like a
big locker room like. Yeah. And I was sort of
reminded of on our trip to Iceland last year when
we went to Blue Lagoon. Yeah. And the way it

(10:38):
works at Blue Lagoon, or the at least the way
it works when we were there, is that you are
given your towel, like you have to go and wash
your body before you get in the water. Yeah, And
you are not given a towel or a rope unless
you have paid extra for a robe, Like you don't
have a towel or a robe or whatever. So there

(10:59):
are just periods of time that you need to be naked. Yeah.
I was not prepared to just be naked around the
people who were on the trip with them. Yeah, it
was a little weird, and I was you know, I
had a moment where I felt kind of hung up
on it, and then I was like, we're all gonna
be naked. Yeah, exactly. Listen, I'm practically a never nude right, Like, yeah,

(11:22):
me and Tobias get each other. I never take My
feet are never uncovered, my body is never I don't
want to touch the outside world with my person, right
even Like having been to massage school and having practiced
as a licensed massage therapist for several years, like I

(11:45):
just I got very accustomed to nudity and bodies, but
at the same time, we also took a lot of
care to make sure that the parts of people's bodies
that we think of as private were covered, right, and
so like there was just there was not a lot
of walking around completely unclothed in front of other people.

(12:05):
That part is actually not so bad for me. Yeah,
Like the idea of modesty and nudity in front of
other people. I credit this to when I was much
much younger and I danced ballet, and I danced kind
of as a junior member of a ballet company for
a while. Yeah, and like you just got to change backstage,
and sometimes everything is coming off down to like tights

(12:27):
or sometimes to nothing before you can whip it back
on and go back on stage. And so I was
a little inured to that. I just as I've gotten older.
I don't know if I'm Howard hughesing out or what,
but I don't want anything touch I don't want to
be exposed. Yeah, it's less of like a yeah, A
part of it is just like I don't I don't

(12:49):
want to accidentally be upbraided by anything. I don't want
any discomfort to surprise or sneak attack me in any way. Yeah,
when I was in high school and I did drum corps,
I got very used to just like being in the
locker room changing clothes in front of other people. But
that was still sort of a like that was a

(13:10):
group of people that I was used to being around
in those contexts, right, Not so much the people who
were on the trip with us also not so much.
If I were invited to a nice dinner at a
politician's house and then everybody else from the political dinner
is going to go, I would, in my modern sensibilities,
be kind of like, ah, I gotta think about the

(13:32):
fact that now we've all seen each other naked. Well,
I also am like, the last thing I want to
see or be around after a rich meal is the
naked bodies of all those people who have eaten that
rich meal. That's just not for me, makes sense? I
sound so hung up? Yeah, that one just got me.

(13:53):
I had another big thought though, which might have more levity,
or maybe that had levity, okay, ogle painting. Yeah, the
idea of like, it's not clear how the theft happened. No,
of course not. But having done an entire season of
Criminalia about art thefts, uh huh, it's shocking how many

(14:16):
famous art thefts literally constituted. I just took it off
the wall and walked out, right, I'm like, I can
tell you how it probably happened, youoin, like somebody just
walked out with it and covered a magazine print out. Yeah,
this also is one of those things that gives me

(14:36):
hope from another story that was in that particular season.
Have we talked about this? Do you know that there
was for a while a salad an original Salvador Dali
on display at Rikers Island. No, he did this piece
of art for the incarcerated men there because he was
supposed to go and give a talk to an art

(14:59):
program that they doing, and he was sick that day,
so instead he made a quick piece of art, which
was an interesting choice. It's like a crucifixion piece, and
sent it to Rikers with you know, his compliments to
the people who were part of that program. And it,
for a long time was displayed in the mess hall
over the trash can, so it got splattered with stuff,

(15:19):
and then it got put in storage, and then someone realized,
we have an original DOLLI. We should put it on
display in the admin building, and they did, and then
it got stolen by three of the guards. Okay, it
has never been recovered. They may have destroyed it, and
that breaks my heart because like, yeah, but then we
have stories like this, and I'm like, maybe maybe they

(15:41):
palmed it off to some dude and he's got it,
and one day we will find it accidentally on loan
from a private collector to use, or somebody's heirs will
be cleaning out their estate. I hope, I hope. There
are several pieces that you know, have never been recovered,
and we hope and hope. But this reminded me a
little of the DOLLI. For some reason, there's been sort

(16:01):
of speculation on and off about whether the painting's stolen
from the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum still exists or not.
Did we talk about I haven't seen any updates. Several

(16:24):
weeks before we are recording this conversation, there was some
video that was all over social media of an art
exhibit in I think it was in Soho in New
York that was allegedly like authorities walking into the art
exhibit and taking a painting off the wall because it

(16:48):
was Christ on the Sea of Galilee. It was that
painting from the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum. But the thing
is everyone was like, is this a piece of perform's art?
About that theft? Is this really something happening at this gallery?
Galleries wouldn't show a piece of art that they knew

(17:09):
was famous and stolen it. I'm like, yes, they would,
but but I never saw a follow up on it,
and I haven't dug around, and I didn't know if
you had seen that. I did not. I somehow missed
all of this. Let me see if I can look
for it really quick. As as I said, I was
struggling with focus while working on this, so it would
not surprise me if there were a big thing that

(17:31):
should have wound up in the episode that did not well.
I mean, I think the fact that you didn't see
anything of it makes it seem like that might have
been a hoaxy hoax hoax. Okay, Hold on, NBC has
a thing. NBC Boston says the date on it, this
was just from the the Thing March seventeenth, So it's

(17:54):
literally in reference to that. Okay, but nobody seems to
think that's really what happened. The video, it's a marketing video.
The video I'm quoting from NBC Boston quote. The video,
which depicts FBI agents confiscating the stolen Rembrandt masterpiece from
an art gallery in New York City, is part of
the marketing strategy for Eric Aronson's new movie any Day Now. Ah, Okay,

(18:19):
that's what's up. Well, all right then, somehow that's local
to you, theater od I do miss living in Summerville.
I got priced out of that place when we were
ready to buy a house. Yeah, but I'm still there regularly,

(18:40):
and I still have friends who live there. All of
them are renting. I think nobody who's the house in Summerville.
Everyone's all furious about a Fulbright scholar basically being snatched
off the street. Yeah, of course over I have read

(19:00):
the op ed that she co wrote. I found it
to be not even that radical. I'm not saying that
people should be disappeared for radical speech at all, but
I found the op ed to be a pretty even
handed criticism of the Tough's administration's response to resolutions passed

(19:20):
by the Student Senate related to Israel and Gaza. And
as I understand it, like the Student Senate debated over
these things throughout the night before voting on them, and
the op ed was basically like, to have gotten this, really,

(19:42):
you know, flat dismissal from the administration almost immediately does
not seem like you actually listened to what the students
were saying. And while graduate students were not part of this,
we're still part of this university. It did not to
me say anything that would be cause, in any circumstance
for six plain clothed officers to be snatching somebody off

(20:06):
the street. Yeah. The only circumstance I can think of
that that might be appropriate would be someone making active
threats of violence and a need to take that person
into custody. Right now, which is not what was happening
in any way. Right. So, anyway, my entire friend community
is outraged and heartbroken. That's how we're all feeling right now. Yeah,

(20:29):
not just for that reason, but that's one of the reasons.
So you're saying you hate waffles, I don't. Actually you're
gonna say, I don't actually like waffles. I was trying
to think of something funny to append to that, and
I just I didn't. I didn't. The only waffle maker
we have in our household currently is a little mini

(20:51):
waffle maker, and that's time I make eggs in the morning. Yeah,
I have so many waffle makers. Yeah, it does mean
when sometimes Patrick wants to make waffles, there's a lengthy
waffle making process because of our one little mini waffle
My gosh, I have so many. I have so many,
it's silly. I love a novelty waffle maker I got.
I got my Grogu ones, I got a million Star

(21:14):
Wars ones, I got Halloween ones, I got hanted Mansion ones. Yeah.
I think I finally re homed my Hello Kitty one
that I had for a long time. I love a
waffle maker. I'm gonna tell you BB eight is maybe
my favorite, very exciting. Yeah. So I can make all
the waffles of all the shapes in size, but I

(21:35):
usually make savory ones, not sweet ones. Yeah, waffles is
definitely a more fun way to close out this little
behind the scenes, I will just say we're recording this
on April the first. It's gonna be two solid weeks
before these episodes come out. Who even knows what is
happening in those two weeks, Oh, there's literally no telling. Yeah. So,

(21:55):
whatever's happening on your weekend? Boy, do I just have
thoughts of peace and love, especially for anybody who is
struggling with anything. The list of people who are struggling
with things just increasing for me every day. So I
hope what's happening on your weekend can have a moment
of like rest. You gotta take a moment of rest

(22:18):
sometimes to keep yourself going. We will be back with
a Saturday Classic tomorrow. I think I've lined up a
couple of Saturday Classics that are related to things that
came up today. We will have a brand new episode
on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a

(22:41):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
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favorite shows.