Well There's Your Problem | Episode 19: Lake Peigneur

Today we talk about fish.
Here is the Patreon: / wtyppod
Mostly sourced from the MSHA report: babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?i...
slide 2 salt
By Andrei Stroe - Image taken by Andrei Stroe, CC BY-SA 2.5, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
slide 3 salt cathedral
By Cezary p, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
slide 4 drilling platform
By Peretz Partensky from San Francisco, USA - Deep sea oil drilling in the Caspian., CC BY-SA 2.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
Captions and chapters by Pineapples Foster Media Services
Twitter: @annasfoster
E-mail: [e-mail]
allmylinks.com/pineapples-foster
CHAPTERS:
00:00:00 THIS IS A PODCAST
00:00:33 INTRO / PRONOUNS
00:04:20 TOPIC TEASE
00:07:59 MAIN TOPIC background: Lake Peigneur
00:08:59 MAIN TOPIC background: Salt Mining
00:20:21 MAIN TOPIC background: Oil Drilling
00:21:21 MAIN TOPIC events leading up to the disaster
00:23:02 MAIN TOPIC The Disaster
00:00:00 MAIN TOPIC Aftermath
00:57:08 MORAL, aka WHAT DID WE LEARN?
01:04:53 NEXT EPISODE / COMMERCIALS

[@wire_hall_medic8470]

Liam said he killed and ate the other hosts. That bothers me; one is clearly labeled donoteat.

[@synthgal1090]

i feel like this comment is not going to get the attention it deserves, so I just wanna say good job

[@emberd-l795]

lol

[@SpicyTexan64]

What does dono teat mean?

[@emberd-l795]

@@SpicyTexan64 donations for big fat juicy teats

[@kupsna]

@@SpicyTexan64 a teat intended for donation, and so should not be eaten

[@TheOneSevenNine]

i love when alice says some absolutely bonkers shit and justin just very firmly says the syllable "Yes" like he's testifying in front of a jury

[@CleverCrumbish]

That's very very good, especially since its frequency renders even better the moments when Justin genuinely breaks and starts giggling with the rest of them

[@arthropodqueen]

I get massive autism vibes from him I do that too, and I have it

[@Sir.Craze-]

This is currently one of my favorite things in life!

[@K-o-R]

"We'll get to that."

[@ericfischer8295]

Hon Hon, wee wee,

[@ClaudiaNW]

Surely as "moisturised lefties" you should support fish, which are inherently moist

[@William-Morey-Baker]

They SHOULD be vegan... But you know... Nobody's perfect... Discrimination starts with your diet... all enviromental destruction is predicated on specisism. It's their home too... Also, Liam used the same justification for eating fish that hitler used to kill the disabled, or Jews... It's a fallacy. Intellectual capacity in no way determines your right to exist...

[@ClaudiaNW]

@@William-Morey-Baker Sir this is a Greggs

[@strangeWaters]

common misconception. fish are not actually wet. they have hydrophobic scales. that's why you need to cook them in oil, because heat from water slides right off

[@MazHem]

@@William-Morey-Baker I'm going to eat you, the best food is the sort you have to outwit first.

[@jbt-qu6lm]

@@William-Morey-Baker hey dude concept here you dont have to listen and all but maybe just don't

[@GoredonTheDestroyer]

Hearing, "We done fucked up, we woke up Cthulhu." in Justin's very _matter of fact_ voice is an energy I want to acquire.

[@sweetprimrose]

Fish: Bad Lake Monster: Good (also sexy) Mothman: King

[@NeighborSenpai]

Justin: what salt does when it touches the water? Alice: it does the thing where it doesn't be there anymore

[@hp67c]

If my professors had just accepted that sort of answer as valid, I'd have a Chemistry PhD and probably a bunch of other PhDs as well

[@user-me8hc3bs7i]

Podcast format is great, I work in an engineering office and we joke around about morbid shit failing all the time. We’ve turned a guys name into a noun for severely fucking shit up after he dumped a $400,000 pump off a flatbed trailer directly into a 4160 volt transformer pulling out of our parking lot. He was requested to take a drug test and chose the option of “quit” instead.

[@VeggieRice]

shout out to him

[@Crowborn]

dudes rock

[@Deimonik1]

Shake hands with danger

[@OutbackCatgirl]

why isn't this a safety third yet

[@lfraser7128]

You guys are really hypocritical, you say you're socialist but you actively contribute and encourage classism against fish

[@yedoom]

Fish are all members of the PMC they don't get to join the union damnit

[@goodluck5642]

Salmon salute

[@Cythil]

Well in modern cladistics fish do not even exist. It is a meaningless distinction.

[@Cythil]

@standardleft culinary definitions are distinction from scientific ones. Which is why you end up with a chef not agreeing with a botanist what is and what is not a fruit for example. ;) Heck even in the culinary world the term chip is rather vague. Just compare how is used in UK vs US. ;)

[@BlarryOfficial]

An ex of mine had a phobia of whales. She adamantly declined to comment on how it came to that and what went wrong in her childhood.

[@rekindle7602]

can we please acknowledge how sinister the poster for 811 is? "UNDERGROUND PIPELINES ARE EVERYWHERE" and "KNOW WHAT'S BELOW" sound like taglines for a horror movie

[@zechsblack5891]

811 is really just a Cthulhu truther group

[@AbsolXGuardian]

If anyone knows the location of buried ancient evils, power spots, etc it's 811. Stops people from becoming the POV character of prologs or the first 10 minutes of the movie

[@dillonberch243]

What do you mean the image of a family home teetering on the edge of a bottomless chasm makes you uncomfortable?

[@thehand7902]

@@dillonberch243 You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial...

[@FerretKibble]

And or warnings about the student bar

[@theryanbard]

Love to nod solemnly while listening to my favourite jokeless podcast.

[@PejmanMan]

Hardcore history do be like that

[@RenaDeles]

@@PejmanMan someone hasn't actually listened, that dude has plenty of jokes, just not the great bounty we get here

[@tarasaurus98]

This is honestly one of the best episodes of this show, even 100 episodes later.

[@agmlego]

truly a heritage post where Liam's fish thing is revealed. Also hi fellow trans!

[@chrisstropoli]

I neeeeed a shirt that just says "I don't respect fish" with a John Madden'ed drawing of a disembodied fist punching a flounder on the front.

[@MichaelHolloway]

Fascists against Fish party.

[@youtubeisawebsite7484]

@@MichaelHolloway red-brown alliance that happened against fish

[@MonMalthias]

@@youtubeisawebsite7484 Anti-Fish Aktion

[@MySerpentine]

Shark Punching Center

[@AlanCanon2222]

Like, ooh, even that's a pretty dicey kind of image, I would not respect it.

[@WebsiteTourist]

The "bone cathedral" thingy, so the Sedlec ossuary, is actually in the Czech Republic, a bit of a ways from Prague. It's pretty metal. Also, tangential note - Polish churches in the 80s were often just built by local communities according to plans made pro-bono or by very inexperienced architects - it's pretty amazing that there aren't any spectacular Polish church collapses for you to cover, seeing as modern Polish churches are basically the product of a Catholic Great Leap Forward

[@BlarryOfficial]

Alas, I never knew I wanted a Maoist pope in the Vatican.

[@henrycurtis3652]

Give the churches another decade or two maybe, then we'll start seeing some

[@DeadWhiteButterflies]

Side note but "Bone Cathedral" honestly sounds like a Metal band and I can't get that image out of my head now.

[@BlarryOfficial]

@@DeadWhiteButterflies also Dark Souls map

[@teslashark]

Late for the Swedish Protestant Crusade for ~400 years

[@pkunkbwok]

There was that doctor from Massachusetts who weighed people at the moment of death and determined that their bodies lost about 3/4 of an ounce as the soul escaped, so if the water in your concrete mix contains the Holy Spirit, you'll want to adjust the ratio accordingly

[@BrownEyePinch]

Was probably the weight of pee and feces leaving the dead body

[@pkunkbwok]

@@BrownEyePinch I hope when I die I crap bigger than that

[@Huntracony]

The Hillsborough Disaster is the one that really depressed me, mostly because I went on to watch it as it was broadcast on TV. One thing that happened is the presenter saying, "The big problem now is getting them back into the stands or getting them somewhere out of the way to let the players return," while you see like twenty people receiving chest compressions. Also, fans helping extract injured/dead people while the police formed a barrier, rather than help.

[@OkSharkey]

My biggest complaint is that when the podcast stops all the funny talking stops too and I am lonely again; please fix this

[@OkSharkey]

@standardleft that's a mean trick but I deserve it

[@TrashHeapCustodian]

make twitter account, follow only the hosts and the podcast feed, problem partially solved

[@danielziemba8045]

Give in to your most insane thoughts, and the voices will return! I’m never lonely!

[@flowgangsemaudamartoz7062]

@@danielziemba8045 This! If only more people would do this. The world would be a better palce.

[@alexc8461]

If I may suggest other content, the Technical Difficulties (Tom Scott et al) have a lot that has comforted me, I'd start with Citation Needed.

[@AsiniusNaso]

When you pull out the ACME plug from the bottom of the lake

[@tangledfish]

Man, I thought the vacuum tube episode sucked but this one really sunk to a new low.

[@jacky445]

In Slovakia we mine salt by pumping water into salt deposit and than sucking out brine which then gets boiled and scraped off the walls of the boilers. That way people don't have to go underground to mine it.

[@adams3627]

That doesn't sound NEARLY dangerous enough.

[@Skylancer727]

@@adams3627 yeah that sounds efficient, we can't have that. We need to send another 200 people down a hole in the ground that may cave!

[@hipsterindietrash6105]

Yeah but making it safe would be gay

[@relwalretep]

That method is clearly far too sensible.

[@scarylion1roar]

Also: the hard rock hotel collapse should include the "How a building gets built" part from Ep. 4. Some workers shared a video from the worksite of how badly the hotel was designed/built a few days before the building Sampoonged. (They/them)

[@BlarryOfficial]

I'd absolutely love another episode about a building being fishy (sorry I had to) with Kate Wagner from McMansion Hell. She's such a beautiful mind.

[@UnrealPerson]

Can we make "sampoong" a verb for collapsing shoddy structures?

[@eustatic3832]

"How a building doesn't get built"

[@Dorian_sapiens]

Biggest of props to Alice for nailing the pronunciations of both R'lyeh and octopodes. These are not easy words to get right. I'm very impressed.

[@ClaudiaNW]

I always assumed it was pronounced octo-POE-des

[@ShootingStarNeo]

Alice: can pronounce these obscure words correctly right off the cuff Also Alice: forgets the word “dissolved” Love her. Best podcast host.

[@MySerpentine]

Can any human *really* pronounce R'lyeh right?

[@K-o-R]

So many amazing combinations of words here 😂 "The lake was still on fire though." "Oh, the mud-and-mining-equipment geyser is calming down i see..."

[@SASardonic]

Not respecting fish is the basis for Pescatarianism I think

[@djsquarewave]

Pescatarian here, can confirm!

[@Kay-kg6ny]

As a pescatarian: yes.

[@kaycashew]

I don’t respect fish, I simply eat them

[@djsquarewave]

@ThisIsMyRealName Who said anything about ethics? I wanted to go vegetarian, but sushi and fried shrimp are delicious! :P

[@coolmikefromcanada]

but it does make you an eanamy of piscineisms

[@windwalker5765]

"Oh, great, now there's a lake monster in here." The hell with the monster, there's a *LAKE* in here!

[@johnenright9859]

Absolutely loved the episode, great work as always! Just a few notes (some more pedantic than others) that I (as someone who is studying geological engineering) think are important/worth taking note of/ or just interesting: -Plate tectonics as, Justin interjected, have been accepted since the 60s, but the idea goes back to 1914 with Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift. Basically Alfred noticed that the continents fit together (especially South America and Africa) and that certain fossils had really weird cross-continental ranges. He proposed this idea of continental drift and was pretty much dismissed because he couldn't explain how it happened. In the 1950s and 60s a lot of ex-military sonar equipment was sold off to scientists cheap and they started mapping the ocean floors and discover the mid-oceanic ridges (the oceans were thought to be essentially featureless before that) -Geologists/paleontologists still rely on licking rocks to check for taste and texture of rocks to help with identification, though typically you try something else first. The difference between silt and clay can be checked by gritting it in your teeth (if it feels gritty, then the particles are bigger and are therefore not clay) -Upfront: FUCK TEXACO, and Oil and Gas companies in general. With that out of the way It is worth noting that salt domes often collect a lot of gas and oil underneath them (they work their way towards the surface and basically hit a big dome of low permeability material that acts like a bowl and traps it) While I don't know if this is 100% the case here I would suspect it might be. -Waking up Cthulhu or one of the other Great Ones is a major concern within the whole of geology. -Fun Fact: Mining equipment is often just left in the mines once operations cease. It typically costs more to get a vehicle out than it does to just buy another one. So it's possible the truck being driven in the mine might have just been abandoned down there anyways. This leaves the vehicles to just be crushed by overburden eventually (because tunnels in mines are typically not built as long term structures. They are designed to last as long as they will be mined (with a factor of safety) but not much longer. -Just to terrify Liam: Evolutionarily (by cladistics) all tetrapods (birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians) are fish. We are fish. -and the most pedantic probably: Archaeology is for human artifacts, paleontologists for prehistoric animals (admittedly there is some overlap there) Amazing work comrades! Solidarity!

[@LarixLyalliiAlpine]

"I do not respect fish" 🤣 my goodness, this should be animated.

[@TheDickbeard]

"Those are load-bearing bodies now, we cant remove them" lmao

[@MrCzechTexan]

The 30 minute "i do not respect fish" bit would make a great WTYP Animated debut

[@midgetwthahacksaw]

YES!!!

[@benoitbvg2888]

Being French and seeing your title with a hard-to-pronounce French name in it, I expected a great deal of hate towards me and my fellow countrymen, as usual. Instead it all went to the Netherlands, Belgium and fish. Not cool. Unsubbed and reported.

[@teslashark]

Lake peener!

[@stevieinselby]

It's in Louisiana. The chances of it being pronounced in the French way are about 0.0001%. It's probably "Peg-ner" or some shit like that. Remember this is a state that says Orleans as "Or-linz".

[@benoitbvg2888]

@ThisIsMyRealName ... Et j'adore dessiner des caricatures de Mahomet

[@TalkingSoup]

relistening to this and liam's fish rant and justin and alice's teasing is still one of my favorite things in the whole podcast

[@davidvenegas6401]

A construction company I worked for once gave us donuts at the start of a meeting to discuss a death that had happened. We called it the death and donuts meeting. Afterwards we would joke that at least if one of us died the rest would all get donuts. 💀🍩

[@jadebullet3884]

A similar thing happened in a coal mine near Pittston, PA. The coal company ordered the miners to start knocking out the support pillars of coal and the mine collapsed below the Susquehanna, causing it to flow backward. They actually tried to plug up the whirlpool by throwing railcars into the river to be sucked down. It was called the Knox mine disaster.

[@grmpEqweer]

That's great managerial talent right there.

[@Sir.Craze-]

Holy fuck that's metal...

[@deeznoots6241]

Best anti-Fish podcast ever

[@MrJohndoakes]

They lost all their listeners in Amsterdam.

[@JWP329]

I believe that humans and fish can Coexist - George W. Bush

[@djhsilver]

I disagree.

[@welltheresyourproblempodca1465]

some more shit he was wrong about

[@AlanCanon2222]

"NO!" -- Liam

[@RedWurm]

Medieval monasteries got very creative with what was considered fish. An english one apparently decided bacon was a type of fish.

[@RubyofTrinity]

Another Safety Third Anecdote. No fish are involved, I promise.

[@williamchamberlain2263]

Bloody hell

[@HuggyBearx64]

For those watching at home: 1,500 feet = 457m 1,100 feet = 335m 700 feet = 213m 165 feet = 50m 75 feet = 23m 10 feet = 3m

[@eminatorstudios]

god, this hurt my brain. Can't they use metric already?

[@lukewest7216]

Technically we (the US) do, except Reagan defunded the commission in charge of actually switching everything from metric and the law saying we're supposed to use metric permits the use of imperial units too so no one bothers

[@jbkjbk1999]

the use of imperial on an engineering podcast is the thing to actually complain about with this show

[@Melonist]

@@lukewest7216 i swear Reagan is just the personification of a cartoon villain

[@tyson31415]

Engineers need to know Metric. Alice is Scottish (they use Metric like everyone else does) so the "freedom" units are just there for their audience who I assume, are mostly American, and are to defunded educationally to understand it.

[@josephmmuller]

Train good, car bad, horse dubious/viscera, fish shameful.

[@hpoz222]

I regret to inform Liam that catfish (at least some of them) are in fact apex predators

[@scarylion1roar]

The bigass koi fish in my neighbourhood pond eat Canada goslings :) and small turtles :(

[@domi8619]

I respect exactly one fish, and that is that one giant catfish that ate a nazi officer

[@forcea1454]

@@domi8619 Apparently that was a fake.

[@SofaKingShit]

I really hate it when they play with a half dead mouse for hours in the pond.

[@Diego-zz1df]

Technically anything nature deems so fucking ugly and disgusting no self-respecting creature would eat it is, by definition, an "apex predator".

[@Zephyrbal]

All this talk of pouring holy water in to an unimaginably deep hole just has me convinced you're going to have to do any episode on the Third Impact

[@heartache5742]

one of the slides is going to be a nerv/seele relations organisation diagram flow chart thing

[@DistractedGlobeGuy]

And a Patreon-exclusive bonus episode on the ensuing waifu wars of course.

[@toddschriver9924]

We thought we had a lake monster in Northern Indiana bc several people had witness adult ducks just disappear into the water and not come back up. But, it turned out someone had just released a 130 pound alligator snapping turtle in there, which is pretty fun.

[@alaeriia01]

A 130-pound snapper is absolutely a lake monster.

[@Zehn317]

Real talk I've come back to this episode multiple times mostly because the "shake hands with Peigneur" pun is so good

[@Hexa1123]

Thank you for that "f Belgium" energy. Very few people acknowledge their violence in the Congo and in Africa in general.

[@EmyrDerfel]

In Hitchhiker's Guide canon, Belgium is a swearword.

[@TrashHeapCustodian]

friendship ended with "activate windows," now "microphone with timer" is my best friend

[@gwynjudd]

You can just how good the podcast is by counting the minutes of cry laughing

[@Dorian_sapiens]

Some people test podcast quality by putting it in their mouth, I've heard.

[@rileye9599]

Mud, Dirt, Salt, Pee is my favorite cooking show Also Elizabeth Warren stole the Activate Windows watermark before she dropped out

[@MidnightCheerios]

Your stupid fish conversion about killed me

[@welltheresyourproblempodca1465]

- Andrew and Simon who is called Peter to Jesus, Matthew Chapter 4

[@FERAL_MECHANICAL_NOMATIC]

*NEW HEADCANNON:* Sterling Archer really hates fish. And is, for some reason, on a podcast about engineering disasters.

[@Mattwae]

The reason why they were doing exploratory drilling is because salt and oil deposits are often close to each other, as both are formed from old seabeds. The presence of a gas well would also indicate the possibility of oil.

[@danielkorladis7869]

well then fuck oil drilling and fuck Texaco

[@thehand7902]

Now civ makes sense to me

[@eustatic3832]

But....they knew about the mine...they just missed

[@THE_BATLORD]

I'm only here for the asmr beer opening

[@wabicajo]

Grip it and rip it baby

[@Jablicek]

Guys, do you know how hard it is to keep a straight face listening to this while out in the world?

[@ZeRedSpy]

"I have killed and eaten the other two hosts" had me literally in tears, very well done Liam.

[@somethingsnowing]

Alice mentioning that she thinks that the Soviet superdeep borehole is haunted reminds me that there is a russian horror film call The Superdeep which is essentially like The Thing but with the superdeep borehole.

[@PostingCringeOnMain]

Well There's Your Problem | Episode 20: Windows Activation

[@matt39581]

the problem is nobody in the entire world actually knows how windows licensing works

[@user-ms8km7lh1l]

WTYP: DRM

[@teg24601]

This reminds me of the guy who built a canal off of the Mississippi River, and nearly caused all the water to take a different route. So much so that there is a damn preventing it from moving now.

[@alaeriia01]

Well, damn.

[@DistractedGlobeGuy]

The Mississippi's changed its path pretty continuously since it was first charted. Shit, there's good reason to believe the boilers of PS _Sultana_ are probably buried under a field like three or four miles west of where the actual river is today.

[@rm2569]

As a geology student I can tell you, when working with rocks, you will eat rocks. Also Alfred Wagner proposed plate tectonics in the 20s, but had no mechanism so was pretty much rejected, until people did some seafloor research on it.

[@joshuahadams]

Tying into the “we woke up Cthulhu” gag, H.P. Lovecraft had a surprisingly decent model of how plate tectonics have change the world in 1936’s “At the Mountains of Madness”. He stated that, after the moon was sheared from the earth, the world was mostly ocean, and over time the continents formed as plates bounced around with his fictional mountain range - one higher than the Himalayas - being the result of tectonic uplift, like the real Transantarctic range that he mentions hides the Mountains of Madness from view from the coast. For all the weird ideas he had about most things, he was surprisingly good about geology.

[@moortak]

You've touched on Cleveland's penchant for river fires a few times. You might want to look at one of Cleveland's other fire related disasters, the East Ohio Gas explosion.

[@SizzleCorndog]

Holy fuck I live in cleveland and just found out about this, this would be a great episode

[@ProjectThunderclaw]

Ah yes, the greatest philosophical question of our time: how many angels can dance in the drum of a cement mixer?

[@VeggieRice]

probably like 8-11

[@wkiernan]

Water infiltration is not always an impediment to the salt industry. I once drew a survey drawing of a ditch across the bottom of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. On one side of the lake was a factory in Salt Lake City. On the other side was a solar refinery, where they placed great basins of lake water under the sun until most of the water evaporated off and the salt concentration was sky-high. BUt how do you get that valuable brine all the way across that big wide lake? Should they lay a pipeline? Should they hire a buncha semi trucks? Is there an existing nearby railroad which circumnavigates the lake? It turns out, you read the textbooks and do the math, the cheapest way is dig a ditch running North-to-South from West of North Ogden across the entire bottom of the lake, sloping at about 0.2%, and you drop the highly-concentrated brine in at one end, and you install a suck-pipe at the other, then due to the force of gravity it will flow smoothly at zero energy cost, and there will be little enough intercourse between the salty water overhead and the stream of uber-salty water in the ditch below that that stream will arrive in Salt Lake City with almost all its concentration intact.

[@evamiller4886]

I can’t believe none of them pointed out that the live oaks are now all dead oaks

[@HarrisPropertyMaintenance]

Lost potential

[@ProjectThunderclaw]

Oh, please do Centralia. If nothing else there's a very interesting angle in that a lot of people (many of whom were trained engineers) just... chose to stay. Which I'm of two minds about, because on one hand those are their homes of decades and staying is obviously their decision to make, and it's certainly despicable how disaster tourists treat their homes and their tragedy. But on the other hand, they're literally living on top of a collapsing garbage fire spewing toxic fumes and demanding that maintenance workers, postmen and pizza delivery guys drive right up to their doorstep, which doesn't seem entirely fair.

[@cindytepper8878]

I live near Centralia. I don't think anyone lives there at all now. I think that last guy finally left. I think the town owned the mineral rights. Centraila sits on top of the Mammoth Vein huge amounts of anthracite down there. I wonder who owns the mineral rights now

[@pkunkbwok]

better be sure to tip in cash, I tell ya

[@cindytepper8878]

It is estimated that there are 40 million tons of coal under the town in the Mammoth vein. The borough of Centralia owns the mineral rights. As an asset in the ground, coal is valued at $6 a ton. Mined, 40 million tons of coal is worth billions of dollars at today's retail prices. However, offers to buy out the Centralians have been ridiculously low. (in 1999 dollars and prices) www.mcall.com/news/mc-xpm-1999-12-12-3272428-story.html

[@cindytepper8878]

$6,000,000,000 after processing at the breaker. That is at today's prices ($150 per ton)

[@ProjectThunderclaw]

It has occurred to me that this is actually just the normal rural experience on fast forward. You build your community around some kind of resource or industry, industry becomes unteneble for some reason, people leave for better opportunities, there are fewer people with less money so local businesses can't sustain themselves, economy worsens, more people leave, government uses dwindling population as excuse to cut back on services, lack of services drives even more people away. The community gets stuck in a death spiral, and even individuals can't escape unscathed because they can't exactly sell their deteriorating homesteads to the mole people, and even in a literal disaster scenario like Centralia it's not like government is gonna bail them out to a degree where they get to maintain any semblance of their old quality of life. And on one hand it can seem kind of selfish to say "no, I will stay here in this dilapidated ghost town, and I expect you to keep our cell phone tower operating to the tune of millions even though it only serves five people" - but on the other hand, maybe it wouldn't _be_ a dilapidated ghost town if you had done something other than sit around and wait for it to die

[@nicholasduncan1594]

Explicit anti-fish content starts at 27:07 , though there are hints of it earlier.

[@Admiral_Ellis]

Thank you, I was looking for this

[@augustzeidman4443]

I love your off topic tangents. Its what sets you folks apart from any kind of project like this. Its a beautiful thing

[@chaxfox]

As a person who used to do a lot of soil borings, this was a great episode. Really brought back the itchy feeling of "Oh god, I really hope there's not a pipeline down there." Always call 811, but I could never overcome a sense of creeping dread.

[@yedoom]

Also on the topic of land suddenly disappearing because of man's hubris: towns in the Canadian north are getting really fucked up right now by the permafrost melting. Turns out a lot of that "land" is essentially just piles of dirt on top of underground glaciers. So that's cool.

[@Cythil]

Yeah shark week should be abolished. It does a lot more harm to the preservation of sharks then it does educating people about sharks. Funny thing is that bony fish are actually more closely related to humans than cartilaginous fishes like sharks and rays. (And if fish was a thing in cladistics then every land living vertebra having creature would be a fish. Yes even you reading this is likely a fish in that sense. But fish is not used as a term in cladistics.)

[@dairallan]

The Forth Bridge received a new formulation of paint around abotu 2010. It no longer needs to be repainted constantly. IIRC, the current coat will last around 10 years.

[@RoamingAdhocrat]

so, it needs repainting now then?

[@joshuahadams]

H.P. Lovecraft’s _At the Mountains of Madness_ from 1936 used plate tectonics, uplift, subduction, and plate movement, as a way to explain why the Elder Things were where they were and the like.

[@_TehTJ_]

Geologists bite and taste rocks like all the time.

[@sweetprimrose]

mineralized bone has a perceptible mouth feel vs not fossil bits.

[@ProjectThunderclaw]

Geologists are the cavemen of the natural sciences. Not only do they literally hang out in caves, but their favorite pastimes are hitting things with hammers and staring intently at rocks.

[@_TehTJ_]

​@@ProjectThunderclaw They (I'm studying to be one so in 4 years that would be "we") also hunt and gather food more than any other natural scientists I can think of. Almost any log about geological expositions I read has a chapter about finding an animal in their camp and turning it into exotic bacon.

[@RoamingAdhocrat]

@@sweetprimrose all about that mouthfeel

[@jenjaynes8863]

I am so far behind on these episodes, but you know how people do animation of TTRPG scenes? That needs to happen for the "I don't respect fish" tangent

[@AlanCanon2222]

Check out TheMaestroso's channel on KZbin, they're doing that sort of thing with WTYP. (Sorry if I'm a little late with the pointer).

[@Sadiqi]

Main I just had a hard ass shift at work...and I get a new well there's your problem episode... Bless y'alls souls...also Philly love!!!!

[@sunyavadin]

We learned plate tectonics in school in the 80s, so I'm not sure that's correct. *edit* Ah, yea, there we go, Justin corrected them in post.

[@kjj26k]

Cool pfp, _Tron_ ftw.

[@turbo1431]

Hey! I remember this from Modern Marvels! Also, RIP "Activate Windows" logo

[@jasonallman696]

Re-listening to old episodes. This is one of my favorites.

[@danielled8665]

I find this podcast amazing to listen to when I’m tired, and I don’t want to have to keep my eyes open to watch a video. I can open my eyes every once in a while to peek when they refer to an image or diagram. Their voices are soothing and non abrasive, only problem is I sometimes fall asleep and end up having to backtrack like five videos

[@hinzster]

The "superdeep borehole" as you call it is actually on the Kola Peninsula, neither serbian (as you called it) nor siberian (what you probably meant). It held the record for quite some years, and they had to stop boring because temperatures got higher than they expected. It's still quite the engineering achievement.

[@danielkorladis7869]

I like that Alice got in an LOTR and Cthulhu reference in one sentence.

[@joshuahadams]

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nodens#Legacy

[@CleverCrumbish]

Alice, thank you so much for the image of the CSB safety guy just stopping to curse out a boss or something as a dipshit instead of us just having to be content with the barely restrained rage in his voice in the Imperial Sugar video

[@huntermorgan4201]

I'm having a really shit day, and "shake hands with Peigneur" got me real good :D Edit: goddamn, y'all in the comments weren't kidding about the anti-fish ranting. Incredible episode.

[@whoever6458]

I'm 41 and I learned about plate tectonics in the 80s and 90s because we had a bunch of earthquakes back then and some geologists would come on TV and talk about them. That would be how we found out how big the earthquake was and what sorts of things had fallen down from it (if any). There were always these two women: Kate Hutton and Lucy Jones who would tell us all about earthquake science since they always talk about breaking news for a long time. It's always good when there is some breaking news that involves scientists talking about something for a long time because then you at least learn something. So those women taught me some of the first things I learned about geology. The only thing I knew about it before was that my mom mentioned that earthquakes were a thing, which was good because then I didn't freak out when I first felt one.

[@e.l.2482]

This is legit the best episode yet IMO. Also I'm 100% with Liam on the subject of fish, those things are not to be fucking trusted.

[@2sudonim]

Fun fact: Humans are fish. No, seriously. Humans are more closely related to catfish than sharks are. The category of fish is colloquial, not biological. From a biological perspective, there's no way to separate the definition of fish from the definition of vertebrate without making paraphyllitic groups.

[@jellosapiens7261]

Cladistics, babey

[@danielkorladis7869]

fuck fish for being a paraphylitic group

[@2sudonim]

@@danielkorladis7869 Wasps, amphibians, and reptiles are also paraphylitic.

[@danielkorladis7869]

@@2sudonim and also unworthy of respect

[@VeggieRice]

@@danielkorladis7869 fear is a type of respect

[@josh8344]

The hatred of fish is possibly one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever heard in my life 🤣

[@frozenchikin6321]

The 40 year experienced engineer is Grover

[@MichaelSmith-vh3dr]

fuk...

[@jimwilliamsnc]

Nailed it! He’s out grilling next to the vinyl siding right now!

[@michaelaschmid]

I got the notification for this just as I was about to complain I have nothing to listen to while doing the garden. Perfect.

[@xymaryai8283]

i would have thought old wtyp would be rough and weird to watch in common day, but this is as timeless as the RBG laugh

[@Zombiewski]

+1 to Alice for the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Bartleby the Scrivener reference @ 28:00.

[@DeadWhiteButterflies]

I too love when a comedy podcast is not allowed to do comedy, especially as a means to elleviate us from the pain of the corporate hellscape that is the 21st century. That's an extremely normal way to approach this.

[@1Phloat1]

Oliver Cant Its copism. If were somber for the dead and act very stern, this whole system is good. If you laugh at how recklessly capital throws away lives for numbers, well maybe this system should change.

[@kaycashew]

My aunt used to work as a geophysicist for a gasoline company in Texas. She said the geologists out there would lick rocks all the time as part of their work. This was in the 1980’s, by the way. EDIT: they/them

[@platedlizard]

As a rockhound can confirm we lick rocks frequently. Fossil bone sticks to your tongue

[@ollllj]

early chemistry was full of taste-testing. This is more dangerous where you do NOT know how poisonous or radioactive the chemical may be, and less dangerous when you know that you actually micro dose on a poison.

[@LordByte]

Oil is mostly hydrocarbon.. So basically, sugar-water!

[@Mira_linn]

Wonder if methane is sweeter then Ethan oO and if ethan then taste like starch xD

[@2sudonim]

Plate tectonics were proven in 1959. My mother was in high school before it made it to textbooks.

[@pkunkbwok]

I was gonna say, I knew the theory of plate tectonics was accepted shockingly recently, but not like a couple years before Nirvana broke

[@ambroselwatson]

Down voting this because it might be true but it isn't as fun.

[@platedlizard]

@@ambroselwatson still pretty funny it took until almost the 60s to figure out something so basic

[@AlanCanon2222]

"Why do you do this, man, I don't come into your fuckin' room and start talking about vertigo." lol

[@andrevanderleeuw8070]

The blackface thing we do is pretty bad, and we also had people make a cart with Jewish stereotypes on it for Carnival. We also started stock trading, colonized every continent, got wealthy of slaves and in our last (provincial) elections the fascists won. Gotta love the Netherlands!! /s

[@asArsenic]

I'm not entirely convinced it really counts as blackface. That is a distinctly american phenomenon associated with a history of racism. Zwarte piet, while visually similar has a distinctly different background.

[@andrevanderleeuw8070]

@@asArsenic It's important to note that the Netherlands also has a history of racism, like most European countries. We traded many slaves and colonized quite a lot of places. The "Zwarte Piet" character people dress up as is very stereotypical of how we portrayed African/surinamese people in the Netherlands. The big red lips and black curly hair. While yes, in the United States blackface has a different background and meaning it can still be said that this tradition is dressing up as a stereotype for black people, and is thus also blackface. There are also a lot of black people on the Netherlands who don't like the tradition because of this. If course the people who defend it have been used to it since childhood and never associated it with racism, hence the backlash to anti-black Pete movements. Another interesting thing is that many immigrants to the Netherlands actually find it quite weird, nay absurd, that this is an accepted tradition.

[@asArsenic]

@@andrevanderleeuw8070 It's the steriotypical representation of a moorish manservant to go with the steriotypical representation of a spanish cardinal that Sinterklaas is. However, using steriotypes isn't inherently racist.

[@JohnSmith-ot4hq]

I suppose racism means literally saying brown people are subhuman to you then?

[@andrevanderleeuw8070]

@@asArsenic indeed using a stereotype is not inherently racist, the context and subject matters. In this case, while the backstory might not be racist, depicting black slaves to a white master does send a message that can very easily be interpreted as racist, especially by those affected most by racism. Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet cannot just be taken out of the context of what we accept as a society, because traditions like this are grounded in our society.

[@Robert0Pirie]

YAY! Louisiana! We have so many engineering disasters!

[@WaterMan416]

I think it's safe to say that the Deepwater Horizon belongs to Louisiana, even though it was in international waters. Largest oil spill in the world.

[@stephenmiller2544]

We've got bridge collapses and levy breaks too!!!

[@justinokraski3796]

I love how the whole tectonic plate thing just gets shut down by a post production footnote

[@r2dezki]

Tacoma narrow bridge disaster killed a dog too. What a coincidence.

[@schnoodle3]

Didn't that guy manage to get the dog out o9f his car?

[@scarylion1roar]

@@schnoodle3 No. Tubby was too scared by the bridge's oscillations to be extracted from the car. It's in the 99PI episode.

[@freepics1400]

This podcast is quickly becoming my favorite, I love the dry humor and all the personalities, it is a relatively refreshing experience to have an actually interesting podcast premise

[@hpalpha7323]

Half this episode is Liam ranting about how much he hates fish while everyone else dies laughing good times