January 30, 2025 • 42 mins
You want payback don’t you? Sure, we all do. We all want it so bad. So bad. Sometimes people do things to get payback against someone who’s wronged them and sometimes those things they do are memorable and monumental. We commemorate some here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and this is stuff you should know. And this
episode Chuck has made fun of, even though I took
pride in helping to assemble it.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Oh, it's fine. It's a top ten. We haven't done
those in forever. Yeah, it's always kind of a fun throwback,
and it seems like we never do ten with our
three x structure. Nine is probably a great number, but
I guess we'll see what happens.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Right, let's see what happens. So, you know the old
saying cut off your nose to spite your face.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yes, And I feel like we did this on an
internet roundup or something. Maybe it's unded really familiar the story.
Did it did?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Not to you.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
No, As a matter of fact, it was all new
to me. But that doesn't mean we didn't do it already.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah, but you would remember this one because it involves
self mutilation.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
So just want to put out there that this actually
has nothing to do with that phrase. And I'll explain
why that phrase doesn't actually have anything to do with this.
Oh really, but I guess I should probably say that
we're starting this episode out in like the worst possible way,
with a really downer of a story that may or
may not have to do with Spie. So I say
(01:25):
we just go ahead and start that.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Now. Yes, there is a book, and this is as
the story goes. The book in nineteen oh four called
A Dictionary of Saintly Women. The story is that Viking,
you know, berserker raider types, came pillaging southward to the
British Isles at one point well not at one point
(01:48):
eight sixty seven CE specifically, and while they were doing
their berserkering and ravaging of the villages and things things,
there was obviously the kind of thing that would happen
would be assaults on people physically, sexually and otherwise. And
so when they went to a monastery in Scotland, the
Coldingham Monastery, the lead nun, Saint Aby the Younger, said, Hey,
(02:14):
here's what we'll do. We want to keep our chastity
and our covenant to God. It's a big deal for
us nuns. We should cut off our noses to keep
that from happening, because they won't assault us then.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
But not to spite our faces, to snite the vikings.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Yeah, not even to spite. I think. I think it's
to protect themselves from sexual assault. Sure, I mean this
is all horrific.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
It is horrific.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
No, I'm not saying like this is a laugh, right, yeah,
like that.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
I'm just saying no, no, no, thank you.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Anyway, back to the horrific story, Saint Aby said, and
she was in a saint at the time, but this
certainly helped her case. Later on, she said, come, nuns,
let's go sit around and talk. I have something to
say to you. Uh, to prevent ourselves from losing our
chest from being raped by these Vikings, We're going to
(03:02):
cut off our own noses. I'm going to cut off
my lip and maybe I'll inspire you to do the same.
And the rest of the sisters said, yes, let's do that,
and they did. And there's actually old like wood cuttings,
and there's at least one stained glass panel of this happening,
and it's gory, even as a wood cutting as gory.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
And when the Vikings showed up, they found these nuns
missing their noses, bleeding, missing their lips, just in quite
a state. And they were like, we're just gonna move on.
To the next monastery and see what we find there.
The nuns, however, were not their lives were not spared,
were they.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah, it gets even worse because what the Vikings did
was burned the place down with them inside and killed
them all.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah. But there's a different way of looking at this,
and that is that these nuns protected their chastity, which,
as you said, is like really really important. They're known
as the brides of Christ, and that's one of the
reasons why they're chased. Why they're meant to die virgins,
is because they have given themselves to Christ or to God.
(04:12):
So as long as they're chased and they die chase,
then they have fulfilled this covenant. Even if it's not
by their own will or decision that they lose their virginity.
If they lose it through force, it's still not quite
the same as dying chase. So they managed to come
out on top religiously speaking. So that's that story. Oh.
(04:34):
The reason why it doesn't have anything to do with
cutting your nose up to spite your face is because
that phrase means that you are doing something in revenge
to somebody else or to harm somebody else, but you're
actually harming yourself much worse than you are them.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, and they just burned them down.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
They didn't spite anybody, right, So that's a heck of
a way to kick off what was supposed to be
a semi lighthearted top ten list.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah. Oh wait, didn't it mean to spite your own face?
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Right? So you're.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Yeah, I got you.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
You see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Yeah, I just got confused.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
It's kind of like there's another saying that hating somebody
is like drinking poison and expecting them to die.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
I've never heard that.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
It's a good one. It really gets the point across.
It makes you not want to hate or steal or
something about someone else.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Wow, that's really good. I like that.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Thanks a lot. I just made it up.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Look at you dropping nugs. All right, Let's talk about
Henry Clay Frick because he was a Gilded Age I
don't know about robber Baron, but he was at very
least a mogul, and along with Andrew Carnegie, they made
quite a lot of money together as partners in the
steel industry. That relationship went south and Carnegie got him
(05:47):
out of the picture, got Frick out of the picture,
and you know, to the point where he was Carnegie
was sued and and Frick actually won a lawsuit and
one compensation and everything. But it wasn't like he was like,
all right, we're all even now. He hated Andrew Carnegie
for the rest of his life.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah, anytime, like Carnegie's companies, I can't remember which steel
company was he owned, but anytime there was like some
misstep or bad decision or business went awry, Frick would
send a note like chiding him or taunting him for
having made a terrible decision, like just constantly kept it up.
There was I think Carnegie built a mansion in New
(06:25):
York and Frick was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to
build an even bigger one right down the street, just
to show you up. Like would not let it go.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah, for sure, anything you can do, I can do
bigger and better. And so you would think at the
end of their lives they could just let buy guns
be by guns. And that's what Andrew Carnegie tried to
do when he was in failing health, said, can you
get in touch with my old partner Frick, mister Henry
Clay Frick, and tell him he's got a great name,
(06:55):
and tell him that I'd like to meet up with
him and patch this thing up before we're gone off
of this earth. And so they brought the letter he
dispatched as his personal secretary James Bridge to send this
to Frick personally, and Frick apparently bawled up the letter
and threw it back at him and said, tell him
I'll see him in hell where we are both going.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Yeah, great, comeback.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
I'll meet him in hell.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yeah. His other thing that he was said to have
said was not until he admits that I'm the Mary
and you're the Rhoda.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Oh man, I know you're getting into some old TV
and you always have been. But if you do, you
have Criterion the Criterion channel streamer. Uh no, highly recommended,
by the way, like it's really the only great one
out there as far as quality stuff. But they have
Old Mary Tyler Moore. Or maybe that was on Max.
(07:51):
I can't remember, but anyway, Emily and I started watching
Old Mary Tyler Moore episodes.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Well like the original where she worked at the TV station.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Yeah, and it is. I watched a little bit when
I was a kid, but man, it it is so
good and it's so funny and charming and witty and
like still great. Yeah, holds up.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Those shows used to like just be written so well too,
and acted.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
She was so good.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I can't remember. There was one episode where I think, Ted, yeah,
Ted Night, he was doing he was doing something and
it was so ridiculous and preposterous, but he was playing
it straight so well that the rest of the cast
just started cracking up and like they couldn't not They
(08:34):
did it in every take and it ended up kind
of in the show. It's some classically well known episode.
But check that one out and make sure you see
that one too.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
So good, Ted Knight. And uh, who's the woman who
played rote A?
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Valerie Burton Alley? No, Valerie, Uh, oh.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
It's killing me. Valerie Harper. There you Valerie Harper ed Asner.
It's like, it's just it's really a great, great show.
And Mary Tyler Moore is just a gem of a human.
I hope she's still good as a person. Sure, I'll
watched the documentary about her. It's worthwhile. Oh really, yeah,
it's excellent.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
In fact, all right, I'll check it out.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Yeah, quite a woman.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Well thanks for the recommendation.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Hey, sure, I feel like we've killed some time, should
we do a third in then take a break.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
I think that's a great idea.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Chuck, all right, we're gonna talk about Sadam Hussein, and
Sadam Hussein didn't like one George H. W. Bush, who
was the guy who said his name that way because
of the First Gulf fer.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah, he said, sure, I invaded Kuwait, but that doesn't
mean you have to come over here and liberate Kuwait.
And George Bush said, yes, we do. And as a result,
after this war, Saddam Hussein was still in power, and
he apparently was willing to use his power in all
sorts of weird ways and techie ways. Frankly, in one
(10:01):
of the ways he did that was he had a
mosaic mural, and unflattering mosaic mural of George Bush laid
into the floor of the entrance of the Al Rashid Hotel,
one of the nicest hotels in Baghdad, if not the nicest,
And the whole reason was it also said Bush is
criminal on it too. And the reason was is that
(10:23):
anyone coming into this well traveled hotel would walk right
over George Bush's face.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Right, and if you walked around it, you were given
a bad room.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Right, or taken out back and shot one of the two.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Did you look at a picture of this?
Speaker 2 (10:37):
I did. It is an unflattering portrait, but you just
totally tell who it is.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
You totally tell who it is. It's a big old
George Bush senior right there on the floor of the hotel,
of the lobby. It's a very strange thing to see
in a nice hotel. Yeah, but w came along later on,
went back to Iraq for the you know, the war
there on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that
(11:04):
did not exist, right, And he had them smash that up.
And he's like, Daddy, I'm not gonna let him do
that to you. Here's some sledgehammers. And so they went
in there and they smashed that thing up and chiseled
it up and supposedly laid a portrait of Saddam. Did
they didn't do that in mosaic tile? Did they?
Speaker 2 (11:22):
I don't think so. From what I saw, it looked
just like a picture. I didn't see a close above it.
I just saw it. Yeah. I couldn't find one either,
Like the head without a proportion with the Body's.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Like, here's some sledgehammers, and I need a good tile
guy in bagdad.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Right, the sledgehammers head, don't mess with Texas engraved on them.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
They probably did.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
But yeah, I mean that's spiteful. Right to make a
mosaic portrait of one of your sworn enemies so that
your people walk all over him, I.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Think so to ruin your hotel lobby, your nicest hotel lobby.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, all right, so we have a definitive example of spite.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Well then that I think that means we should take
a break while we're ahead.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
All right, we'll be right back with three more. I
want to learn about Terris ort to college, horedactyle, how
to take a bird.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Is gone?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
That's a little hunt the.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Word up, Jerry, Okay, Chuck. I guess we should at
this point decide which one we're not going to do
for doing three three and three.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Well, I think the Beatles one has the least amount
of meat on the bone.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
All right, I was gonna skip that one too. Or
suggests we do great, uh and if you did it,
I was just gonna not talk. I was gonna skip
it either way.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Well, I mean we can just quickly say that at
one point after the Beatles break up. John Lennon wrote
a song where he talked a lot of trash about
Paul McCartney. So everyone wants story. It's very, very famous story.
But the one that's really interesting to me is Ford
Versus Ferrari because that is a terrific movie that I
high they recommend.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Is it on Criterion Channel?
Speaker 1 (13:14):
I doubt it, but I'm sure you could stream it somewhere.
The great James Mangold directed it, and I'm always a
fan of his work. He did the new Bob Dylan movie.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
What else?
Speaker 1 (13:23):
He did the last Indiana Jones movie, which was better
than the one before.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
What Else. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
He's done, he's done. James Mangold's good. He sort of
has a very varied resume, which I always appreciate in
a director.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Yeah, I was gonna say that's all over the place
for sure. Yeah, So I guess if you've seen Ford
Versus Ferrari, you're familiar with this story.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
I am, and I do recommend it. He also did
the Wolverine movie in the Logan movie, so yeah, he's
all over the place.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Okay, So I'm going to tell this story then, because
I haven't seen that movie. So this was new to me, Oh,
you'd like it, okay. So in the sixties, Henry Ford
the second, who was the successor president of the Ford
Motor Company and I guess probably a relative of Henry Ford's,
he decided that he wanted Ford to get into racing
(14:12):
just to basically like make Ford, just to expand the brand. Basically, yeah,
rather than just giant land yachts, we also make really
fast cars too.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
He also was like, you know, I know that there's
probably easier ways to get into racing than to build
race cars, and that is, let's just buy Ferrari like
they were already known around the world for building cars
that were just fast as all get out.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
That's right, and they're very famous. Founder Inzo Farrati pitched
a deal for eighteen million bucks for ninety percent interest
in the company. And as the movie portrays it, this
isn't in this article, but as a movie portrays it.
If I'm not mistaken, and I'm not sure if it's
true or not, but at least it wasn't a movie.
I don't see why they would make this part up
is that he was using that deal to get a
(14:58):
better deal from Fiat. So playing one against the other,
which will really make someone mad in business.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Apparently, when Ford showed up to sign the paperwork, Ferrari
said that you know what you're this Ford assembly line.
This bureaucracy that you've got in this company is this
is not of how we do it over here.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
So no deal, right, And Ford was not very happy
about this, right of course, not so out despite and
to get back at Ferrari, and I think also to
get into racing too, Ford decided to build their own
race car, which came out to be the Ford GT.
Forty and I went and looked it up. I'm not
(15:37):
a car dude, but I am like, here, this is
an amazing car.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
I'm the same way man.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
And in fact it actually did best Ferrari at Leman's
in nineteen sixty six. And you can buy that car
at the very least, the original body that won Lamon's
in nineteen sixty six for cool six hundred and seventy
five thousand dollars from it looks like a private owner
in Jacksonville, Florida.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Wow, Jacksonville, it's beautiful. So they won first, second, and third,
so they really bested Ferrari. They also won in subsequent years.
So they swept in or not swept, but they won
in sixty six, sixty seven, sixty eight, and sixty nine.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
That's a sweep.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Well, I meant not sweep for a second and third
place necessarily, or they may have. I don't know, but
I think we should do one on the twenty four
hours of La Monz because that's that's I'm not a
car race guy, but that to me is the most
interesting one.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yeah, because they just drive around and around and around
for twenty four hours to see who can go the
furthest right.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Yeah, I think it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
It's an endurance race.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
And it's not just like a you know, a circular
NASCAR thing. You know, they're driving through streets.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Right, and every once in a while it starts to
get boring. They just push pedestrians out in there and
see what happens exactly. So there's a little more to
this story. A little separate spoke that Ferrari had going
on at about the same time or a couple of
years earlier. Our friends at Mental Floss pointed out that
Lamborghini actually was founded out of spite to Ferrari.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah, apparently the founder of Lamborghini, John Smith. His name
was Ferruccio Lamborghini. He was a tractor maker in the
sixties and he had a Ferrari and he was like,
this clutch is kind of janky. And as the story goes,
(17:28):
he got in touch with Inzo Ferrari and I was like, hey,
you know, I think I can help make your clutch better,
because you got this problem here with this spawndivot and
I can help make that thing better. And apparently, as
the story goes, Ferrari did not receive that phone call
well and was basically like get lost.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, he said, stick to making tractors. Lamborghini. Who's ever
heard of Lamborghini?
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Exactly?
Speaker 2 (17:50):
What a weird name for a car, right, So Lamborghini
was like, well, I'm just going to go make my
own car, and in nineteen sixty three, I believe, he
started making Lamborghinis with the help of five workers who
had recently been fired from Ferrari. That's how we established
his car company. And had Enzo Ferrari not rebuffed him,
(18:11):
we would never have that classic Garfield poster from the
eighties where he's standing next to a Kuontosh Bright.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
You and I are not car guys, But like, if
I see a Lamborghini on the street or something, or
like the old Magnum Ferrari. I love that stuff.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Tinkle yourself a little bit.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
I mean, you know, I'm not a sports car guy,
but I just can't help but see those and think, like,
what a what an amazing machine?
Speaker 2 (18:37):
That is gorgeous. Those Magnum Ferraris you can get for
a song these days. I mean they don't work very well,
but like, how much are you O? Dohn't know. I'm
gonna guess anywhere between ten and fifty grand.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Yeah, I mean, considering how much they were, that is
a song, you know it is.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
And they're so small too, Like I'm not sure either
one of us could fit in one of those.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, I mean I think every guy are. I mean
Thomas magnefited him, but.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Yeah, I think that was a stunt. Double half his size.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Really well he was when it showed him in the car.
His knees were up toward his chin a bit so.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Like by his ears.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Yeah, because he was he was a tall guy.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
But I.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Like that that Ferrari. I feel like for guys of
our generation, that Ferrari and the the Porsche from Risky
Business or like Top two of the top five probably
dream cars.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Was that in nine, nine to eleven, it was the.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Now in the nine to eleven it was the nine
I'm not familiar with that one. Then, yeah, it had
the lights that popped up.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
It was.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
It was one of the not as lauded versions, I think.
But man, and that it's just something about that movie.
It just sort of locked it in. I mean, it's
like a little hatchback. It's not even that special.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Hatch pack when you look at it. Now, yeah, for
grocery shopping. Exactly how many have we done for this thing?
Speaker 1 (19:59):
We just did one, right, Oh yeah, we gotta get going.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Okay, all right, let's get going. Because it turns out
that there was a road in China made out of spite.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
That's right. And I feel like I've seen this in
more than one place in the world where oh really, yeah,
not even necessarily a road, but like where like, well,
you don't want to give up your house, so we're
just going to build these skyscrapers all around.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
It, right, Sure did you see pictures of this though?
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Oh yeah, this is this is the extreme because this
happened in China to this couple in twenty twelve, The
man's name was Luo Bogan Boggin Boggin. He and his
wife refused to you know, they tried to come in
and take their house to make a highway, and they
(20:46):
were like, no, we're not going to do it. You
didn't offer us enough money, and so we're not going anywhere.
And so they built. I mean, if you visualize, if
you're visualizing a house literally sort of in the middle
of a road, in the right way goes around it,
that's what they did.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yeah, Like, it wasn't even aroundabout. It's just that the
road widened and kind of curved in a bulge on
the sides around this house literally in the middle of
a highway. Even worse, even more reckless, if you ask me,
they kept electricity going to this house. So there's an
electrical pole in the middle of the highway too, totally unmarked.
(21:24):
It doesn't look really, no, it doesn't. It does not
at all doesn't. And if you want to see what
we're talking about, The Atlantic has a good photo spread
called the House in the Middle of the Street from
in twenty twelve.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Yeah, I mean, this is the most extreme case of
something like this that I've heard. You know, it didn't
take long for them to give in, obviously because it
was well dangerous and awful, and so they got They
did eventually give in and got a larger offer than
they are originally asked for. But I don't get the
feeling that they thought they won.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
No, they definitely didn't. So I've looked into this a
little further. There was a five story house that they
had just built for ninety five grand when the provincial
government said you need to move because we're building a
highway through here. And they weren't the only ones who
had kind of tried to stick it out. So they
were also aware that they could not leave their house.
(22:17):
They had to stay in their house twenty four hours
a day because if they left, the government would come
and bulldoze their house while they were gone and be like, ts,
what are you going to do? And they had no choice,
but just holding out was kind of a protest and
to draw attention to this generally unfair practice, because I mean,
any government can exercise eminent domain, but typically you want
(22:38):
to give at least market value.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, I mean, it's it's really egregious.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
When you look at this picture, it's nuts because they
were on their porch like a second floor balcony, and
they're looking down and you're looking down not at a
front yard, you're looking down at the road, like it
went right around this house.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Yeah, through crazy stuff.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yeah, so that was a spiteful road.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
That was a spiteful road. And now we're gonna talk
about a spiteful statue.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Because in Germany, between the towns of Bonn and Buah,
there's the old Rhine River and the Rhine River Bridge
that connects the two and so the Little Bridgeman or
the bruchen Mankin frucin Mankin, it's kind of a mouthful,
is the little Bridgeman. And that is a sculpture of
(23:29):
a guy sort of bent over sticking his butt out,
and that became the subject of a lot of contention,
eventually backfiring. Is that right.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Yeah, So the story went that in the late nineteenth century,
I think December seventeenth, eighteen ninety eight, this bridge between
Bonn and Buell, which was supposed to be a joint
construction project between the two, ended up being paid for
entirely by Bonn because Buell was like, we'll use the bridge,
but we're not going to pay for it. You go
(24:00):
ahead and pay for it. Yeah, And so under wraps
until this unveiling of the bridge was that little statue
of a little man carved into the bridge with his
butt sticking out, basically.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Mooning Bule, mooning Bule.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Can you imagine just the pilarity of seeing that.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, But like I said, it backfired because that statue
became a bit of a local icon. So it you know,
it was on banknotes, it was on people took pictures
of it, it was on local postcards, and it was
a little tourist attraction. But what they did was they
put attacks on the bridge, but only attacks going one
(24:44):
way and not back into your own place.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
So what happened was from the Bule side they could
see the statue because it was pointing, you know, their
butt was pointing at them. So they got all the
benefits of seeing this thing without having to pay to
to cross the bridge to see it. If you're on
the other side and you wanted to go, like actually
see the statue, you had to pay to get across.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Yeah. And you can believe that anytime you had out
of town guests visit, you had to take them to
go see the little bridge Man, go see the butt man.
So yeah, they ended up what was supposed to be
a joke at the expense of Bule ended up to
be an actual expense for the city, a bond because
they had to pay this fee to get onto the bridge.
But supposedly their friendly rivals still or they were. Now
(25:28):
I think they're one town, kind of like Buddha Pest.
There's Buddha and Pest and it's separated by the river,
but it's still one city now.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Yeah, same thing, and that's what Bonn and Bule interest.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
That's how I understand it. So this you can still
see the little Bridgeman, but he's not the original. The
original was almost destroyed in the Second World War. The
bridge was at least, but they were able to get
their hands on the statue and get them out of
the rhine. They put them back on the rebuilt bridge,
but then some local youths in nineteen six he destroyed that.
(26:02):
So now there's a recreation of it on the bridge.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
A little punk rockers.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah, a little punks at least. Uh. So that's that
was a little Bridgeman made out of spite.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
All right, And I think that's break number two. And
we'll be back to finish up with three more right
after this, I want to learn about a Terris ran
College veradactyle, how to take a bergink is gone. That's
a little hunt we should know.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Word up, Jerry, all right.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
We're gonna talk about uh. And I've seen stories sort
of like this, but this one seems to take the cake.
When a Christmas display goes too far and all of
a sudden, people are neighbor are like, hey, this is
getting out of hand. It's too bright, or it's you know, neighbor.
People are driving in to see these things now, and
I can't even get down my own street, right. And
(27:10):
this happened in the mid two thousands in Ross Township, Pennsylvania,
when a dude named Bill an electrician key named Bill
an Sell did a pretty you know, audacious Christmas display
in his front yard there in Ross Township, such that
people were driving in and neighbors started to get annoyed.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, And actually the way that this neighborhood was arranged
is a cul de sac. But in the center of
the coulda sack was Bill Ansel's house. So with his
light display, you it was just kind of like driving
through a holiday light display because you just drive past
and go all the way around and come back on
the other side.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
And lee, he's kind of perfect.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Actually it was perfect, and Bill Ansel definitely thought it
was perfect. But like you said, the neighbors were like, man,
come on, this is one hundred thousand watts of Christmas joy.
It's just it's too much, so and we do something
about this. Bill Ansel apparently was not the type to
take criticism. Well, sounds like it. I think he actually
(28:09):
was required to take down the holiday display, and yes,
I think they cited him for an out of season
decoration or something like that. Right, So he took it down,
but in short order he put up a new display
and specifically designed it so that the neighbors regretted ever
(28:30):
asking him to take down the original joyous display.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
And he did this chuck out of spike, that's right,
and apparently left it up year round. Santa urinating in
the front yard, a choir that was beheaded, Frosty the
Snowman getting run over by a car. Also up in
lights f Ross Township. Yeah, just right there in string
(28:59):
lights a sign that said this display is dedicated to
Ross Township. Shame on you. For destroying my display that
brought so much joy and happiness to so many people.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
There was also a warning, a sign that said Ross Township,
don't touch any of this property. If you do, there
will be bloodshed.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Is that true?
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Yeah, okay, no, it totally is. And there was another one.
I read an interview with twenty twenty with the neighbors
who were like, this guy actually wrote a sign. I
didn't see what he said, but he came up with
the disparaging sign for the deceased wife of Tom White,
one of the neighbors. The day after she died, he
put up some sign disparaging her. So this guy was
(29:42):
definitely off the chain with this thing. And I mean
like he would stay up at night and hit metal
with sledgehammers to make noise. He had floodlights pointed directly
in the neighbors' houses, and I mean, living like that's
bad enough. But they said something that stuck out to
me that I hadn't thought of. That It's like, this
is a living nightmare when you have a neighbor like that. Yeah,
(30:05):
and you sell your house anytime you have a showing,
They're going to turn around before they even get out
of their car. That's like, you're trapped. They were totally
trapped there, and despite the township finding him, despite court orders,
like you said, he kept it up year round, and
he kept it up for years.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Yeah, and then he built a kill desert.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yes, I thought that there was definitely a parallel between
those guys too. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Be a good neighbor everyone. Be a good neighbor to
your neighbor. That's all you got to do. You don't
have to. You can go above and beyond if you want,
but just be like base level good.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Sure, and if your neighbor, then if your neighbors come
to you with a complaint about some special thing that's
special to you, rather than going off the handle, maybe
say well, let's figure out a compromise because this is
really important to me.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Yeah, and let's not tank everyone's property values. We're all
in this together.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Sure, And if they're like, no, we insist you take
it down, then you do something right, at least give
him a fighting chance.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
That's right. This is this is super spike.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
So we want to thank not just our friends at
twenty twenty, but our friends at Mental Floss too for
pointing that one out to us.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
So I think we got a couple more, right.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
That's right. We'll move on to Prince Rogers Nelson aka
Prince AKA for a little while. The artist formerly known
as Prince because very famously Prince changed his name in
nineteen ninety three when to an unrecognizable symbol. It was
(31:39):
sort of the symbol for a man and woman, and
it had some other flourishes and had kind of been
tweaked and redesigned over the years. It was on different pieces,
you know, he had a guitar shape like that previously.
I think it was on his motorcycle and purple rain maybe,
oh yeah. But it was a symbol that had been
around his world for a while and Prince said, yep,
that's my name now, and wear it out. He was thought,
(32:01):
he was, we don't wear it out because you can't
say it, so that's impossible, right. But I think at
the time, I remember, everyone just thought it was Prince
being prince and being strange and being eccentric. But it
is now pretty widely accepted that he did that to
spite Warner Brothers Records because he was in a record
contract he didn't like for numerous reasons.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Yeah, I know, it was a very lucrative contract. A
lot of people were playing like the world's smallest violin
for Prince at the time.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Resigned it too.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
By the way, twenty years later resigned with the same company.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
And I don't know he resigned before this one. This
was the second. Really he resigned a third time later.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I got you okay, did not realize that, but this
was like one hundred million dollar contract was worth two
hundred and fifteen million dollars today. It was a big
fat contract.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
The thing is is, Prince I saw like when he died,
when they went into his audio archives, They're like he
could release an album like every month for the next
fIF years or something like that, that he had that
much stuff recorded. Yeah, and he wanted to release music
really quickly and with high turnover, and Warner Brothers is like, no,
you're gonna flood the market. You're gonna shoot yourself in
(33:10):
the foot. You can only release X number of albums
every say, twelve months of like one a year maybe
or something like that. He didn't like that. And then
apparently Warner Brothers owned the rights to his songs too,
which I'm quite sure he really really didn't like. So
to get out of his contract. He thought, well, okay,
the contract is between Prince and Warner Brothers. I'm going
to change my name and maybe the contract won't be
(33:32):
valid any longer. I'm not sure how much he actually
believed that, because Prince wasn't a dumb person at all. Yeah,
but at the very least he was trying to humiliate
Warner Brothers make life harder for them. And he did
all this, as you said, out of spite.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
That's right. He also wrote the word slave on his
cheek and a lot of performances at the time, and
it didn't work. He had to see the contract through,
which was just another few I think in two thousand
it expired and then he was Princes again. And like
you said, you know by guns were by guns I
guess because he re signed yet again twenty years later
(34:09):
with Warner Brothers.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Yeah. One of the things that Warner Brothers too had
to do, Chuck, was they had to send out digital
files to the media. And this is the nineties, because
there was no way to there was no like combination
of keys on a keyboard to make this symbol, so
they had to send a digital image of the symbol
for the like newspapers or magazines or whatever to insert
(34:31):
into their articles about Prince. And then finally the media
was just like, we're just gonna call him the artist
formerly known as Prince, and Prince.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Was like, damn it, right, work around.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah exactly, So rip Prince man. He was pretty great.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Yes, my friend and your friend Scottie got to go
to his final performance, the solo Atlanta performance at the
Fox Theater, just days before he died. Yeah, and it
always makes me so mady because Scotty didn't even really
love Prince. Yeah, now I'm glad he got together.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
He just showed up there, like how did I get here?
Speaker 1 (35:07):
So that's one of those We almost went and pulled
the trigger to scalp tickets, and it was just like,
I don't know why we didn't, because it was special
enough to be a piano solo concert by Prince. I
was like, man, we gotta go yep, and we didn't,
and then he died.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, we were going to do the same thing, and
that's actually a well we were going to scalp. We
were going to go, and I don't remember why we didn't,
But that's kind of par for the course for me,
because I did that with Prince. I did that with
Pink Floyd, I did that with Steve Ray Vaughan, and
I did that with The Grateful Debt. I was just like,
(35:40):
I'll see him next time.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
I saw Prince when I lived in LA in the
late ninety or I'm sorry, Yeah, I guess it was
early two thousands, and that was amazing just being able
to see him once with a full band. It was
something else.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
You saw him for some tour I think Musicology tour,
and she was like, hands down, the best show I've
ever seen.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Yeah, what a loss.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Apparently he was quite the dancer. He was.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Also saw Tom Petty on that last tour. I saw
him quite a few times, but I was I was
really glad to be at that last one.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah, he was cool. He's one of those guys that
you like, you appreciate the older you get, you know.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
What I mean, the best. No, he's one of my faves.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Great, let's move on to the pink House, Chuck, the
Last of the.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Last, the Last, John Mellencamp.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
No, that's a little pink house.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
This is just the pink house, that's right. This is
another image search quality or image search worthy kind of
thing to look up. If you're in a place where
you can do that, just type in Plum Island pink
house and you will see a quite large pink house
sitting in the middle of nothing, just.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
A desolate marshland. Yeah, and it's it's just looking at it,
it's very eerie, especially now it's abandon it's kind of
ramshackle and run down. But it was built on Plum
Island and it's considered one of the all time great
example of a spite house. And a spite house is
basically any house wall structure that's built to get under
(37:07):
someone else's skin, right, so sometimes it's built to block
their view. We talked about Henry Clay Frick building a
mansion that was bigger than Andrew Carnegie's that would be
considered a spite house. And in America they go back
at least until eighteen o six. That was the earliest
one I could find. But this one on Plumb Island
off the coast of newberry Port, Massachusetts, which by the way,
(37:31):
is one of the more charming towns in the entire country.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Oh, I've never been there.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Oh, it's wonderful. That's where this pink house is. And
there's a great backstory to it that makes it a
spite house.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
A lot of times the spite houses happen when a
couple gets divorced. It should come as no surprise, or
I should say probably a couples with a lot of
money get divorced, because what I've learned is in order
to have a spite house, you have to be rich. Right, Oh,
I'm just going to build that huge house to get
back at someone. It's a very privileged position to be in,
for sure, So you know I am judging. But in
(38:08):
twenty fifteen there was a New York Times article that
talked about this thing that was built, like you said,
in the middle of nowhere. It said it was overlooking
a vast landscape of pristine salt marsh. And it apparently
happened in nineteen twenty five when a couple got divorced
and the wife said, all right, we can get a divorce,
but you have to rebuild an exact duplicate of the
(38:32):
house we live in if you're kicking me out of it,
because I love it so much. And he went, no problem,
And so he built it. And he said, you didn't
say where, And he said, it just like that.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
I bet yep, he did. So he built it on
Plumb Island. At the time, there was no one else
living there, no fresh water, no electricity. It was just
the worst place you could build a house. And he said,
there you go, there's your spite house. And he walked away,
rubbing the dust off of his hands or what do
you call that?
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Yeah, that whatever, you clapping the dust off your hands.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah, we need to come up with a name for that, right, yeah,
a snigglet yeah yeah. So yeah, that's how it ended.
And the story went that she lived there for a
while and sold it, and it actually was inhabited, weirdly enough,
by a succession of people up until twenty eleven. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
I mean, I guess if you're a loner and you
like the nature, it's not the worst place to be.
I just saw a sunset picture. It look pretty nice in.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
That sense, Yes it did, But it's just I mean,
like the sea off of Massachusetts can be fairly unforgiving. So, yeah,
you know, this is an old house from the nineteen twenties,
Like you're it's gonna probably be kind of drafty depending
on the time of year.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Yeah, and I'm sure I'll keep on that thing as
you're probably repainting that thing every couple of years, right.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Yes, but you would have to paint a pink girls.
Everybody in newberry Port would hate you.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Yeah, you would have to. Apparently that it was lived
in until twenty eleven and then eventually was sold to
the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge in twenty twelve, and
you can't get to it now. It's off limits to
the public. But they're trying to make it an official
like protected house so it will stand forever.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
And it was made out of spite or was right shock?
Speaker 1 (40:24):
I don't know. Well, some people say that that was
just an urban legend and it was just a family
who lived out there.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Right, which is a much less interesting story.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
So we're just going to spite whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
We're going to go with Spiite House for that one.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Agreed, All right.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Well that's it for things done out of spite. We
hope you enjoyed it. And since I said we hope
you enjoyed it, it's time for listener now.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
So another recent one from automat. I love this real
time stuff. This, you know, I mentioned some sort of
episode on currency and how it affects things, And this
is from tree.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Tree. Okay, awesome, not a tree, but tree tree.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Hey, guys, Chuck, specifically, you mentioned in the Automate episode
you were trying to formulate something around how change affects
things our currency rather a look into the situation in
Zimbabwe that might help where it was too expensive to
import metal coins they had adopted the US dollar. It
was too expensive to import the metal because of weight,
so there was a huge chain shortage because store owners
(41:26):
couldn't give shoppers change, shoppers would have to purchase additional
items to try and get their total purchase as close
to the whole dollar amount. And he sent a New
York Times article and that, my friend, tree, is exactly
what I was talking about as something that could be
a part of that episode. So I appreciate that direction,
and that is specifically Tree March Shink, great name, three
(41:51):
tree Markshink from South Carolina.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Thanks a lot. That's a good one. And I remember
we talked a little bit about Zimbabwe's hyperinflation. Oh yeah,
where people were like showing up with actual weird wheelbarrows
of cash because it was just going nuts.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
That was crazy.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
I remember that, great, great example. Yeah, we've got to
do that episode.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Yeah, there's there's got to be more to it, for sure.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Well, if you want to be like Tree and fill
us in on something we've said we want to know about.
We love that kind of thing, you can send us
an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and this is stuff you should know. And this
episode Chuck has made fun of, even though I took
pride in helping to assemble it.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Oh, it's fine. It's a top ten. We haven't done
those in forever. Yeah, it's always kind of a fun throwback,
and it seems like we never do ten with our
three x structure. Nine is probably a great number, but
I guess we'll see what happens.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Right, let's see what happens. So, you know the old
saying cut off your nose to spite your face.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Yes, And I feel like we did this on an
internet roundup or something. Maybe it's unded really familiar the story.
Did it did?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Not to you.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
No, As a matter of fact, it was all new
to me. But that doesn't mean we didn't do it already.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah, but you would remember this one because it involves
self mutilation.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
So just want to put out there that this actually
has nothing to do with that phrase. And I'll explain
why that phrase doesn't actually have anything to do with this.
Oh really, but I guess I should probably say that
we're starting this episode out in like the worst possible way,
with a really downer of a story that may or
may not have to do with Spie. So I say
(01:25):
we just go ahead and start that.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Now. Yes, there is a book, and this is as
the story goes. The book in nineteen oh four called
A Dictionary of Saintly Women. The story is that Viking,
you know, berserker raider types, came pillaging southward to the
British Isles at one point well not at one point
(01:48):
eight sixty seven CE specifically, and while they were doing
their berserkering and ravaging of the villages and things things,
there was obviously the kind of thing that would happen
would be assaults on people physically, sexually and otherwise. And
so when they went to a monastery in Scotland, the
Coldingham Monastery, the lead nun, Saint Aby the Younger, said, Hey,
(02:14):
here's what we'll do. We want to keep our chastity
and our covenant to God. It's a big deal for
us nuns. We should cut off our noses to keep
that from happening, because they won't assault us then.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
But not to spite our faces, to snite the vikings.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Yeah, not even to spite. I think. I think it's
to protect themselves from sexual assault. Sure, I mean this
is all horrific.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
It is horrific.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
No, I'm not saying like this is a laugh, right, yeah,
like that.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
I'm just saying no, no, no, thank you.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Anyway, back to the horrific story, Saint Aby said, and
she was in a saint at the time, but this
certainly helped her case. Later on, she said, come, nuns,
let's go sit around and talk. I have something to
say to you. Uh, to prevent ourselves from losing our
chest from being raped by these Vikings, We're going to
(03:02):
cut off our own noses. I'm going to cut off
my lip and maybe I'll inspire you to do the same.
And the rest of the sisters said, yes, let's do that,
and they did. And there's actually old like wood cuttings,
and there's at least one stained glass panel of this happening,
and it's gory, even as a wood cutting as gory.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
And when the Vikings showed up, they found these nuns
missing their noses, bleeding, missing their lips, just in quite
a state. And they were like, we're just gonna move on.
To the next monastery and see what we find there.
The nuns, however, were not their lives were not spared,
were they.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah, it gets even worse because what the Vikings did
was burned the place down with them inside and killed
them all.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah. But there's a different way of looking at this,
and that is that these nuns protected their chastity, which,
as you said, is like really really important. They're known
as the brides of Christ, and that's one of the
reasons why they're chased. Why they're meant to die virgins,
is because they have given themselves to Christ or to God.
(04:12):
So as long as they're chased and they die chase,
then they have fulfilled this covenant. Even if it's not
by their own will or decision that they lose their virginity.
If they lose it through force, it's still not quite
the same as dying chase. So they managed to come
out on top religiously speaking. So that's that story. Oh.
(04:34):
The reason why it doesn't have anything to do with
cutting your nose up to spite your face is because
that phrase means that you are doing something in revenge
to somebody else or to harm somebody else, but you're
actually harming yourself much worse than you are them.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, and they just burned them down.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
They didn't spite anybody, right, So that's a heck of
a way to kick off what was supposed to be
a semi lighthearted top ten list.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah. Oh wait, didn't it mean to spite your own face?
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Right? So you're.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Yeah, I got you.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
You see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Yeah, I just got confused.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
It's kind of like there's another saying that hating somebody
is like drinking poison and expecting them to die.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
I've never heard that.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
It's a good one. It really gets the point across.
It makes you not want to hate or steal or
something about someone else.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Wow, that's really good. I like that.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Thanks a lot. I just made it up.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
Look at you dropping nugs. All right, Let's talk about
Henry Clay Frick because he was a Gilded Age I
don't know about robber Baron, but he was at very
least a mogul, and along with Andrew Carnegie, they made
quite a lot of money together as partners in the
steel industry. That relationship went south and Carnegie got him
(05:47):
out of the picture, got Frick out of the picture,
and you know, to the point where he was Carnegie
was sued and and Frick actually won a lawsuit and
one compensation and everything. But it wasn't like he was like,
all right, we're all even now. He hated Andrew Carnegie
for the rest of his life.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah, anytime, like Carnegie's companies, I can't remember which steel
company was he owned, but anytime there was like some
misstep or bad decision or business went awry, Frick would
send a note like chiding him or taunting him for
having made a terrible decision, like just constantly kept it up.
There was I think Carnegie built a mansion in New
(06:25):
York and Frick was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to
build an even bigger one right down the street, just
to show you up. Like would not let it go.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah, for sure, anything you can do, I can do
bigger and better. And so you would think at the
end of their lives they could just let buy guns
be by guns. And that's what Andrew Carnegie tried to
do when he was in failing health, said, can you
get in touch with my old partner Frick, mister Henry
Clay Frick, and tell him he's got a great name,
(06:55):
and tell him that I'd like to meet up with
him and patch this thing up before we're gone off
of this earth. And so they brought the letter he
dispatched as his personal secretary James Bridge to send this
to Frick personally, and Frick apparently bawled up the letter
and threw it back at him and said, tell him
I'll see him in hell where we are both going.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Yeah, great, comeback.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
I'll meet him in hell.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yeah. His other thing that he was said to have
said was not until he admits that I'm the Mary
and you're the Rhoda.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Oh man, I know you're getting into some old TV
and you always have been. But if you do, you
have Criterion the Criterion channel streamer. Uh no, highly recommended,
by the way, like it's really the only great one
out there as far as quality stuff. But they have
Old Mary Tyler Moore. Or maybe that was on Max.
(07:51):
I can't remember, but anyway, Emily and I started watching
Old Mary Tyler Moore episodes.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Well like the original where she worked at the TV station.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Yeah, and it is. I watched a little bit when
I was a kid, but man, it it is so
good and it's so funny and charming and witty and
like still great. Yeah, holds up.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Those shows used to like just be written so well too,
and acted.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
She was so good.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I can't remember. There was one episode where I think, Ted, yeah,
Ted Night, he was doing he was doing something and
it was so ridiculous and preposterous, but he was playing
it straight so well that the rest of the cast
just started cracking up and like they couldn't not They
(08:34):
did it in every take and it ended up kind
of in the show. It's some classically well known episode.
But check that one out and make sure you see
that one too.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
So good, Ted Knight. And uh, who's the woman who
played rote A?
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Valerie Burton Alley? No, Valerie, Uh, oh.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
It's killing me. Valerie Harper. There you Valerie Harper ed Asner.
It's like, it's just it's really a great, great show.
And Mary Tyler Moore is just a gem of a human.
I hope she's still good as a person. Sure, I'll
watched the documentary about her. It's worthwhile. Oh really, yeah,
it's excellent.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
In fact, all right, I'll check it out.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Yeah, quite a woman.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Well thanks for the recommendation.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Hey, sure, I feel like we've killed some time, should
we do a third in then take a break.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
I think that's a great idea.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Chuck, all right, we're gonna talk about Sadam Hussein, and
Sadam Hussein didn't like one George H. W. Bush, who
was the guy who said his name that way because
of the First Gulf fer.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah, he said, sure, I invaded Kuwait, but that doesn't
mean you have to come over here and liberate Kuwait.
And George Bush said, yes, we do. And as a result,
after this war, Saddam Hussein was still in power, and
he apparently was willing to use his power in all
sorts of weird ways and techie ways. Frankly, in one
(10:01):
of the ways he did that was he had a
mosaic mural, and unflattering mosaic mural of George Bush laid
into the floor of the entrance of the Al Rashid Hotel,
one of the nicest hotels in Baghdad, if not the nicest,
And the whole reason was it also said Bush is
criminal on it too. And the reason was is that
(10:23):
anyone coming into this well traveled hotel would walk right
over George Bush's face.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Right, and if you walked around it, you were given
a bad room.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Right, or taken out back and shot one of the two.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Did you look at a picture of this?
Speaker 2 (10:37):
I did. It is an unflattering portrait, but you just
totally tell who it is.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
You totally tell who it is. It's a big old
George Bush senior right there on the floor of the hotel,
of the lobby. It's a very strange thing to see
in a nice hotel. Yeah, but w came along later on,
went back to Iraq for the you know, the war
there on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that
(11:04):
did not exist, right, And he had them smash that up.
And he's like, Daddy, I'm not gonna let him do
that to you. Here's some sledgehammers. And so they went
in there and they smashed that thing up and chiseled
it up and supposedly laid a portrait of Saddam. Did
they didn't do that in mosaic tile? Did they?
Speaker 2 (11:22):
I don't think so. From what I saw, it looked
just like a picture. I didn't see a close above it.
I just saw it. Yeah. I couldn't find one either,
Like the head without a proportion with the Body's.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Like, here's some sledgehammers, and I need a good tile
guy in bagdad.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Right, the sledgehammers head, don't mess with Texas engraved on them.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
They probably did.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
But yeah, I mean that's spiteful. Right to make a
mosaic portrait of one of your sworn enemies so that
your people walk all over him, I.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Think so to ruin your hotel lobby, your nicest hotel lobby.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, all right, so we have a definitive example of spite.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Well then that I think that means we should take
a break while we're ahead.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
All right, we'll be right back with three more. I
want to learn about Terris ort to college, horedactyle, how
to take a bird.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Is gone?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
That's a little hunt the.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Word up, Jerry, Okay, Chuck. I guess we should at
this point decide which one we're not going to do
for doing three three and three.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Well, I think the Beatles one has the least amount
of meat on the bone.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
All right, I was gonna skip that one too. Or
suggests we do great, uh and if you did it,
I was just gonna not talk. I was gonna skip
it either way.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Well, I mean we can just quickly say that at
one point after the Beatles break up. John Lennon wrote
a song where he talked a lot of trash about
Paul McCartney. So everyone wants story. It's very, very famous story.
But the one that's really interesting to me is Ford
Versus Ferrari because that is a terrific movie that I
high they recommend.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Is it on Criterion Channel?
Speaker 1 (13:14):
I doubt it, but I'm sure you could stream it somewhere.
The great James Mangold directed it, and I'm always a
fan of his work. He did the new Bob Dylan movie.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
What else?
Speaker 1 (13:23):
He did the last Indiana Jones movie, which was better
than the one before.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
What Else. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
He's done, he's done. James Mangold's good. He sort of
has a very varied resume, which I always appreciate in
a director.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Yeah, I was gonna say that's all over the place
for sure. Yeah, So I guess if you've seen Ford
Versus Ferrari, you're familiar with this story.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
I am, and I do recommend it. He also did
the Wolverine movie in the Logan movie, so yeah, he's
all over the place.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Okay, So I'm going to tell this story then, because
I haven't seen that movie. So this was new to me, Oh,
you'd like it, okay. So in the sixties, Henry Ford
the second, who was the successor president of the Ford
Motor Company and I guess probably a relative of Henry Ford's,
he decided that he wanted Ford to get into racing
(14:12):
just to basically like make Ford, just to expand the brand. Basically, yeah,
rather than just giant land yachts, we also make really
fast cars too.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
He also was like, you know, I know that there's
probably easier ways to get into racing than to build
race cars, and that is, let's just buy Ferrari like
they were already known around the world for building cars
that were just fast as all get out.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
That's right, and they're very famous. Founder Inzo Farrati pitched
a deal for eighteen million bucks for ninety percent interest
in the company. And as the movie portrays it, this
isn't in this article, but as a movie portrays it.
If I'm not mistaken, and I'm not sure if it's
true or not, but at least it wasn't a movie.
I don't see why they would make this part up
is that he was using that deal to get a
(14:58):
better deal from Fiat. So playing one against the other,
which will really make someone mad in business.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Apparently, when Ford showed up to sign the paperwork, Ferrari
said that you know what you're this Ford assembly line.
This bureaucracy that you've got in this company is this
is not of how we do it over here.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
So no deal, right, And Ford was not very happy
about this, right of course, not so out despite and
to get back at Ferrari, and I think also to
get into racing too, Ford decided to build their own
race car, which came out to be the Ford GT.
Forty and I went and looked it up. I'm not
(15:37):
a car dude, but I am like, here, this is
an amazing car.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
I'm the same way man.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
And in fact it actually did best Ferrari at Leman's
in nineteen sixty six. And you can buy that car
at the very least, the original body that won Lamon's
in nineteen sixty six for cool six hundred and seventy
five thousand dollars from it looks like a private owner
in Jacksonville, Florida.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Wow, Jacksonville, it's beautiful. So they won first, second, and third,
so they really bested Ferrari. They also won in subsequent years.
So they swept in or not swept, but they won
in sixty six, sixty seven, sixty eight, and sixty nine.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
That's a sweep.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Well, I meant not sweep for a second and third
place necessarily, or they may have. I don't know, but
I think we should do one on the twenty four
hours of La Monz because that's that's I'm not a
car race guy, but that to me is the most
interesting one.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yeah, because they just drive around and around and around
for twenty four hours to see who can go the
furthest right.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Yeah, I think it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
It's an endurance race.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
And it's not just like a you know, a circular
NASCAR thing. You know, they're driving through streets.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Right, and every once in a while it starts to
get boring. They just push pedestrians out in there and
see what happens exactly. So there's a little more to
this story. A little separate spoke that Ferrari had going
on at about the same time or a couple of
years earlier. Our friends at Mental Floss pointed out that
Lamborghini actually was founded out of spite to Ferrari.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Yeah, apparently the founder of Lamborghini, John Smith. His name
was Ferruccio Lamborghini. He was a tractor maker in the
sixties and he had a Ferrari and he was like,
this clutch is kind of janky. And as the story goes,
(17:28):
he got in touch with Inzo Ferrari and I was like, hey,
you know, I think I can help make your clutch better,
because you got this problem here with this spawndivot and
I can help make that thing better. And apparently, as
the story goes, Ferrari did not receive that phone call
well and was basically like get lost.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, he said, stick to making tractors. Lamborghini. Who's ever
heard of Lamborghini?
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Exactly?
Speaker 2 (17:50):
What a weird name for a car, right, So Lamborghini
was like, well, I'm just going to go make my
own car, and in nineteen sixty three, I believe, he
started making Lamborghinis with the help of five workers who
had recently been fired from Ferrari. That's how we established
his car company. And had Enzo Ferrari not rebuffed him,
(18:11):
we would never have that classic Garfield poster from the
eighties where he's standing next to a Kuontosh Bright.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
You and I are not car guys, But like, if
I see a Lamborghini on the street or something, or
like the old Magnum Ferrari. I love that stuff.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Tinkle yourself a little bit.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
I mean, you know, I'm not a sports car guy,
but I just can't help but see those and think, like,
what a what an amazing machine?
Speaker 2 (18:37):
That is gorgeous. Those Magnum Ferraris you can get for
a song these days. I mean they don't work very well,
but like, how much are you O? Dohn't know. I'm
gonna guess anywhere between ten and fifty grand.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
Yeah, I mean, considering how much they were, that is
a song, you know it is.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
And they're so small too, Like I'm not sure either
one of us could fit in one of those.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Yeah, I mean I think every guy are. I mean
Thomas magnefited him, but.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Yeah, I think that was a stunt. Double half his size.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Really well he was when it showed him in the car.
His knees were up toward his chin a bit so.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Like by his ears.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Yeah, because he was he was a tall guy.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
But I.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Like that that Ferrari. I feel like for guys of
our generation, that Ferrari and the the Porsche from Risky
Business or like Top two of the top five probably
dream cars.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Was that in nine, nine to eleven, it was the.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Now in the nine to eleven it was the nine
I'm not familiar with that one. Then, yeah, it had
the lights that popped up.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
It was.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
It was one of the not as lauded versions, I think.
But man, and that it's just something about that movie.
It just sort of locked it in. I mean, it's
like a little hatchback. It's not even that special.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Hatch pack when you look at it. Now, yeah, for
grocery shopping. Exactly how many have we done for this thing?
Speaker 1 (19:59):
We just did one, right, Oh yeah, we gotta get going.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Okay, all right, let's get going. Because it turns out
that there was a road in China made out of spite.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
That's right. And I feel like I've seen this in
more than one place in the world where oh really, yeah,
not even necessarily a road, but like where like, well,
you don't want to give up your house, so we're
just going to build these skyscrapers all around.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
It, right, Sure did you see pictures of this though?
Speaker 1 (20:26):
Oh yeah, this is this is the extreme because this
happened in China to this couple in twenty twelve, The
man's name was Luo Bogan Boggin Boggin. He and his
wife refused to you know, they tried to come in
and take their house to make a highway, and they
(20:46):
were like, no, we're not going to do it. You
didn't offer us enough money, and so we're not going anywhere.
And so they built. I mean, if you visualize, if
you're visualizing a house literally sort of in the middle
of a road, in the right way goes around it,
that's what they did.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Yeah, Like, it wasn't even aroundabout. It's just that the
road widened and kind of curved in a bulge on
the sides around this house literally in the middle of
a highway. Even worse, even more reckless, if you ask me,
they kept electricity going to this house. So there's an
electrical pole in the middle of the highway too, totally unmarked.
(21:24):
It doesn't look really, no, it doesn't. It does not
at all doesn't. And if you want to see what
we're talking about, The Atlantic has a good photo spread
called the House in the Middle of the Street from
in twenty twelve.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Yeah, I mean, this is the most extreme case of
something like this that I've heard. You know, it didn't
take long for them to give in, obviously because it
was well dangerous and awful, and so they got They
did eventually give in and got a larger offer than
they are originally asked for. But I don't get the
feeling that they thought they won.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
No, they definitely didn't. So I've looked into this a
little further. There was a five story house that they
had just built for ninety five grand when the provincial
government said you need to move because we're building a
highway through here. And they weren't the only ones who
had kind of tried to stick it out. So they
were also aware that they could not leave their house.
(22:17):
They had to stay in their house twenty four hours
a day because if they left, the government would come
and bulldoze their house while they were gone and be like, ts,
what are you going to do? And they had no choice,
but just holding out was kind of a protest and
to draw attention to this generally unfair practice, because I mean,
any government can exercise eminent domain, but typically you want
(22:38):
to give at least market value.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, I mean, it's it's really egregious.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
When you look at this picture, it's nuts because they
were on their porch like a second floor balcony, and
they're looking down and you're looking down not at a
front yard, you're looking down at the road, like it
went right around this house.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
Yeah, through crazy stuff.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yeah, so that was a spiteful road.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
That was a spiteful road. And now we're gonna talk
about a spiteful statue.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Because in Germany, between the towns of Bonn and Buah,
there's the old Rhine River and the Rhine River Bridge
that connects the two and so the Little Bridgeman or
the bruchen Mankin frucin Mankin, it's kind of a mouthful,
is the little Bridgeman. And that is a sculpture of
(23:29):
a guy sort of bent over sticking his butt out,
and that became the subject of a lot of contention,
eventually backfiring. Is that right.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
Yeah, So the story went that in the late nineteenth century,
I think December seventeenth, eighteen ninety eight, this bridge between
Bonn and Buell, which was supposed to be a joint
construction project between the two, ended up being paid for
entirely by Bonn because Buell was like, we'll use the bridge,
but we're not going to pay for it. You go
(24:00):
ahead and pay for it. Yeah, And so under wraps
until this unveiling of the bridge was that little statue
of a little man carved into the bridge with his
butt sticking out, basically.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Mooning Bule, mooning Bule.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
Can you imagine just the pilarity of seeing that.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, But like I said, it backfired because that statue
became a bit of a local icon. So it you know,
it was on banknotes, it was on people took pictures
of it, it was on local postcards, and it was
a little tourist attraction. But what they did was they
put attacks on the bridge, but only attacks going one
(24:44):
way and not back into your own place.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
So what happened was from the Bule side they could
see the statue because it was pointing, you know, their
butt was pointing at them. So they got all the
benefits of seeing this thing without having to pay to
to cross the bridge to see it. If you're on
the other side and you wanted to go, like actually
see the statue, you had to pay to get across.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Yeah. And you can believe that anytime you had out
of town guests visit, you had to take them to
go see the little bridge Man, go see the butt man.
So yeah, they ended up what was supposed to be
a joke at the expense of Bule ended up to
be an actual expense for the city, a bond because
they had to pay this fee to get onto the bridge.
But supposedly their friendly rivals still or they were. Now
(25:28):
I think they're one town, kind of like Buddha Pest.
There's Buddha and Pest and it's separated by the river,
but it's still one city now.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Yeah, same thing, and that's what Bonn and Bule interest.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
That's how I understand it. So this you can still
see the little Bridgeman, but he's not the original. The
original was almost destroyed in the Second World War. The
bridge was at least, but they were able to get
their hands on the statue and get them out of
the rhine. They put them back on the rebuilt bridge,
but then some local youths in nineteen six he destroyed that.
(26:02):
So now there's a recreation of it on the bridge.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
A little punk rockers.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah, a little punks at least. Uh. So that's that
was a little Bridgeman made out of spite.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
All right, And I think that's break number two. And
we'll be back to finish up with three more right
after this, I want to learn about a Terris ran
College veradactyle, how to take a bergink is gone. That's
a little hunt we should know.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Word up, Jerry, all right.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
We're gonna talk about uh. And I've seen stories sort
of like this, but this one seems to take the cake.
When a Christmas display goes too far and all of
a sudden, people are neighbor are like, hey, this is
getting out of hand. It's too bright, or it's you know, neighbor.
People are driving in to see these things now, and
I can't even get down my own street, right. And
(27:10):
this happened in the mid two thousands in Ross Township, Pennsylvania,
when a dude named Bill an electrician key named Bill
an Sell did a pretty you know, audacious Christmas display
in his front yard there in Ross Township, such that
people were driving in and neighbors started to get annoyed.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, And actually the way that this neighborhood was arranged
is a cul de sac. But in the center of
the coulda sack was Bill Ansel's house. So with his
light display, you it was just kind of like driving
through a holiday light display because you just drive past
and go all the way around and come back on
the other side.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
And lee, he's kind of perfect.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Actually it was perfect, and Bill Ansel definitely thought it
was perfect. But like you said, the neighbors were like, man,
come on, this is one hundred thousand watts of Christmas joy.
It's just it's too much, so and we do something
about this. Bill Ansel apparently was not the type to
take criticism. Well, sounds like it. I think he actually
(28:09):
was required to take down the holiday display, and yes,
I think they cited him for an out of season
decoration or something like that. Right, So he took it down,
but in short order he put up a new display
and specifically designed it so that the neighbors regretted ever
(28:30):
asking him to take down the original joyous display.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
And he did this chuck out of spike, that's right,
and apparently left it up year round. Santa urinating in
the front yard, a choir that was beheaded, Frosty the
Snowman getting run over by a car. Also up in
lights f Ross Township. Yeah, just right there in string
(28:59):
lights a sign that said this display is dedicated to
Ross Township. Shame on you. For destroying my display that
brought so much joy and happiness to so many people.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
There was also a warning, a sign that said Ross Township,
don't touch any of this property. If you do, there
will be bloodshed.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Is that true?
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Yeah, okay, no, it totally is. And there was another one.
I read an interview with twenty twenty with the neighbors
who were like, this guy actually wrote a sign. I
didn't see what he said, but he came up with
the disparaging sign for the deceased wife of Tom White,
one of the neighbors. The day after she died, he
put up some sign disparaging her. So this guy was
(29:42):
definitely off the chain with this thing. And I mean
like he would stay up at night and hit metal
with sledgehammers to make noise. He had floodlights pointed directly
in the neighbors' houses, and I mean, living like that's
bad enough. But they said something that stuck out to
me that I hadn't thought of. That It's like, this
is a living nightmare when you have a neighbor like that. Yeah,
(30:05):
and you sell your house anytime you have a showing,
They're going to turn around before they even get out
of their car. That's like, you're trapped. They were totally
trapped there, and despite the township finding him, despite court orders,
like you said, he kept it up year round, and
he kept it up for years.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Yeah, and then he built a kill desert.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yes, I thought that there was definitely a parallel between
those guys too. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Be a good neighbor everyone. Be a good neighbor to
your neighbor. That's all you got to do. You don't
have to. You can go above and beyond if you want,
but just be like base level good.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Sure, and if your neighbor, then if your neighbors come
to you with a complaint about some special thing that's
special to you, rather than going off the handle, maybe
say well, let's figure out a compromise because this is
really important to me.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
Yeah, and let's not tank everyone's property values. We're all
in this together.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Sure, And if they're like, no, we insist you take
it down, then you do something right, at least give
him a fighting chance.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
That's right. This is this is super spike.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
So we want to thank not just our friends at
twenty twenty, but our friends at Mental Floss too for
pointing that one out to us.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
So I think we got a couple more, right.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
That's right. We'll move on to Prince Rogers Nelson aka
Prince AKA for a little while. The artist formerly known
as Prince because very famously Prince changed his name in
nineteen ninety three when to an unrecognizable symbol. It was
(31:39):
sort of the symbol for a man and woman, and
it had some other flourishes and had kind of been
tweaked and redesigned over the years. It was on different pieces,
you know, he had a guitar shape like that previously.
I think it was on his motorcycle and purple rain maybe,
oh yeah. But it was a symbol that had been
around his world for a while and Prince said, yep,
that's my name now, and wear it out. He was thought,
(32:01):
he was, we don't wear it out because you can't
say it, so that's impossible, right. But I think at
the time, I remember, everyone just thought it was Prince
being prince and being strange and being eccentric. But it
is now pretty widely accepted that he did that to
spite Warner Brothers Records because he was in a record
contract he didn't like for numerous reasons.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Yeah, I know, it was a very lucrative contract. A
lot of people were playing like the world's smallest violin
for Prince at the time.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Resigned it too.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
By the way, twenty years later resigned with the same company.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
And I don't know he resigned before this one. This
was the second. Really he resigned a third time later.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I got you okay, did not realize that, but this
was like one hundred million dollar contract was worth two
hundred and fifteen million dollars today. It was a big
fat contract.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
The thing is is, Prince I saw like when he died,
when they went into his audio archives, They're like he
could release an album like every month for the next
fIF years or something like that, that he had that
much stuff recorded. Yeah, and he wanted to release music
really quickly and with high turnover, and Warner Brothers is like, no,
you're gonna flood the market. You're gonna shoot yourself in
(33:10):
the foot. You can only release X number of albums
every say, twelve months of like one a year maybe
or something like that. He didn't like that. And then
apparently Warner Brothers owned the rights to his songs too,
which I'm quite sure he really really didn't like. So
to get out of his contract. He thought, well, okay,
the contract is between Prince and Warner Brothers. I'm going
to change my name and maybe the contract won't be
(33:32):
valid any longer. I'm not sure how much he actually
believed that, because Prince wasn't a dumb person at all. Yeah,
but at the very least he was trying to humiliate
Warner Brothers make life harder for them. And he did
all this, as you said, out of spite.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
That's right. He also wrote the word slave on his
cheek and a lot of performances at the time, and
it didn't work. He had to see the contract through,
which was just another few I think in two thousand
it expired and then he was Princes again. And like
you said, you know by guns were by guns I
guess because he re signed yet again twenty years later
(34:09):
with Warner Brothers.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Yeah. One of the things that Warner Brothers too had
to do, Chuck, was they had to send out digital
files to the media. And this is the nineties, because
there was no way to there was no like combination
of keys on a keyboard to make this symbol, so
they had to send a digital image of the symbol
for the like newspapers or magazines or whatever to insert
(34:31):
into their articles about Prince. And then finally the media
was just like, we're just gonna call him the artist
formerly known as Prince, and Prince.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Was like, damn it, right, work around.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah exactly, So rip Prince man. He was pretty great.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Yes, my friend and your friend Scottie got to go
to his final performance, the solo Atlanta performance at the
Fox Theater, just days before he died. Yeah, and it
always makes me so mady because Scotty didn't even really
love Prince. Yeah, now I'm glad he got together.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
He just showed up there, like how did I get here?
Speaker 1 (35:07):
So that's one of those We almost went and pulled
the trigger to scalp tickets, and it was just like,
I don't know why we didn't, because it was special
enough to be a piano solo concert by Prince. I
was like, man, we gotta go yep, and we didn't,
and then he died.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, we were going to do the same thing, and
that's actually a well we were going to scalp. We
were going to go, and I don't remember why we didn't,
But that's kind of par for the course for me,
because I did that with Prince. I did that with
Pink Floyd, I did that with Steve Ray Vaughan, and
I did that with The Grateful Debt. I was just like,
(35:40):
I'll see him next time.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
I saw Prince when I lived in LA in the
late ninety or I'm sorry, Yeah, I guess it was
early two thousands, and that was amazing just being able
to see him once with a full band. It was
something else.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
You saw him for some tour I think Musicology tour,
and she was like, hands down, the best show I've
ever seen.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
Yeah, what a loss.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Apparently he was quite the dancer. He was.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Also saw Tom Petty on that last tour. I saw
him quite a few times, but I was I was
really glad to be at that last one.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Yeah, he was cool. He's one of those guys that
you like, you appreciate the older you get, you know.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
What I mean, the best. No, he's one of my faves.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Great, let's move on to the pink House, Chuck, the
Last of the.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Last, the Last, John Mellencamp.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
No, that's a little pink house.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
This is just the pink house, that's right. This is
another image search quality or image search worthy kind of
thing to look up. If you're in a place where
you can do that, just type in Plum Island pink
house and you will see a quite large pink house
sitting in the middle of nothing, just.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
A desolate marshland. Yeah, and it's it's just looking at it,
it's very eerie, especially now it's abandon it's kind of
ramshackle and run down. But it was built on Plum
Island and it's considered one of the all time great
example of a spite house. And a spite house is
basically any house wall structure that's built to get under
(37:07):
someone else's skin, right, so sometimes it's built to block
their view. We talked about Henry Clay Frick building a
mansion that was bigger than Andrew Carnegie's that would be
considered a spite house. And in America they go back
at least until eighteen o six. That was the earliest
one I could find. But this one on Plumb Island
off the coast of newberry Port, Massachusetts, which by the way,
(37:31):
is one of the more charming towns in the entire country.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Oh, I've never been there.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
Oh, it's wonderful. That's where this pink house is. And
there's a great backstory to it that makes it a
spite house.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
A lot of times the spite houses happen when a
couple gets divorced. It should come as no surprise, or
I should say probably a couples with a lot of
money get divorced, because what I've learned is in order
to have a spite house, you have to be rich. Right, Oh,
I'm just going to build that huge house to get
back at someone. It's a very privileged position to be in,
for sure, So you know I am judging. But in
(38:08):
twenty fifteen there was a New York Times article that
talked about this thing that was built, like you said,
in the middle of nowhere. It said it was overlooking
a vast landscape of pristine salt marsh. And it apparently
happened in nineteen twenty five when a couple got divorced
and the wife said, all right, we can get a divorce,
but you have to rebuild an exact duplicate of the
(38:32):
house we live in if you're kicking me out of it,
because I love it so much. And he went, no problem,
And so he built it. And he said, you didn't
say where, And he said, it just like that.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
I bet yep, he did. So he built it on
Plumb Island. At the time, there was no one else
living there, no fresh water, no electricity. It was just
the worst place you could build a house. And he said,
there you go, there's your spite house. And he walked away,
rubbing the dust off of his hands or what do
you call that?
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Yeah, that whatever, you clapping the dust off your hands.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
Yeah, we need to come up with a name for that, right, yeah,
a snigglet yeah yeah. So yeah, that's how it ended.
And the story went that she lived there for a
while and sold it, and it actually was inhabited, weirdly enough,
by a succession of people up until twenty eleven. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
I mean, I guess if you're a loner and you
like the nature, it's not the worst place to be.
I just saw a sunset picture. It look pretty nice in.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
That sense, Yes it did, But it's just I mean,
like the sea off of Massachusetts can be fairly unforgiving. So, yeah,
you know, this is an old house from the nineteen twenties,
Like you're it's gonna probably be kind of drafty depending
on the time of year.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Yeah, and I'm sure I'll keep on that thing as
you're probably repainting that thing every couple of years, right.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Yes, but you would have to paint a pink girls.
Everybody in newberry Port would hate you.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Yeah, you would have to. Apparently that it was lived
in until twenty eleven and then eventually was sold to
the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge in twenty twelve, and
you can't get to it now. It's off limits to
the public. But they're trying to make it an official
like protected house so it will stand forever.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
And it was made out of spite or was right shock?
Speaker 1 (40:24):
I don't know. Well, some people say that that was
just an urban legend and it was just a family
who lived out there.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
Right, which is a much less interesting story.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
So we're just going to spite whatsoever.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
We're going to go with Spiite House for that one.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Agreed, All right.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Well that's it for things done out of spite. We
hope you enjoyed it. And since I said we hope
you enjoyed it, it's time for listener now.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
So another recent one from automat. I love this real
time stuff. This, you know, I mentioned some sort of
episode on currency and how it affects things, And this
is from tree.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Tree. Okay, awesome, not a tree, but tree tree.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
Hey, guys, Chuck, specifically, you mentioned in the Automate episode
you were trying to formulate something around how change affects
things our currency rather a look into the situation in
Zimbabwe that might help where it was too expensive to
import metal coins they had adopted the US dollar. It
was too expensive to import the metal because of weight,
so there was a huge chain shortage because store owners
(41:26):
couldn't give shoppers change, shoppers would have to purchase additional
items to try and get their total purchase as close
to the whole dollar amount. And he sent a New
York Times article and that, my friend, tree, is exactly
what I was talking about as something that could be
a part of that episode. So I appreciate that direction,
and that is specifically Tree March Shink, great name, three
(41:51):
tree Markshink from South Carolina.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Thanks a lot. That's a good one. And I remember
we talked a little bit about Zimbabwe's hyperinflation. Oh yeah,
where people were like showing up with actual weird wheelbarrows
of cash because it was just going nuts.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
That was crazy.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
I remember that, great, great example. Yeah, we've got to
do that episode.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Yeah, there's there's got to be more to it, for sure.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Well, if you want to be like Tree and fill
us in on something we've said we want to know about.
We love that kind of thing, you can send us
an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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