REVISITING Art Crime Doesn't Pay, Canines Cooking Meat, Eggs Gone Wrong

⁠⁠While Rachel is on parental leave, here's a vintage episode from our vault! Rachel, Sara, and comedian Josh Gondelman discuss dogs cooking in kitchens, chickens laying eggs inside themselves, and one of the most peculiar art heists in history. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tweet at us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Click here to learn more about all of our stories! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to Jess' Twitch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to all of Jess' content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.jesscapricorn.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Produced by Jess Boddy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Popular Science: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/PopSci⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Theme music by Billy Cadden: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thanks to our Sponsors: Buy or sell your next car today with CarGurus at https://cargurus.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:33Rachel Feltman?

  Hey weirdos, it's Rachel. I'm still on parental leave for a little bit, but I wanted to pop in to say hello and of course, to introduce this week's awesome vintage rerun episode. What's wild about the episode we're about to air is that it was top of mind as soon as I tried to think of my favorite weirdest thing episodes ever. But when I first thought of it, I was like, no, that's way too recent an episode to use as a rerun. But then I checked and it's almost been an entire full, actual five years since this first aired. So I guess you could say that the weirdest thing I learned this week is that time continues to progress in a linear fashion. From 2021, which it turns out was not just a couple of years ago, features one of our beloved original weirdest thing co-host Sarah Chodosh,

• 2:18Rachel Feltman?

  and a very special guest, the delightful comedian Josh Gondelman, who has been rightfully compared to a sentient cardigan. I got in touch with Josh to ask him what we should plug for him today. And he says it would be great if people would check out his new stand-up special, Positive Reinforcement, which is available now on YouTube and wherever you stream audio. I'm also a subscriber to his newsletter, That's Marvelous, which you can get for free by going to that'smarvelousnewsletter.com. That's marvelousnewsletter.com. If you, like me, spend a lot of your day wishing that we lived in less interesting times, I really have to recommend Josh's comedy if you haven't checked it out already. He's so hilarious, but also has so much heart. So I promise you'll probably come away feeling at least

• 3:03Rachel Feltman?

  a little bit better than you did before you sat down to watch or read his work. And he's not even paying me to say that. I just think he's a really nice, funny guy. That's probably why this episode is one of my favorites. And one fun fact about Josh's fact for this episode before we get into it. So I believe this episode came out in May of 2021. And when it did, you may have recognized his art heist fact from a Netflix documentary that came out on April 7th, 2021, called This is a Robbery. But in fact, Josh had pitched this as his fact for the show back in March of 2021. And we even recorded it before the Netflix documentary got dropped. He then sent me an email saying, in all caps, that he was so sorry that he had accidentally picked something

• 3:46Rachel Feltman?

  that was about to be a Netflix documentary, which of course I told him was completely fine. So listen, when it comes to the thrilling tale of the 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, you may not have heard it here first, but we said it here first. Okay, now let's jump into the episode. I hope you enjoy. I know things are pretty messed up right now. I hope that the next hour or so can feel a little bit better than the rest of your day. Or I hope your whole day feels awesome. That's also okay. You don't have to feel bad about having a good day when the world is bad. I, for example, just had a very giggly conversation with a baby. And I'll play some of that for you at the end of the episode so you can enjoy it too. Okay, on with the show.

• 4:30Rachel Feltman?

  At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Sarah Tchodosh.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  I'm Josh Gondelman.

• 4:51Rachel Feltman?

  Josh, welcome to the show. Listeners, I'm sure people who enjoy podcasts have heard Josh's voice before. He is a frequent guest on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. He hosts a delightful show called Make My Day, which I caught up on a few episodes this morning, and they did truly make my day. So, thank you.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh. Thank you. That is truly the kindest compliment, because it's like, literally, the premise of the show is in the name. I really just want it to be like, a fun, breezy half hour that makes people feel better on the way out than they came in feeling.

• 5:26Rachel Feltman?

  And then you also, after writing for some time for John Oliver, you now write and produce for Deezus and Mero, which I often forget, because I kind of just think of your job as being like, a national resource to like, help us all feel better.

• 5:40Speaker 04

  That's so sweet. Yeah, no, I've been at Deezus and Mero. This is the third season of the Showtime show. And I've been with them since they started at Showtime, since we started. So it's been, yeah, it's been really wonderful. And I've just like, had really great fortune to go from like, dream job to dream job in the past, over the past like, eight-ish years.

• 6:04Rachel Feltman?

  Amazing. Yeah, so we wanted to have you on Weirdest Thing, because I was like, here's a person who is great at talking about interesting facts, in a fun way. And we often get accidentally depressing here on Weirdest Thing. I'm looking at Sarah.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  It's mostly me. My beat on this podcast is just like, the saddest thing I learned this week, also with a little weirdness.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  It's like, hey, guess who got polio?

• 6:32Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. This is also, I would say, by far, the most Jewish episode of Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week we've ever had.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  That's what I was gonna say as well. Anticipating this, I was like, oh, we should have aired this like, during the week of Passover, just so we could fully be maximally Jewish.

• 6:49Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Just charging up.

• 6:54Rachel Feltman?

  So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, making people's days, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah, would you like to start with your tease?

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm gonna talk about how chickens sometimes accidentally miss their op-educt and lay a little bit of an egg inside their body cavity. And other assorted weird egg facts. Weird chicken facts is my beat today.

• 7:34Rachel Feltman?

  This is not your first weird egg fact rodeo either.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  No, it's not. I actually referred back to the other one because I was like, I don't want to repeat a weird egg fact.

• 7:42Rachel Feltman?

  This really says a lot about you as a reporter, that you're able to get two full episodes of weirdest thing content out of chicken eggs specifically.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, if anyone, if anyone needs a chicken egg reporter, I'm your gal.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Listeners just listening like, more chicken egg facts? All right, Sarah, we get it.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  So sorry, so sorry, listeners.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  No, I'm intrigued.

• 8:05Rachel Feltman?

  Josh, how about your tease?

• 8:07Speaker 04

  Mine is about, my fact is about an art heist that still has not been recovered from.

• 8:15Rachel Feltman?

  Ooh, I love it. I love a good heist. My tease is that I would like to talk about a dog that was genetically engineered to serve as a kitchen appliance.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  All right, well, we have to go with that one first, I feel.

• 8:29Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, all right, I accept. Okay. And I will say too, that I had it in my head, Josh, that this would be a great one to have while you were on, because I have really enjoyed your comedic references to your dog.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, my dog though, she's, she's a chubby little pug. She's so cute and so grumpy. She would, if you, she couldn't serve as any appliance other than maybe like a paperweight. And even then, she is very defiant. She just doesn't have a lot of, uh, she's not very tenacious. She's not especially, uh, strong. She, she is, she eats wet food and I have to cut the wet food up into pieces because she prefers chunks to gum and she won't attack it all as one glob anymore. So she, she's mostly gums. So yeah, she could maybe be like a business card holder or a paperweight. But other than that, she is, she's not super, um, utilitarian.

• 9:28Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Rachel Feltman?

  Well, the story ended up kind of being, um, a little darker than I expected, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna do my best with it. But it is about a, a very utilitarian dog. Um, and the long story short here is that, um, people bred these small dogs, uh, to have like relatively kind of long bodies and like short crooked legs. And they were very strong and very high energy. Um, Charles Darwin actually referenced these pups as an example of genetic engineering where humans, you know, specifically bred, um, qualities that would serve them into animals that they were raising. And the reason people did this is so that the dogs could basically power a kitchen of appliances,

• 10:14Rachel Feltman?

  which just sounds so wild, um, but I'm gonna explain. Um, so back when open fires were our best way of cooking things, uh, the spit was invaluable. As early as the first century B.C., people were sticking meat onto spits so that they could turn it and cook it. Cause otherwise you would get like half of your mammoth was on fire while the other half stayed raw, similar issues. But for hundreds of years, that meant that somebody had to be physically turning the spit. Um, and in medieval kitchens, this was a job for like the lowest of the lowly servant boys. And they would be called the spit boy, which is just, oh god.

• 10:54Speaker 04

  Which is now, that's now a different thing. Don't Google it.

• 10:59Rachel Feltman?

  Exactly.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  I mean, or Google it. Like, I don't know what you're into.

• 11:01Rachel Feltman?

  Whatever you're into, but yeah, Google with caution.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Google with caution. That, I think, is always good advice.

• 11:08Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Or they'd be called like Spit Jack, which I think implies that they just called all the boys Jack if they worked on the spit. Which is-

• 11:17Speaker 04

  Joe Biden was their supervisor.

• 11:22Rachel Feltman?

  And that is kind of my impression of like what medieval Europe was like, that you could just be renamed Jack because you were basically a human rotisserie turder. So anyway, the first mention of the Turnspit Dog, which was also called the Wernerpeter Kerr or Conus Vertigus, Conus Vertigus as in like a dizzy dog, was in 1576 and it was referred to as the Turnspit.

• 11:54Rachel Feltman?

  But most of what we know about them was written down in the 1800s, which was near the end of what was apparently centuries of regular use. So these were dogs, it was a breed of dog specifically, that had been bred to fit easily into these treadmills that basically looked like the wheels you'd see outside of a mill. But instead of water running through them, there were like cranky dogs running through them. And this was a real thing. That's so cute. The cutest little, oh my God, I can't get over it. It's really cute, but then if you think about, the more you think about it, the less cute it is, which we'll talk about a little more in a second. But there were actually several devices that these dogs could power, like they could help mill grain, really anything

• 12:39Rachel Feltman?

  that you could attach some kind of like treadmill style gear to, they could power. And there was even a patent for a dog powered sewing machine in the 19th century, unclear whether anyone actually used that.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  That is the cutest sweatshop condition I've ever heard of.

• 12:58Rachel Feltman?

  It's like really, really awful implications, but also so cute.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, very, very cute and very tragic.

• 13:06Rachel Feltman?

  Um, so yeah, unfortunately, uh, as, as some listeners may have already guessed, this job totally sucked for the dogs, um, for all the reasons that it had sucked for humans. And, and this was really common so that we know, like during the period from that first mention we have in the 1500s until the early 1800s, that, um, it was kind of like the, the mark of a high end kitchen was to have at least one turnspit dog. Cause if you didn't, that meant that you had a little boy cranking the turnspit, which, um, you know, maybe it was a little more obvious that that job sucked when it was a tiny human boy. Um, but yeah, uh, according to at least one historian, it was an encounter

• 13:50Rachel Feltman?

  with a New York hotels turnspit dogs in the 1850s that inspired Henry Berg to found the ASPCA. So like turnspit dogs, uh, apparently were our first instance of realizing that maybe animal cruelty was a thing and not just like what animals were for.

• 14:08Speaker 04

  And yeah, this feels, I mean, like obviously there are so many animals that we make do jobs for us that are like, that seem like maybe not what the animals would prefer to be doing. Like even a really fast horse, right? Uh, you know, they don't necessarily want to take Paul Revere around.

• 14:28Rachel Feltman?

  Revolutionary War.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Boston, but like when you're, when you're like, when you're putting an animal like a foot away from another animal that you're cooking. And you're just like, so you're not, we're not going to cook you, we hope, but like, hey, that's on you, dog.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  If time get rough, you know, we may, we may have to.

• 14:49Rachel Feltman?

  Well, and like they worked really long hours. There's just in kind of the historical accounts we had that mentioned turnspit dogs, um, they're always, um,

• 14:59Rachel Feltman?

  Referred to as being very suspicious looking and very like really easily trained. In in fact, there are some stories about them like if if you were rich enough to have like a pair of turnspit dogs so they could trade off during the day.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 15:14Rachel Feltman?

  If you accidentally kept one in for too long, it might like hop out and be like, my shift is over, clock it out. Go back home to the missus.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  Good for the dogs. Unionize the spit dogs.

• 15:25Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. But it does seem like they were probably treated quite awfully and it was a really grueling job and they were even bred to be not just energetic, but like it sounds like they kind of bred like hyperactivity into the dogs so that they would actually like want to run for a long time. Obviously, they were still made to run for longer than they would have liked. And there are awful stories about like people doing things like throwing pieces of hot coal in there to like try to get them to go faster. But it does seem like they were they were really bred to be dogs that would mostly be fairly content to just run on a wheel all day.

• 16:06Rachel Feltman?

  And so, yeah, there were actually as early as 1551, people had like schematics for steam powered roasting jacks, presumably named after the boy named Jack who turned every spit in in every medieval kitchen. That was in 1551 by Teke Aladin in the Ottoman Empire, where generally they were just doing things more sophisticated than making dogs turn their meat. But there was a version patented by an American clockmaker in 1792. And there were also smoke powered jacks described as early as the 1600s. But a lot of these things were either really expensive or they required kind of like retrofitting

• 16:47Rachel Feltman?

  your giant old medieval oven that so many of these like wealthy houses still had. So I think, you know, one of the reasons that there was that opportunity for the guy who founded the ASPCA to be shocked is that they actually were like much less common in the Americas where the buildings were newer, so people were more likely to be able to like build a chimney to accommodate, you know, a steam powered jack versus in Europe where maybe it was just simpler to keep the dogs running.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  I feel like that's like one of those building codes where like you see a grandfathered inn, right? Where you're like, oh yeah, this is a new building. You can't have spit dogs in here. Or if it's like a really, it's a really old building, they're like, we're gonna do these renovations, but we're gonna do it so we can keep our spit dogs. Cause otherwise it's gonna be a pain in my ass to install a steam power jack.

• 17:39Rachel Feltman?

  Exactly. Yeah, and it wasn't until like the late 18th century that these and other solutions, including this jack that had like a wind-up clockwork mechanism, which seems really like wildly complicated for just like making sure your meat doesn't burn. Those became accessible enough, you know, again, as we got closer to the turn of the 19th century, that people started to replace their dog treadmills. But yeah, just a little bit more about turn spit dogs, which I think are a beautiful and terrible human invention, like many dog breeds that exist today. They weren't just relegated to the kitchen.

• 18:22Rachel Feltman?

  The lords and ladies of the house would actually use them as like living foot warmers at church on Sundays. Oh my god. And, which is way cuter than the, the running on hamster wheels next to a hot fire thing.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  Much cuter.

• 18:36Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Queen Victoria is said to have kept several of them as pets, which must have seemed really quirky. But even though she set lots of trends, that is not a trend that took off. They were generally considered ugly and mean, which I have to assume is because people kept making them run on hot treadmills that smelled like meat.

• 18:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can't blame a dog with a, who, like a line cook dog for being a little surly.

• 19:01Rachel Feltman?

  Exactly. I'd be angry too. Yeah. So, once they became obsolete as kitchen utensils, they just quickly disappeared. And so they're considered extinct now, which is really funny because dog breeds aren't distinct species, so... Calling them extinct is, is kind of a misnomer. It's, it's like how like cabbage, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, and a whole bunch of other plants are actually one species. So if we stopped eating cabbage and it disappeared, it wouldn't really be extinct. Like, the makings of cabbage would still exist in the DNA of those other varietals. And so like similarly, any extinct dog breed is just one where we don't have proof that like a pure descendant of that exact lineage is still around.

• 19:44Rachel Feltman?

  But generally speaking, like, there's always some idea of like what modern dogs they're really closely related to, um, and that sort of thing. I do have, um, one picture of a, um, there's a taxidermied turnspit dog. There's the last known specimen.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  God, I'm so afraid.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  Wait, it's like one old, oh, sorry, go ahead, Sarah.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  No, I was just gonna say, I feel like the taxidermy dog is either gonna be like, that looks just like a living dog, or like, dear God, that is terrifying.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This looks like a wolf that someone pan-seared for half an hour.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, God, yeah.

• 20:26Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, I am attempting share screen, and here's the dog.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  Oh, I think it's cute.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Wait, it's so much, what is the scale there? It looks so much more petite than I was picturing.

• 20:41Rachel Feltman?

  Definitely very petite. Like, the wheels were not, um, were not large. Um, kind of like terrier sized, I would say.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 20:51Rachel Feltman?

  Um, and a lot of the kind of like modern dogs that's thought to be related to are terriers. That picture, which I will post on popside.com/Weird, um, there's a great episode of Kitchen Sisters, an awesome podcast, talking about turnspit dogs from a few years ago. And the historian they talked to about that taxidermy was like, it's clearly lovingly done. Like, there are flowers in the like shadow box that it's in, the box is painted. But it was maybe their first attempt to taxidermy.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Ooh, okay.

• 21:21Rachel Feltman?

  Not, not very well done.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Lovingly done, but poorly executed.

• 21:24Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 21:25Rachel Feltman?

  So it's hard to know exactly what they looked like, except that that was like their size. They were a squat, sturdy, but like petite dog.

• 21:35Rachel Feltman?

  Also, just like, you know, extinct dogs in general, or extinct breeds, again, like, a dog breed being extinct is kind of like a weird concept.

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Discontinued.

• 21:46Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, right, right. Limited edition discontinued dog.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  A dead stock dog.

• 21:50Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. But there were a couple that I found that I thought were really interesting because it really speaks to like, how dog breeds, you know, go away when there was some really specific purpose we were breeding into them that becomes obsolete. So, one example is the Belgian Mastiff, which was this massive dog, like all Mastiffs are. But it was used to pull carts in Belgium and the Netherlands until the 20th century, like a little horsey. And then around World War II, I guess, other countries started making fun of Belgium for having dogs pull around their groceries and they stopped using them for that.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  That, so this begs the question, like you said, a little, they, like a little horse, like, did they not know about horses in Belgium?

• 22:36Rachel Feltman?

  I really don't know. It might have been like, it was, it was just the right size, maybe.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, a horse is a little too big for your groceries, but a dog could be exactly right, you know?

• 22:47Speaker 04

  All right, all right.

• 22:48Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, it was like a, you know, a milkman's cart would be pulled by, by the value.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  I'm just saying, like, I guess the way we treat animals, this is what it's reminding me, is the way we treat specific animals is kind of arbitrary, right? Like which ones we, we assign labor to and which ones we treat as pets. So maybe in Belgium, they just, their little horses like lived in the house with them and would sometimes sleep in their beds if they were very permissive. And, and the dogs were the ones that they gave all the jobs to until someone was like, you gotta switch this up. Your, your pet horse that, that you let sleep by the fireplace, this thing could be dragging your cart around town.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  You got it all backwards.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  Instead of this team of dachshunds you have on a rickshaw.

• 23:32Rachel Feltman?

  Well, and then one other defunct breed of dog I found that was really interesting. I didn't write the name down, but there are a lot of the quote unquote extinct breeds are hunting dogs who were just bred to hunt really specific things. And like one of them, probably more than one of them, the reason it was so specific is that they wanted a dog that was really good at silently sniffing out a particular kind of prey, but not actually hunting it. Like those were the dogs that found it and they needed to do it really stealthily because then they would be like, all right, now other dog, go hunt that thing that hasn't yet realized there are dogs around. And like, people are absurd. Just breed one dog to do that whole thing.

• 24:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:16Rachel Feltman?

  You know?

• 24:17Speaker 04

  That was the snitch collie.

• 24:21Rachel Feltman?

  Exactly.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  Just like, I'm not, I'm not saying nothing, but uh,

• 24:26Rachel Feltman?

  You go this way.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you're looking for a pheasant, uh, I've heard some things.

• 24:33Rachel Feltman?

  So yeah, that is, you know, a brief overview of the, um, the turnspit dog, the dizzy dog. I, I would love to have one as a foot warmer. I think they, it sounds like they're probably really smart, industrious little dogs. And, um, you know, I'm really glad that like eating shawarma doesn't involve like a dog having.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Imagine if everywhere you went in New York, like every shawarma cart was just, there was a little dog just like going in circles outside. Like tragic, yes. Would it make the streets of New York a little more adorable? Maybe.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  Also, yes. Yeah, for sure. I feel like that is like not, it would be like akin to the bodega cat, right? Like it feels like there's, there are openings in New York institutions for other kinds of animals. A shawarma dog, a bodega cat, a, uh, a deli bird. Like we get all sorts of, you know, like a hot dog cart parakeet.

• 25:37Rachel Feltman?

  Well, I also think like the only thing that it would take to make this a much more humane practice is to just have a ton of of dogs.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, they just go as long as they want.

• 25:47Rachel Feltman?

  And then yeah, and then another one pops in. Yeah, it could be a fun activity.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:52Rachel Feltman?

  Sort of saying.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  I know dogs who would love to run in circles for an hour, just like burn off all that energy.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  There's my, my dog, as I said before, just very old, very lazy. She would absolutely not be able to resist just trying to eat the meat that she was assigned to cooking.

• 26:11Rachel Feltman?

  Perhaps a good foot warmer, though.

• 26:13Speaker 04

  A great foot warmer. Absolutely. Yeah, she would, she'd be great at half of this job.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Well, just a very specific, you know, it's like the hunting dogs that divide up the labor. She's, she's just got the foot warmer part covered.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  She'd be the foot warmer. She wouldn't, I mean, I guess she could do it in church as a, as like a vocation, but she is a Jewish dog.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  There's a little too much standing, I think, in synagogues to have a foot warmer be useful.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. Yeah, you're up, you're down, you're startling your dog who just kind of got a good snore going. Oh, she snores really loud. So she would additionally be bad for her religious setting.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  That would be your sinuses.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, just, she's got like.

• 26:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, oh, it's, it's, it's a problem.

• 27:01Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts.

• 27:13Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. And Josh, why don't you talk to us about art heists?

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Okay, so this is my favorite thing. I hope this isn't too redundant with information people already know, because there have been other podcasts and books about this, but this is like my favorite fact. And it's one that I kind of like retained as a kid and resurfaced in my brain as an adult, which is there's a museum. I'm from Massachusetts and that we, we went when I was a kid on a field trip to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. And in the museum, there There's a little history of the museum to start with. Isabella Stewart Gardner was born in New York in the 1840s. Her, she moved to Boston with her husband. He died in 1898 and she started doing this thing they'd always planned, which was to start a museum.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  So you can see like what kind of financial bracket they were working in. If they were like, they weren't like, honey, should we have a garden? It was just like, hey babe, you know what I was thinking? Let's do a museum. So, so he died and she starts getting this museum ready. And so they had been all over the world and acquired art. Again, I, when you're, when it's the 1800s, mid 1800s and you're just like acquiring art from other countries. I don't really want to like vouch for that process as being ethical or fair. However, what the, the, the end result was that she built this, um, this had this mansion built basically as a museum.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  And it's just full of all the art that she loved. And, and it's like the art itself, I have the, I have the webpage open because the art is like not consistent. In any way, like it's from all different countries. There are like paintings, uh, there are, there are like artifacts and it's, it's organized just by like how she liked it. Like how much she liked different stuff. She was like, I think these look good together. And she was not, uh, I believe not like trained in curating art, but she did, uh, she was very specific. So when she died, she was like, I'm going to leave, I want this to be a museum forever.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  I'm leaving this in, in a trust, but one of the conditions is that you can't move anything. Which it's like visiting like a, a grandparents' house where everything, you know, it's like, that's the room you don't sit in. Even though there's a couch, like everything just stays. And there's like a picture of your grandparents and they're very young and just, uh, nobody moves anything. Nobody touches anything. There's just like a glass jar full of seashells for some reason.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  So this is, this is all fine and good. She was just like, keep it like it is.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  Then. In 1990, so, oh, yes, okay, so I'll just tell the story fairly linearly. In 1990, the night of St. Patrick's Day, there was-

• 30:22Rachel Feltman?

  Oh, no.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  I know, I know, okay.

• 30:24Rachel Feltman?

  St. Patrick's Day in Massachusetts, nothing good can happen.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  St. Patrick's Day in Boston is-

• 30:28Rachel Feltman?

  Ah, oh, no.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  Um, it is, so, the night of St. Patrick's Day, two robbers came in, I believe, dressed as police, um, and they stole what the FBI has valued at over $500 million worth of art, including, yeah, including one of 32, uh, or, excuse me, one of 34 known Vermeer paintings. The Concert was one, the only seascape of Rembrandt's, uh, which is called The Storm in the Sea of Galilee, uh, sketches, a Chinese gou, I think I'm pronouncing that right, which is like a, uh, cer- I think it's ceramic, excuse, it is a bronze vessel, excuse me.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  Um, so, just all this stuff stolen, never recovered. Um, the case is open, the museum has a, uh, has a $10 million reward for information leading to the recovery of this art, which obviously, hundreds of millions of dollars of artwork, I believe it stands as the largest unsolved art heist in history. But, the, uh, the, the fact that I love, that was so fascinating as a child, and that it is so fascinating now, is that where the art was is empty. The robbers cut canvases out of their frames to just take them with them, those frames

• 31:56Speaker 04

  remain empty on the wall of the museum. Yeah, so, like, you go into this museum and there's, it looks like it's vaguely under construction, um, because, because it's gone. And so, there have been 30 years of investigations, and I, I really want to shout out the, uh, the podcast Last Scene, which was a, a joint venture between WBUR, that Boston's public Station and the Boston Globe and they they go down all these kind of rabbit holes of like, maybe it was this this segment of the Boston mafia, maybe it was Whitey Bulger, maybe it was these other criminals from, you know, international art thieves that hit this museum,

• 32:40Speaker 04

  knowing that on St. Patrick's Day, like, you know, midnight to 2 a.m. on Sunday night after St. Patrick's Day was Saturday into, I mean, St. Patrick's Day is kind of a state of mind in Boston. Like, some people I think are constantly, it's constantly St. Patrick's Day, but they go hard. And so they seized upon this chaos. It was also, there were thoughts about whether it was an inside job, whether one of the two night watchmen was involved, and all these leads have come up empty, as are the frames on the wall of this museum that you can go and see, which I think

• 33:19Speaker 04

  is like, that's pretty fun. Like, obviously, you want to see Rembrandt's only seascape, but if you can't see Rembrandt's only seascape, don't throw up just another painting there and and eliminate the history of this art heist. Leave it empty and just be like, no other paintings.

• 33:42Rachel Feltman?

  Because that was Oh, how fun for the the people who pulled this art heist, that there is a permanent tribute.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  A lasting legacy.

• 33:53Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 33:53Speaker 04

  Now it's like it's both an art museum and also a museum about this one specific heist. Yes, it's an art heist museum as well as an art museum. I love that. The Isabella Stewart Gardner slash Ocean's Eleven museum in the fens. And yeah, so I'm like, obsessed with the heist in general, but also with the fact that they keep that because of this charter and in the on the website to the museum, because I remember hearing on the tour when I was, whatever, 11 years old, that it was the charter of the museum that that said that they couldn't replace the art. And on the website, they kind of, there's a whole section devoted to the theft,

• 34:36Speaker 04

  because it's such a big deal. And I imagine it like drives at least some of the visitors to the museum, but it says, let me find it, because they're a little gentler about. The reason that the they leave the frames open. I can't find it. I when I was looking at it the other day, it said something like the single largest proper thing, single largest property theft in the world, they claim on the website took 81 minutes. There's, there's pictures on the website of one of the guards kind of duct taped to a, a pipe downstairs. And then empty frames today, empty frames remain hanging in the museum as a placeholder for the missing works and as symbols of hope awaiting their return, which I think is kind of a sweet.

• 35:19Rachel Feltman?

  That's much sweeter, yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 04

  Right. Um, yeah, it's kind of like the.

• 35:24Rachel Feltman?

  Much sweeter than this dead lady made us promise we would never move these frames.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  This dead there, this dead old lady was like, don't move anything. I have it the way I like it. My ghost will know. Um, and it is like you brought up Rachel at the beginning of the podcast Passover. And it's kind of like the idea of like the, the bitterness and the sweetness at once of like hope for the return, but also a reminder of like, whoopsie.

• 35:55Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, I, you know, I've been thinking since you, you mentioned that there would be an art heist involved in your fact, I was like, what, what does happen with stolen art, right? Cause you can't just like go sell it to anybody.

• 36:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:12Rachel Feltman?

  People are looking for that stolen art. Um. Gotta sell it to the right people.

• 36:16Speaker 04

  You do have to sell it to the right people.

• 36:18Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. And yeah, I definitely, I read a few pieces about how, you know, unsurprisingly, there are rich people who are less scrupulous than others about, you know, some, some rich people love the, the brag of having some hidden stolen art in their home that only their, you know, uh, close friends and associates can know about. But I also was reading that it's like stolen artworks that are recovered. It's often found that they were basically just used as like collateral in like, um, you know, in mobs and, you know, various criminal underbellies where it's just like, yeah, I got, I got the goddamn Mona Lisa. So you can hold it while I go do this thing.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 36:58Rachel Feltman?

  And then I'll come back and take the Mona Lisa back. And like, what a bummer that so much stolen art is apparently just being used as like, as like IOU markers.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  So one thing that that was interesting in the podcast last scene is that they really make the point that like you, we, there's this image in our, in the public imagination of like the art thief as like a, a gentleman criminal, right? Like an appreciator of art who's like, mm-hmm, I shall have the Vermeer for my own. And then they're like, they're like sad to have to sell it to like a fence to, you know, to like,

• 37:35Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  to get that money and have the art. They're like, mm-hmm, it's beautiful, treat it well. But like in real life, it's just like whoever, it's the same kind of person that would do any kind of robbery. And I don't want to like, by that, I don't mean like anything derogatory other than it's, it's not like an art appreciator. It is like the same kind of person who would like rob a bank, but they're like, oh, I, instead of getting the money directly, we know how to get this art. Like we know somebody on the inside or we know a security vulnerability. And, and so it's, it's like a very funny where it's just like, it's the same mob that steals other things. Like the same, yes, there's not like a secret like art mafia.

• 38:17Rachel Feltman?

  Right. And also then like, you know, there's always the concern that this stuff is just going to be destroyed once it's more risky than it is.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 38:26Rachel Feltman?

  Useful. So yeah, like if you're gonna, if you're considering doing crime, just like, consider doing it with something other than a priceless artwork.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  Well, my, my favorite art crime is I just watched that documentary, Made You Look, about the art forgeries. And I think if you can forge a priceless work of art and sell it to a rich person, or you know, through a gallery to a rich person, I think they shouldn't be able to prosecute you. I think you win fair and square.

• 38:56Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. If you can, if you can trick someone into that, especially if you can trick someone who like verifies.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  The painting like this is a legit what I don't know about art to insert insert an artist's name here who you can forge effectively. I yeah, I feel the same way, especially the rich person like jokes on you buddy.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  Well, in that in that movie, there there were people that were very mad that they felt defrauded out of eight million dollars that they spent on a Rothko and on a Rothko that turned out to be forged and nobody spends eight million dollars on a painting when they have a net worth of eight million and fifty dollars. Like they're not, they're not like, oh, no, how do we pay our cellphone bills? They we got screwed on this Rothko deal. So like, I think if you can get, you know, if you're selling a painting for 1.2 million dollars and it's you trick the people that are supposed to verify, I think you don't get to bribe the people that verify it. This is my rule. But I think if you trick them, then it's it's um, no, no take backsies.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  It's fair and square. There's a

• 40:00Rachel Feltman?

  I think that's fair.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  There's a museum of art fakes in Vienna that I have been to and there's no, there's no like quote unquote, real art in it. It is just about art forgery. It is incredible. I'm a big fan of like weird museums. If you're ever in Vienna, if ever, if ever we can go anywhere ever again, go to Vienna and go to the Museum of Art Fakes.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  I want to do a fake version of that museum somewhere.

• 40:26Speaker 04

  I want to open up like

• 40:28Rachel Feltman?

  Would it be real art where it's fake fakes?

• 40:30Speaker 04

  Oh, whoa. Yeah, that is awesome. Where you're just like, these are fakes wink. These are incredible. And it's like, yeah, that's because Picasso did them.

• 40:42Speaker 04

  But I love, I love art crimes.

• 40:45Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, we had a, we had an episode of We're Thing a couple of years ago where I talked about this young female artist who claimed to have like uncovered the secrets of the Renaissance masters and offered to teach these famous male painters how to effectively copy them.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:05Rachel Feltman?

  Um, and she ran a great scheme because the thing is that when the men took her courses and still Sucked at painting and weren't as good as painting as she was. Her secret for copying the Renaissance masters was just that she was a better painter.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  That rules. Yeah. See, that's a great scam.

• 41:22Rachel Feltman?

  And no one wanted to admit it. So they would all just be like, yeah, I learned a lot. It was great. Definitely, definitely pay her to do the same thing.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  I'm like Monet now.

• 41:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's so funny because that is, it's like an unprovable scam, especially because she's so good at painting. It's like a, it's like a, the reverse of that popular, the axiom, right? This is those who can, don't teach.

• 41:51Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

• 42:03Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back and Sarah with some egg facts.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Some egg facts. So I do, I do just have to start by saying, I'm about to tell you basically like.

• 42:12Rachel Feltman?

  What I'm about to tell you will change your life.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  It won't change your life. But I did feel a little like I was slandering chickens because I'm just gonna talk to you guys about how all the, all the ways it can go wrong. Like, how many ways can you lay an egg badly? But I'd just like to set the record straight and say that chickens are really, really good at laying eggs. They, they lay, most of them lay like more than 300 eggs a year, which is like a crazy production rate. If you produced an egg every single day, your life, holy crap. And like the vast majority of them will be absolutely perfect and beautiful and wonderful, but some of them are not.

• 42:47Rachel Feltman?

  Don't let big chicken intimidate you, Sarah.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  My printer, sorry. My printer just made a noise. I have a new printer and the printer just made a noise and I was like.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  The chickens have hacked into the mainframe.

• 43:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, it just is like.

• 43:05Speaker 04

  Piece of paper comes out.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Okay. Um, okay. So like, we're gonna start with least, least to most wrong. So the least wrong an egg can be is like, it's just like missing a yolk. Or it has too many yolks. So like double yolks, eggs, those are pretty common. You can get more. The Guinness World Record is five yolks inside a nine inch wide egg. I don't, I hope that that's like long ways and not wide, because that's a rough time for the chicken.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  That's a chicken egg? Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  It must be a bigger.

• 43:37Rachel Feltman?

  We must mean.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  It must be like an ostrich egg or something. Like it must be something big or like kiwis. Kiwis, by the time kiwis lay their eggs, they can't walk.

• 43:46Rachel Feltman?

  Right. Kiwis are all, they're like all egg.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  It's all egg. They're a weird bird.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Is the, is the world record attributed to the bird or the person who like found it? Because I think the bird deserves most of the credit.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  I mean, it's really, it's really to the egg, but definitely, I don't know if you know the name of the chicken. Or the ostrich or whatever it was. Um, there's a record that the, or there's a rumor that the real record is like nine yolks in an egg, but it's, it's unconfirmed. The Guinness World Record, people weren't there to see it.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  They were, they were like, that's just nine eggs in one box. We can tell.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  We cannot verify this. Um, but yeah, I mean, that's basically for like the same, the same way like humans have like twins or triplets or quadruplets or whatever like that. That's basically the, uh, the general idea. You can also get, um, fairy eggs, um, which are also called fart eggs, dwarf eggs, wind eggs, or a lot of other names that I thought were too rude to mention here. But they're basically like little teeny tiny eggs, like, like the little eggs you get for Easter that are chocolate, but a real egg. Um, sometimes they're all whites, but sometimes they're just little tiny eggs. Um, there's like weird shell abnormalities. You can get like really rough ones, like sandpapery. And that's if your chicken, I know, if the chicken deposits too much calcium in the shell, it gets real bumpy.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Which again, I mean, laying an egg can't be comfortable and definitely laying a sandpapery one isn't.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Some eggs are wrinkly, which happens when there's like a problem partway through, like the eggshell breaks or something, but then sometimes the hen can like patch it back together, basically, and so they end up wrinkly.

• 45:23Rachel Feltman?

  I've seen that before, like, I'm sure, like, not a profoundly wrinkly egg, because it wouldn't have been sold to me. If so, but I've definitely seen some eggs that I would describe as having a wrinkly quality to that.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, and then like

• 45:39Speaker 04

  Chicken buttholes are amazing.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  They are, they are.

• 45:43Rachel Feltman?

  I once made a comment offhand about an egg coming out of a chicken butthole, and the people I was with made fun of me being like, Rachel, they don't poop the eggs. And I was so, they so effectively embarrassed me that I was like, oh, gosh, you're right. And then later on, I was like, no, they do. There's one hole.

• 45:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a cloaca, right?

• 46:00Rachel Feltman?

  It's their butt.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Cloaca, yeah, they do poop eggs.

• 46:02Rachel Feltman?

  Because it's not strictly a butthole, doesn't mean it's not their butthole.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  It's a butthole plus.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  Who's to say when it's being used as a butthole and like, maybe an egg comes out a butthole, or maybe it's an egg hole when an egg's coming out. This is a matter for philosophers. It's more of a philosophy question than a science question.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  It truly is. It's the next great chicken or the egg question.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  So like the, okay, so then like the color of the shell can vary a lot, and that depends on like the stage at which the color gets deposited, like you can get blue eggs or green eggs. And if they're blue or green, that's like the whole shell all the way through is blue or green. If they're brown, you can actually wipe off the color when they're freshly laid, which is crazy. Like they've just been painted like little Easter eggs.

• 46:48Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 46:49Rachel Feltman?

  That sounds really fake.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seemed not real. I Googled it a lot because I was like, there's no way that that's true, but it seems to be true.

• 46:57Speaker 04

  Where I'm from, they, they sell, like, the, the eggs you generally get are brown eggs and they like the, in Massachusetts and they, there was some like the egg council or what whoever sold them had, there was like a slogan of encouraging you to get the brown eggs because they're locally produced.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Really? That's so interesting.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  When I was a kid, I remember my, or, or it's just something my dad made up. Which is so weird. I like, I kind, I want to Google it, but I also like, don't, I can't face the fact that like, did my dad just make up this slogan for eggs? But I think it's from like, when he was a kid and they, and they would like, push you to buy like, locally produced brown eggs.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  That's funny. People, um, I already said this egg fact, but in another podcast, alarmingly, but, if you, a lot of people think that brown eggs are like, more organic or like, more natural eggs, but they're not. The color of a, of an egg is just dependent on what breed of chicken pooped it. And yes, they did poop it. There's also lash eggs, which are truly horrifying. I encourage you to never, ever Google it. They are like egg shaped clumps of goop that happen when the like, oviduct gets infected. So that's real nasty.

• 48:09Rachel Feltman?

  No, thank you.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  But the, uh, the actual fact I have to share with you today, I learned because our tech editor, Stan Horacek tweeted about his wife asking him whether they had any lube on hand because she needed to stick her fingers up the chicken's butt slash cloaca to see if an egg had gotten stuck. And that turned out to-

• 48:32Rachel Feltman?

  Stan's wife is a superhero.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  She's incredible. Sarah, Sarah Horacek. So I got, I asked Stan a bunch of questions and he was like, you know what? I don't know the answer to these questions, but Sarah would, so I'm just going to connect you guys. So about an hour after he connected us on email, I got this incredible response where she was just like, let me tell you about all the weird egg stuff that I, I know. So half of the facts you've already heard it from, actually from Sarah.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  So their chicken, Cleo, she thought was egg bound, which is like, exactly what it sounds like, like the egg gets stuck inside the hen. And there's some solutions to that, including, um, I found this advice on the internet. So I don't know how legit this is, but supposedly if your, if your hen is, is egg bound, you can just give her a nice little warm bath. You just want to relax her and soothe her and then you, you put some KY jelly inside the cloaca to just kind of like, lube it on up. And sometimes I guess that, that solves the problem.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  But Cleo, as it turns out, was not egg bound sadly. So she had something that's called egg yolk peritonitis. Um, I couldn't figure out like why this happens, but as I said in my tease, like basically chickens can start laying little bits of egg, like one without a complete shell or like one that's ruptured. Like often it's just like part of a yolk or something and it just sort of goes into their body cavity. Like it just, it almost literally slips through some kind of gap between the ovaries and the oviduct and it just sort of goes into the body. I'm not even really clear how all the diagrams are just like egg starts here and then it just, it just

• 50:13Speaker 02

  exits this little loop.

• 50:14Rachel Feltman?

  We don't actually know what's inside of a chicken. No one's ever looked.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  It's just, it's just a big old cavity. Um, so yeah, and but then like because it's just like a, a loose yolk, that's bad for the chicken. So like a lot of times they get a really serious bacterial infection. Um, and it's like, it's hard to catch stuff like this early because I don't keep chickens. I hope to keep chickens someday because I think that their happy little clucking sounds are absolutely adorable, but because chickens are like prey species, they hide if they're feeling sick or like feeling crappy. So like it's very hard to, to tell when your chicken is, is feeling sad or off. Um, but also.

• 50:54Speaker 04

  Or they get shy.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  I know. It's so sad. They like, you know, they just want to be strong.

• 50:59Speaker 04

  Right. They never, they, never let him see you cry. That's an old chicken mantra.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Uh, but weirdly sometimes so the, the yolks can also like solidify into like a mass. Um, Stan said that he thought it was from like their body heat. I don't know if that's true. I could not verify like why they solidify, but they act basically like a, like a tumor, but made of solidified eggs. Um, and that's what happened to Cleo, Cleo the chicken. So.

• 51:29Speaker 04

  You're gonna find one of those inside me someday.

• 51:31Rachel Feltman?

  Praise for Cleo.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  I know. Um, so yeah, if you catch it early, there is a treatment, um, which is that you give them hormonal injections. Or an implant. So there's a little thing called a deslorelin implant. I'm sure I'm not saying that right. But it's like, it's like, kind of like birth control, but for some animals. Yeah. So it's like, it's like Implanon, but humans. Like, sorry, no. It's kind of like, it's not for humans. Don't give it to humans. It's kind of like Implanon is for humans, but it releases gonadotropin-releasing hormone and you can use it to suppress fertility in like, male dogs and ferrets and also male or female cats. And this is just a thing that you can get. I mean, like, I think most of the time you wouldn't get it from your vet, but

• 52:16Speaker 02

  like, this is a thing. There's animal birth control and I had no idea. That's not just like, spaying or neutering them. Anyway, vets prescribe it off-label to chickens. It's not really supposed to be for them. But if you give them this little implant, it suppresses their egg laying. So you can, like, stop that process and then you can, like, treat the infection if you get it really early. And at least one chicken blogger, there's a lot of chicken bloggers on the internet, at least one of them successfully treated her hen this way. But it seems pretty rare. And sadly, Stan told me that, that Cleo the chicken will not survive her egg yolk parainitis.

• 52:51Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  I know. So, surprise, this was a sad, I know, I'm so sorry, it turned out to be sad in the end.

• 52:57Rachel Feltman?

  You got me again.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  So, so sorry, I just want to dedicate the episode to Cleo the chicken, because without her, we would not have these facts. And I'm so sorry.

• 53:07Speaker 04

  R.I.P.

• 53:08Rachel Feltman?

  Play as much Sarah McLachlan as we can afford to play here, Jess.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Twenty-nine seconds worth.

• 53:13Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 04

  In the wings of wings.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  Oh, God, I'm gonna start crying just from that. So those are my egg facts. I don't think I have another episode's worth of egg facts, so.

• 53:27Rachel Feltman?

  Maybe not about chickens.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, other eggs, I'm sure.

• 53:30Rachel Feltman?

  Time to branch out, other eggs. Or other non-egg chicken facts. So.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, God, all right. Well, I'm gonna find one. Now you've challenged me and I have to have another egg, egg fact or chicken fact episode.

• 53:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, there are so many other animals that lay eggs. I feel like you're just scratching the surface. I was picturing when you said the egg inside the chicken cell, until I realized that it was just the yolk, more or less, right, loose in their chicken tubes. The, I was like, could an egg just hang out inside a chicken until they give birth? Like a live birth?

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Oh, God, like it just keeps going.

• 54:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what I was worried about. But it sounds like no, right? It sounds like it's, it's not a fully formed egg with a shell. Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  It's not, but that is why Kiwis have such big eggs, because like, like most animals that lay eggs do it so you can just like cook them part way and then put them outside your body. But Kiwis, like they still lay the egg, but the, the little baby Kiwi develops like almost entirely while it's still inside its mom. So that's why they have such big eggs.

• 54:34Speaker 04

  So like a Kiwi could maybe just not, they could just do away with the egg part?

• 54:39Speaker 02

  They probably could, yeah. And they just haven't. Evolution was like, you're stuck with this forever.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  Wow, that's fascinating.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, Kiwis are crazy. The people and the birds, to be honest.

• 54:53Rachel Feltman?

  All right. Well, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week?

• 54:57Speaker 02

  God, I don't know. There were a lot of weird things in this one.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  Lot of weird things.

• 55:00Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, it's true. We had a lot of, a lot of, like tangential weird things.

• 55:06Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 55:07Rachel Feltman?

  I think this, this may, this may be a three-way tie this week. I think all three of our facts taught me new things.

• 55:15Speaker 04

  Me too.

• 55:16Speaker 02

  Is this a first time three-way tie?

• 55:18Rachel Feltman?

  Oh, no, I've definitely pulled this crap before.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  So we're indecisive.

• 55:21Rachel Feltman?

  Sometimes, yeah.

• 55:23Speaker 04

  I, look, I love it. I don't think there's a reason. We don't need to make facts compete.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  They're all equally good facts.

• 55:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, sometimes facts, yeah, sometimes it's just the, the love of the game.

• 55:35Rachel Feltman?

  Exactly.

• 55:36Speaker 04

  The game called science.

• 55:39Rachel Feltman?

  That's what we do. Josh, thank you so much for joining us.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  What a, what a treat. Thank you for having me.

• 55:45Rachel Feltman?

  And listeners who don't already, definitely check out Make My Day, where facts do not have to compete.

• 55:51Speaker 04

  No. Everything is fully invented. It is, it's chaos. It is a game show where there's only one contestant, so they always win. And the, the each week, the winning contestant and only contestant wins a $100 donation to the charity or cause of their, of their choice. And it's really fun. It's, it's the only game show that I know of where no one ever loses. And so it's very stress free. That's, that's what I strive for.

• 56:23Rachel Feltman?

  That's what we need right now, honestly. Just, just a zero stress game show.

• 56:28Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 56:29Rachel Feltman?

  The weirdest thing I learned this week is a Popular Science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsci.com/ weird. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsci.threadless.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, with editing and audio engineering by Jess Bodie. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos. Hey weirdos, it's 2026 Rachel here again. I hope you enjoyed that rerun.

• 57:12Rachel Feltman?

  Just a reminder, you can check out Josh Gondalman's latest special, Positive Reinforcement, on YouTube and wherever you stream audio. Plus, you can get pep talks from him via his newsletter, That's Marvelous, which you can find at thatsmarvelousnewsletter.com. Jess will be back with another new episode in your feed in just two weeks, and in another two weeks, we'll have another rerun. And then I'll be back with regularly scheduled programming in May. It's gonna be here before we know it. In the meantime, I'm having full on conversations with a four month old, because apparently, this is what happens when you spend your entire gestation listening to your parent, like, interview people and read ads for Mint Mobile.

• 57:55Rachel Feltman?

  That's all for now. I'll see you in a few weeks. In the meantime, try to stay safe, try to be kind, and of course, you should always be weird.

• 58:05Speaker 02

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• 59:06Speaker 06

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