March 24, 2020 • 16 mins
For a few decades the station wagon was as central to the American Dream as the white picket fence and the basketball hoop in the driveway. It was the quintessential family car. And really, who didn’t want to ride in the “way back”? This special episode comes from the audiobook edition of MOBITUARIES. You can learn more here: http://bit.ly/MoAudio.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
A few months ago, which, let's face it might as
well be ten years ago. I went out on the
road to promote my Mobituaries book. The names I was
asked most about famous first brother Billy Carter, screen legend,
Audrey Hepburn, and the original Siamese twins Chang and Hang.
I'm imagining a wacky road trip with the four of them. Now,
(00:23):
if in some parallel universe they were to take a
road trip, I would hope they'd take it in the
vehicle that was once synonymous with family fund and adventure.
Please enjoy this mobid for the station Wagon, which I
recorded for the audiobook version of the Mobituaries book, and
please enjoy the bonus on the back end of this bonus,
(00:50):
Death of a Leviathan the station Wagon to two thousand eleven.
My family had a station Wagon for a couple of
years in the early nineteen seventies, but I was only
three or four at the time, so I can barely
remember it. It was yellow, I think, or maybe it
(01:13):
was cream colored. Was it a Chevy? What I do
know is that one afternoon my mother put my brother
in the back seat after a doctor's appointment, and the
car started rolling backward in the parking lot allah Angie
Dickinson and policewoman my mother had to jump into the
front seat and pull the emergency brake. This was reason
enough for my father to trade in the station wagon
(01:35):
for an Impoli sdan soon after, and just like that,
the one thing that made us like TV's Brady Family,
and who were more all American than the Bradies, was gone.
For a few decades. From the mid fifties to the
mid eighties, station wagons like the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, the
Chrysler Town and Country, and the Ford Country Squire were
(01:59):
as central to the American dream as the white picket
fence and the basketball hoop in the driveway. These were
the quintessential family cars. If y I the Bradies had
at least two different station wagons, both of them Plymouth Satellites,
and the bigger the wagon, the cooler the family. By
the nineteen seventies, the Ford Country Squire was a nearly
(02:21):
nineteen ft long behemoth and got a whopping eight to
ten miles to the gallon. You could cram four or
five kids into the back seat. But that's not where
I wanted to be anytime I was lucky enough to
ride in one, and I'm sure I befriended some kids
because their families had station wagons. I headed straight for
(02:42):
the way back with the seats folded down. The freedom,
the danger. I loved being thrown against the side when
the car turned, all the better when other kids were
back there, all of us ricocheting off each other after
a pizza party at Shakey's. Riding in the way back
gave me the same out of control thrill I got
(03:03):
from roller coasters. Related thought, I used to fantasize about
climbing into the dryer so I could just spin and spin.
It's probably a good thing I didn't figure out how
to turn the dryer on from the inside. What gave
these cars an extra flare was the vinyl applicate wood
grain paneling. It made it feel like a house on wheels.
(03:24):
The paneling was a throwback to the earliest station wagons,
which were made mostly of wood. These wagons were d
i y affairs. The customer would buy the chassis of
say a Model T, then ordered the wood body from
a coach builder or hire a carpenter to make it
and bolt it on. It was just much lighter and
easier to build the body out of wood, says my
(03:47):
friend Matt Anderson, curator of Transportation at the Henry Ford Museum.
The technology just didn't exist at that time to build
a large body out of steel. By the nineteen thirties,
these vehicles and any where beauties were known as woodies.
The earliest station wagons were used on farms or as
delivery vehicles and to transport passengers between railroad stations and hotels.
(04:13):
That's how the vehicle got the name station wagon. This
is the kind of factoid I love. By the time
the baby boom hit, the station wagon had caught on
with families. The first real modern station wagon is Plymouth Suburban,
says Matt. It's got an all steel body. The name
itself tells you how that vehicle was marketed. The rise
(04:35):
of the suburbs was a big factor in the adoption
of the station wagon. Now, it's true that station wagons
were an absolute nightmare for any teenager learning to parallel park.
They were larger than the standard parking space, the site
lines were miserable, and I'm pretty sure that rear defrosters
hadn't been invented yet. And of course they were dangerous.
(04:57):
The way back was a death chamber. Are the more
safety conscious. There was a rear facing fold up seat,
introduced by Chrystler in seven. It had seatbelts, not that
you could ever find them. It also had the benefit
that someone sitting back there could call out whenever luggage
strapped to the roof rack came free and tumbled out
onto the highway. By the early nineteen eighties, the family
(05:20):
station Wagon was already beginning to acquire value as kitch.
We know this for a fact because in nine Warner
Brothers released Harold Ramos's National Lampoon's Vacation. The true star
of that movie is not the bumbling Chevy Chase but
the wagon Queen Family Truckster, an enormous hearst like vehicle
(05:40):
that is gradually gutted over the course of the film
due to a combination of vandalism and incompetent driving. But
as the movie Vacation was celebrating the station Wagon, its
demise was looming. There were warning signs. The oil crisis
of nineteen seventy three made fuel efficiency a priority for consumers.
The ingenuity of Japanese engineering was making it harder and
(06:03):
harder to stay loyal to American cars that handled poorly
and seemed in constant need of repair. Then came what
car journalist Amos Kwan has called the testosterone robbing minivan,
which Leaya Coca introduced to Chrysler in with better fuel economy,
more headroom, and best of all, a sliding side door.
(06:26):
The minivan was a hit among practical minded car pooling
soccer moms. Mandatory car seats rang the death knell of
the way back. The station wagon belonged to the golden
age of the highway, the new system of interstates built
by Eisenhower and Kennedy. Up through the eighties, that highway
system represented nothing less than freedom itself, flight from dreary
(06:50):
routines of city and suburb, access to all our nation's
great beauty and natural attractions. But then, with traffic and
suburban sprawl getting worse and worse, those endless highways were
no longer our means of escape. They became another part
of what we needed to escape from. And so after
the minivan, we fell in love with the four wheel
(07:11):
drive suv, the kind that, at least in the commercials,
could drive right over a guardrail, plow through a rocky
river bed and scale a craggy mountain at forty five degrees.
Maybe it was the renewed nuclear fears of the eighties,
or just a vague sense of looming catastrophe, but suddenly
we all needed military grade vehicles of our own, something
(07:33):
that could get traction on a glacier and stand up
to machine gun fire if needed when the next blizzard, hurricane,
or wildfire hit. Local and state authorities weren't going to
save us. In two thousand eleven, Volvo announced that it
would stop selling station wagons in the United States. Sales
had dropped from forty to four hundred and eighty in
(07:55):
two thousand ten. Auto buffs immediately began to mourn its
path sing, But the truth is that by two thousand eleven,
the station wagon was already long dead. The Volvo wagon
of the nineties was no more a real station wagon
than a barn swallow was a real dinosaur. At best,
it was a stunted descendant of the magnificent monsters that
(08:18):
roamed American highways during the late Cretaceous period of American
automotive history. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of
auto safety. A boy. If someone gave me the keys
to a nineteen seventy nine Ford Country Squire, I'd be
sorely tempted to take a week off and ride that
beast to the Grand Canyon, and other things from the
(08:42):
nineteen seventies that could have killed us McDonald's collectible drinking glasses.
Ronald McDonald has been the mascot of McDonald's ever since
nineteen sixty three, when he was first played in TV
ads by future Today weatherman Willard Scott. In nine seventy,
a lonely Ronald was joined by the hamburglar officer Big
(09:05):
Back and the milkshake loving Grimace in McDonald Land, a
spectacularly imaginative concoction of ad agency Needum, Harper and Steers,
which seemed awfully similar to the then popular kids TV
show hr Puffin Stuff. Google the images of Mary mc
cheese and hr Puffin Stuff himself and you'll see what
I mean. The courts agreed and ordered McDonald's to pay
(09:29):
one million dollars to the show's producers, Small Fries. Given
that the ad campaign had been so successful, the McDonald
land characters became inescapable as a line of plastic action figures,
a complete set of which goes for about six dollars
on eBay and as collectible drinking glasses, each one brightly
(09:49):
painted with a different character. It's a safe bet that
a good half of the liquid I consumed growing up
was via those glasses. But it turns out the glasses
themselves weren't so safe. In July, the paint used on
the exterior was discovered to contain led content up to
eighteen times the legal limit. Although the company that manufactured
(10:13):
the glasses, Owen's Illinois of Toledo, Ohio, declared that the
glasses in no way present a health hazard, regulatory agencies
weren't loving it. By that point, McDonald's had given away
as many as sixty million of these i Q killers
in various promotions over five years. Under pressure from the
Food and Drug Administration, they agreed to cease distribution. Unfortunately,
(10:37):
my family missed the memo, and the glasses remained and
now were covered up until about three years ago, by
which point the images had faded to not much more
than outlines. My mother's response, but the painting was on
the outside. PS. Let's all raise a non lead painted
glass to Willard Scott in the hopes that he lives
to announce his own hundredth birthday Quayludes. The pilot episode
(11:04):
of The Brady Bunch, just before they're married, Mike confesses
to Carol that he has a case of nerves. Why
don't you take a tranquilizer, asks Carol. I took one,
says Mike. Well maybe you should take another one, says Carol.
Nothing doing, says America's dad. I want to be calm
for the ceremony, but there's the honeymoon to consider. Look,
(11:25):
I have no idea how much of the Brady Honeymoon
was fueled by synthetic drugs, but the fact that the
quintessential family show of the era was promoting double doses
of tranquilizers makes you realize how mainstream these things were. Queludes,
the brand name for methoon, began as an insomnia and
anxiety treatment and soon became a recreational drug, easy to
(11:47):
get from a doctor who didn't ask too many questions.
It fast became a popular club drug, sometimes called a
disco biscuit, Highly addictive, even lethal when taken in large
doses or mixed with alcohol. Coludes were finally banned in
the United States in a law in Apple A day
(12:10):
keeps the doctor away, right, not if it's sprayed with demeanor'side.
The plant growth regulator, manufactured from the sixties through the
eighties by the Uni Royal Chemical Corporation and sold under
the brand name A Laar A Laura was sprayed on
apples and other fruits in order to keep them on
the tree longer, aiding the ripening process and most important,
(12:32):
cutting down on labor costs for big fruit producers. But
evidence that a law causes cancer emerged during the nineteen seventies,
and the proof was overwhelming. A federal band finally passed
Congress in A laar is still found all over crossword puzzles.
(12:53):
Shag carpeting Okay, I can't prove that shag garpeting huge
in the free love era of the nine sixties and seventies,
ever killed someone. But according to a two thousand one
piece in the British newspaper The Telegraph, carpets function as
toxic sponges, soaking in all kinds of pollutants that we
track in from the outside. Now imagine the billions of
(13:15):
hippie micro organisms teeming inside those deep plush piles of
looped yarn that make up a shag carpet. Trillions of
the shag carpeting was inside a van. I'm not a
licensed to pediatrician, but I bet that encouraging a baby
to roll around a shag carpet from the nineteen seventies
would build up all sorts of immunity. Jarts. Jarts, also
(13:39):
called lawn darts or javelin darts, were weighted metal darts
about a foot long that people used to toss around
the backyard trying to get them to land inside a
plastic ring. If you threw them high enough, they could
really gather speed as they plummeted to earth. Kids loved
charts until the government, citing several injuries and at least
one death, tried to banned them in After pushback from
(14:03):
several dangerous toy lobbying groups, the Consumer Product Safety Commission
agreed to a compromise charts would be allowed only in
sporting goods stores. Then, seven year old Michelle Snow was
tragically killed by a misthrown chart. Her father, David campaigned
tirelessly for an outright ban, and eventually the CPSC voted
(14:26):
two to one to prohibit their sale. I got to
wonder about that one no vote electric blankets. On a
cold winter night. During the Carter administration, there was nothing
like curling up under a soft, cozy blanket laced with
thick electrical wiring. Before safety features like an automatic shutoff
(14:47):
became mandatory in two thousand one. Exposed or damaged wiring
made electric blankets a serious fire hazard. We got rid
of the two we owned when my father started worrying
we could be electrocuted. Even today, the American Pregnancy Association
warns that the heat from an electric blanket can decrease
a mail user's fertility. Fun fact. In the vintage sci
(15:10):
fi invasion film The Thing from Another World, the monster
is freed from the block of ice in which he
is encased when an electric blanket is casually tossed aside,
melting the creature's prison and loosening him upon the world.
You Fee you fee spelled u f f I was
a kind of expanding foam insulation sprayed into walls and
(15:34):
crawl spaces. As a kid, I thought it looked kind
of pretty like ready whip topping. The problem was that
one of the f's in u F stands for formaldehyde, which,
when sprayed into the air, poses a cancer risk. When
you fee's use became a cause of concern, manufacturers protested
that symptoms of exposure were limited to watery eyes, nasally irritation, wheezing, coughing, fatigue,
(16:00):
red or blotchy skin, severe allergic reactions, burning sensations in
the eyes and throat, nausea, difficulty breathing, headache, malaise, insomnia,
and orexia. Loss of libido. I'm running out of room here.
A few months ago, which, let's face it might as
well be ten years ago. I went out on the
road to promote my Mobituaries book. The names I was
asked most about famous first brother Billy Carter, screen legend,
Audrey Hepburn, and the original Siamese twins Chang and Hang.
I'm imagining a wacky road trip with the four of them. Now,
(00:23):
if in some parallel universe they were to take a
road trip, I would hope they'd take it in the
vehicle that was once synonymous with family fund and adventure.
Please enjoy this mobid for the station Wagon, which I
recorded for the audiobook version of the Mobituaries book, and
please enjoy the bonus on the back end of this bonus,
(00:50):
Death of a Leviathan the station Wagon to two thousand eleven.
My family had a station Wagon for a couple of
years in the early nineteen seventies, but I was only
three or four at the time, so I can barely
remember it. It was yellow, I think, or maybe it
(01:13):
was cream colored. Was it a Chevy? What I do
know is that one afternoon my mother put my brother
in the back seat after a doctor's appointment, and the
car started rolling backward in the parking lot allah Angie
Dickinson and policewoman my mother had to jump into the
front seat and pull the emergency brake. This was reason
enough for my father to trade in the station wagon
(01:35):
for an Impoli sdan soon after, and just like that,
the one thing that made us like TV's Brady Family,
and who were more all American than the Bradies, was gone.
For a few decades. From the mid fifties to the
mid eighties, station wagons like the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, the
Chrysler Town and Country, and the Ford Country Squire were
(01:59):
as central to the American dream as the white picket
fence and the basketball hoop in the driveway. These were
the quintessential family cars. If y I the Bradies had
at least two different station wagons, both of them Plymouth Satellites,
and the bigger the wagon, the cooler the family. By
the nineteen seventies, the Ford Country Squire was a nearly
(02:21):
nineteen ft long behemoth and got a whopping eight to
ten miles to the gallon. You could cram four or
five kids into the back seat. But that's not where
I wanted to be anytime I was lucky enough to
ride in one, and I'm sure I befriended some kids
because their families had station wagons. I headed straight for
(02:42):
the way back with the seats folded down. The freedom,
the danger. I loved being thrown against the side when
the car turned, all the better when other kids were
back there, all of us ricocheting off each other after
a pizza party at Shakey's. Riding in the way back
gave me the same out of control thrill I got
(03:03):
from roller coasters. Related thought, I used to fantasize about
climbing into the dryer so I could just spin and spin.
It's probably a good thing I didn't figure out how
to turn the dryer on from the inside. What gave
these cars an extra flare was the vinyl applicate wood
grain paneling. It made it feel like a house on wheels.
(03:24):
The paneling was a throwback to the earliest station wagons,
which were made mostly of wood. These wagons were d
i y affairs. The customer would buy the chassis of
say a Model T, then ordered the wood body from
a coach builder or hire a carpenter to make it
and bolt it on. It was just much lighter and
easier to build the body out of wood, says my
(03:47):
friend Matt Anderson, curator of Transportation at the Henry Ford Museum.
The technology just didn't exist at that time to build
a large body out of steel. By the nineteen thirties,
these vehicles and any where beauties were known as woodies.
The earliest station wagons were used on farms or as
delivery vehicles and to transport passengers between railroad stations and hotels.
(04:13):
That's how the vehicle got the name station wagon. This
is the kind of factoid I love. By the time
the baby boom hit, the station wagon had caught on
with families. The first real modern station wagon is Plymouth Suburban,
says Matt. It's got an all steel body. The name
itself tells you how that vehicle was marketed. The rise
(04:35):
of the suburbs was a big factor in the adoption
of the station wagon. Now, it's true that station wagons
were an absolute nightmare for any teenager learning to parallel park.
They were larger than the standard parking space, the site
lines were miserable, and I'm pretty sure that rear defrosters
hadn't been invented yet. And of course they were dangerous.
(04:57):
The way back was a death chamber. Are the more
safety conscious. There was a rear facing fold up seat,
introduced by Chrystler in seven. It had seatbelts, not that
you could ever find them. It also had the benefit
that someone sitting back there could call out whenever luggage
strapped to the roof rack came free and tumbled out
onto the highway. By the early nineteen eighties, the family
(05:20):
station Wagon was already beginning to acquire value as kitch.
We know this for a fact because in nine Warner
Brothers released Harold Ramos's National Lampoon's Vacation. The true star
of that movie is not the bumbling Chevy Chase but
the wagon Queen Family Truckster, an enormous hearst like vehicle
(05:40):
that is gradually gutted over the course of the film
due to a combination of vandalism and incompetent driving. But
as the movie Vacation was celebrating the station Wagon, its
demise was looming. There were warning signs. The oil crisis
of nineteen seventy three made fuel efficiency a priority for consumers.
The ingenuity of Japanese engineering was making it harder and
(06:03):
harder to stay loyal to American cars that handled poorly
and seemed in constant need of repair. Then came what
car journalist Amos Kwan has called the testosterone robbing minivan,
which Leaya Coca introduced to Chrysler in with better fuel economy,
more headroom, and best of all, a sliding side door.
(06:26):
The minivan was a hit among practical minded car pooling
soccer moms. Mandatory car seats rang the death knell of
the way back. The station wagon belonged to the golden
age of the highway, the new system of interstates built
by Eisenhower and Kennedy. Up through the eighties, that highway
system represented nothing less than freedom itself, flight from dreary
(06:50):
routines of city and suburb, access to all our nation's
great beauty and natural attractions. But then, with traffic and
suburban sprawl getting worse and worse, those endless highways were
no longer our means of escape. They became another part
of what we needed to escape from. And so after
the minivan, we fell in love with the four wheel
(07:11):
drive suv, the kind that, at least in the commercials,
could drive right over a guardrail, plow through a rocky
river bed and scale a craggy mountain at forty five degrees.
Maybe it was the renewed nuclear fears of the eighties,
or just a vague sense of looming catastrophe, but suddenly
we all needed military grade vehicles of our own, something
(07:33):
that could get traction on a glacier and stand up
to machine gun fire if needed when the next blizzard, hurricane,
or wildfire hit. Local and state authorities weren't going to
save us. In two thousand eleven, Volvo announced that it
would stop selling station wagons in the United States. Sales
had dropped from forty to four hundred and eighty in
(07:55):
two thousand ten. Auto buffs immediately began to mourn its
path sing, But the truth is that by two thousand eleven,
the station wagon was already long dead. The Volvo wagon
of the nineties was no more a real station wagon
than a barn swallow was a real dinosaur. At best,
it was a stunted descendant of the magnificent monsters that
(08:18):
roamed American highways during the late Cretaceous period of American
automotive history. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of
auto safety. A boy. If someone gave me the keys
to a nineteen seventy nine Ford Country Squire, I'd be
sorely tempted to take a week off and ride that
beast to the Grand Canyon, and other things from the
(08:42):
nineteen seventies that could have killed us McDonald's collectible drinking glasses.
Ronald McDonald has been the mascot of McDonald's ever since
nineteen sixty three, when he was first played in TV
ads by future Today weatherman Willard Scott. In nine seventy,
a lonely Ronald was joined by the hamburglar officer Big
(09:05):
Back and the milkshake loving Grimace in McDonald Land, a
spectacularly imaginative concoction of ad agency Needum, Harper and Steers,
which seemed awfully similar to the then popular kids TV
show hr Puffin Stuff. Google the images of Mary mc
cheese and hr Puffin Stuff himself and you'll see what
I mean. The courts agreed and ordered McDonald's to pay
(09:29):
one million dollars to the show's producers, Small Fries. Given
that the ad campaign had been so successful, the McDonald
land characters became inescapable as a line of plastic action figures,
a complete set of which goes for about six dollars
on eBay and as collectible drinking glasses, each one brightly
(09:49):
painted with a different character. It's a safe bet that
a good half of the liquid I consumed growing up
was via those glasses. But it turns out the glasses
themselves weren't so safe. In July, the paint used on
the exterior was discovered to contain led content up to
eighteen times the legal limit. Although the company that manufactured
(10:13):
the glasses, Owen's Illinois of Toledo, Ohio, declared that the
glasses in no way present a health hazard, regulatory agencies
weren't loving it. By that point, McDonald's had given away
as many as sixty million of these i Q killers
in various promotions over five years. Under pressure from the
Food and Drug Administration, they agreed to cease distribution. Unfortunately,
(10:37):
my family missed the memo, and the glasses remained and
now were covered up until about three years ago, by
which point the images had faded to not much more
than outlines. My mother's response, but the painting was on
the outside. PS. Let's all raise a non lead painted
glass to Willard Scott in the hopes that he lives
to announce his own hundredth birthday Quayludes. The pilot episode
(11:04):
of The Brady Bunch, just before they're married, Mike confesses
to Carol that he has a case of nerves. Why
don't you take a tranquilizer, asks Carol. I took one,
says Mike. Well maybe you should take another one, says Carol.
Nothing doing, says America's dad. I want to be calm
for the ceremony, but there's the honeymoon to consider. Look,
(11:25):
I have no idea how much of the Brady Honeymoon
was fueled by synthetic drugs, but the fact that the
quintessential family show of the era was promoting double doses
of tranquilizers makes you realize how mainstream these things were. Queludes,
the brand name for methoon, began as an insomnia and
anxiety treatment and soon became a recreational drug, easy to
(11:47):
get from a doctor who didn't ask too many questions.
It fast became a popular club drug, sometimes called a
disco biscuit, Highly addictive, even lethal when taken in large
doses or mixed with alcohol. Coludes were finally banned in
the United States in a law in Apple A day
(12:10):
keeps the doctor away, right, not if it's sprayed with demeanor'side.
The plant growth regulator, manufactured from the sixties through the
eighties by the Uni Royal Chemical Corporation and sold under
the brand name A Laar A Laura was sprayed on
apples and other fruits in order to keep them on
the tree longer, aiding the ripening process and most important,
(12:32):
cutting down on labor costs for big fruit producers. But
evidence that a law causes cancer emerged during the nineteen seventies,
and the proof was overwhelming. A federal band finally passed
Congress in A laar is still found all over crossword puzzles.
(12:53):
Shag carpeting Okay, I can't prove that shag garpeting huge
in the free love era of the nine sixties and seventies,
ever killed someone. But according to a two thousand one
piece in the British newspaper The Telegraph, carpets function as
toxic sponges, soaking in all kinds of pollutants that we
track in from the outside. Now imagine the billions of
(13:15):
hippie micro organisms teeming inside those deep plush piles of
looped yarn that make up a shag carpet. Trillions of
the shag carpeting was inside a van. I'm not a
licensed to pediatrician, but I bet that encouraging a baby
to roll around a shag carpet from the nineteen seventies
would build up all sorts of immunity. Jarts. Jarts, also
(13:39):
called lawn darts or javelin darts, were weighted metal darts
about a foot long that people used to toss around
the backyard trying to get them to land inside a
plastic ring. If you threw them high enough, they could
really gather speed as they plummeted to earth. Kids loved
charts until the government, citing several injuries and at least
one death, tried to banned them in After pushback from
(14:03):
several dangerous toy lobbying groups, the Consumer Product Safety Commission
agreed to a compromise charts would be allowed only in
sporting goods stores. Then, seven year old Michelle Snow was
tragically killed by a misthrown chart. Her father, David campaigned
tirelessly for an outright ban, and eventually the CPSC voted
(14:26):
two to one to prohibit their sale. I got to
wonder about that one no vote electric blankets. On a
cold winter night. During the Carter administration, there was nothing
like curling up under a soft, cozy blanket laced with
thick electrical wiring. Before safety features like an automatic shutoff
(14:47):
became mandatory in two thousand one. Exposed or damaged wiring
made electric blankets a serious fire hazard. We got rid
of the two we owned when my father started worrying
we could be electrocuted. Even today, the American Pregnancy Association
warns that the heat from an electric blanket can decrease
a mail user's fertility. Fun fact. In the vintage sci
(15:10):
fi invasion film The Thing from Another World, the monster
is freed from the block of ice in which he
is encased when an electric blanket is casually tossed aside,
melting the creature's prison and loosening him upon the world.
You Fee you fee spelled u f f I was
a kind of expanding foam insulation sprayed into walls and
(15:34):
crawl spaces. As a kid, I thought it looked kind
of pretty like ready whip topping. The problem was that
one of the f's in u F stands for formaldehyde, which,
when sprayed into the air, poses a cancer risk. When
you fee's use became a cause of concern, manufacturers protested
that symptoms of exposure were limited to watery eyes, nasally irritation, wheezing, coughing, fatigue,
(16:00):
red or blotchy skin, severe allergic reactions, burning sensations in
the eyes and throat, nausea, difficulty breathing, headache, malaise, insomnia,
and orexia. Loss of libido. I'm running out of room here.
Host
Mo Rocca
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Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.