Episode 204: The 1948 Donora Smog

Real timely Goddamned News segment in this one I tell ya what Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/also NOVA HAS A PATREON: patreon.com/postoctobrist Send us stuff! our address:Well There's Your Podcasting CompanyPO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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

• 0:03November Kelly?

  I'm just Googling like local, local facial de-nixonification surgery near me.

• 0:09Liam McAnderson?

  I, I, you are like genuinely.

• 0:12November Kelly?

  No, no, I need, I need to, I need the fucking Bioshock, like fucking plastic surgery derangement thing needs to happen to me.

• 0:21Liam McAnderson?

  What's the, what's the symmetry, Dr. Sadman?

• 0:23November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 0:24Justin Roczniak?

  Gotta have a, uh, whatchamacallit.

• 0:26Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, I will say that like as somebody, as somebody who has struggled with their appearance as well, uh, it, it is the weirdest thing when you get to a spot where you're like, oh, I don't look half bad today. And then you have the occasional day where you're like, I look fucking good. That was not today for me. I feel all right, but I've been taking, I've been taking some nasty shits. So for those of you listening, this is, you know, I, I do want to say like, hey, I, it's, it's kind of scary how, no matter how old we get, we still have the insecurities of youth.

• 0:54November Kelly?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, some of them.

• 0:56Liam McAnderson?

  That's a depressing thing.

• 0:58November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 0:58Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Not all of them obviously, but.

• 1:00Justin Roczniak?

  I lost a big chunk of them. Yeah. I don't think I ever had a big chunk of them.

• 1:04November Kelly?

  I gained some new ones, you know, like in some ways I think I'm more insecure than I was when I was younger, you know?

• 1:10Liam McAnderson?

  I really, I, I don't know. I feel like I'm, I'm more secure, maybe in myself because like I've evolved professionally. I don't know.

• 1:19November Kelly?

  I mean, you got a, you got a great career, you know, you get, you're married, you got like, you know, a house and everything. I mean, yeah, like you're, you're fucking, what do they, what do they say on Reddit? You're adulting, you know? And, I mean, I am too, but like, I don't know, I can't shake the kind of feeling of precarity, I guess. Um, but I'm, I'm talking to my therapist about it and they're very helpful. So, you know, a shout out to them. Um, uh, can we, can we sing point please before I just start just confessing too much about my own feelings?

• 1:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, shit. Now, now the, the world is your therapist. Um.

• 1:55Liam McAnderson?

  Well, there's your problem. It's a, it's a podcast about group therapy.

• 1:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. All right. Um, we're, we're gonna do three, two, one mark. That's three, two, one, mark.

• 2:08Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I went, uh, bye.

• 2:09Justin Roczniak?

  That's, that's, uh, that's definitely a.

• 2:12November Kelly?

  It's in the.

• 2:13Justin Roczniak?

  Definitely about one second apart, part each. Yeah.

• 2:16Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's all good. Nova, do you want to kill your video and try to get this, uh, ping?

• 2:20November Kelly?

  Yeah, sure. I'm kind of sick of looking at myself anyway. Um, all right.

• 2:24Liam McAnderson?

  I'm not, but.

• 2:25November Kelly?

  No, you're very sweet.

• 2:27Liam McAnderson?

  Roz, Roz, Roz, I know you don't have a video webcam, but can you do me a favor?

• 2:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:33Liam McAnderson?

  Later on, when we're done recording, can you send me a selfie so I can look at you?

• 2:36Justin Roczniak?

  Okay.

• 2:37Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you.

• 2:42Justin Roczniak?

  Um, hello and welcome to, well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

• 2:58November Kelly?

  Ah, it's so comforting. I am November Kelly. My pronouns are she and her. I'm the person who's talking now. Yay, Liam.

• 3:06Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, god damn it. I opened the wrong link. Uh, yeah, give me a second. I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, here. Hold, just hold on, just shut up, hold on.

• 3:15November Kelly?

  Briefcase full of jelly beans spilling open.

• 3:20Liam McAnderson?

  I don't like jelly beans all that much, but I will tell you, if I were gonna have, we'll, we'll pin that and figure out what briefcase we want to.

• 3:28Justin Roczniak?

  The two variables. Nixen problem.

• 3:31November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 3:32Justin Roczniak?

  No, Nova's having a Nixon problem. Liam's having a Reagan problem.

• 3:37November Kelly?

  I'm just, I'm just having a lovely sort of slice of pineapple with my, with my cottage cheese, you know, and my jowls are getting in the way of chewing. It's really awful. Um, no, I mean, I think the two variables here are container and candy, right? You could, you could have like, you could have like, like a, like a lunch pail full of M and M's, you know, that could split open.

• 3:59Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm. No brown ones.

• 4:01November Kelly?

  Yeah. Bindle full of Skittles?

• 4:03Liam McAnderson?

  Do you? Oh, I love Skittles. Um, I love Skittles. I love a really dark, rich, bitter chocolate. Um.

• 4:12November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 4:12Liam McAnderson?

  What else do I like? I don't know. I like, oh, I like.

• 4:14Justin Roczniak?

  Attache, attache case full of Ritter's Port Halbert.

• 4:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, full of.

• 4:20Justin Roczniak?

  Ritter's Port Halbert, you know?

• 4:21Liam McAnderson?

  Full of, full of butter fingers that I'm, I'm going to meet up with my contact somewhere in West Germany and.

• 4:27November Kelly?

  Well, that's why, that's convenient because it's like square, you know?

• 4:30Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm.

• 4:32November Kelly?

  I feel like, I feel like the attache case is like a lost art, you know, like we don't do an attache case anymore.

• 4:37Liam McAnderson?

  You can get one from Zero Halliburton.

• 4:39November Kelly?

  I know, and I've been thinking about it for the last three years of my actual life, but I've never gotten over the sort of cringe factor, you know?

• 4:48Liam McAnderson?

  I, I have the same thought. I have the exact same thought. I'm like, I sure would like to look like I'm carrying the nuclear football, but if anyone talks to me, I'll cry.

• 4:56November Kelly?

  I think the thing that's helped me.

• 4:57Justin Roczniak?

  Football.

• 4:58November Kelly?

  That's not mine. The thing that's helped me is, is doing lapping brackets reel because I've kind of realized that everything is larp. And so like now, right, a little sort of peek behind the curtain. My internet here, you've known for some time, listener, is really, really bad and it's fucking with the product, right? And I don't appreciate fucking with the product. And so finally, I've made the decision to try and just like get like an office in town, like a one desk, like serviced office type situation. Um, and yeah, it turns out, because this is the other thing, work-life balance is a phrase that's been said to me in earnest now. And so now I'm like, yeah, I can just larp like

• 5:40November Kelly?

  I have a job. I can just go to an office and like tap in with a key card and like go and work on the computer in a place that isn't my house and feel kind of maybe a bit better about some things. So that's the plan. We'll see if it works. Maybe I'm, I'm just gonna be like, hey, do you want to come to the office at like eight in the, at night? And I'll be like, no, fuck you. I'm going to home. But that's the plan.

• 6:02Liam McAnderson?

  I, I, I think that that's a terrific idea. I will say that, uh, for those of us, uh, who do this for a living, like a bunch of fucking morons, um, yeah, it's hard, right? Because like I, so I have talked to Kurt about this, uh, while we're, while we're filling air, um, about the idea that like all of us kind of play a character on this show, right? Like some version of ourselves. And for me, like that's, you see, listener and viewer, you see a version of me that did exist when I was, what, 25, maybe more earnestly, you know, kind of like drunk and aggressive. And, and to be fair, uh, I almost got in a fight, uh, yesterday with a guy in a Mercedes, but that was different.

• 6:43November Kelly?

  Bless you. You.

• 6:44Liam McAnderson?

  Well, no, no, I was walking down Chestnut. I was, hold on, I was walking down Chestnut, right? I'm walking, this motherfucker with Florida tags, driving a, a Mercedes GLS 450, very nearly runs the red light. Roz, you know what I'm talking about? Taking the left, left from sixth onto Chestnut.

• 7:02Justin Roczniak?

  Okay.

• 7:02Liam McAnderson?

  Where there's a trillion fucking people, you know what I'm talking about?

• 7:06Justin Roczniak?

  That's a busy obsession. Yeah.

• 7:08November Kelly?

  I need, I need some City Skylines B-roll to like locate this for me, you know?

• 7:14Liam McAnderson?

  It's right in front of Independence Hall. Okay. So it's the biggest tourist attraction we have.

• 7:19November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 7:20Liam McAnderson?

  Yes. Yes. And this guy very nearly runs the red light and I flip him off, as you do, because I am from Philadelphia. And he's like, oh, you.

• 7:30Justin Roczniak?

  That's like whipping a turn onto a cobblestone street too, or excuse me, Belgian block.

• 7:35November Kelly?

  Yeah. Also flipping off a car, flipping off a car driver is a free action. I do that shit three times a day. It's completely, one day I'll get shot behind it, but like I, it's normal.

• 7:46Liam McAnderson?

  Right. That's, well, and he is like, he rolls down the window and starts yelling at me. And I'm just like very calmly like, come on, get out of the car, big guy. Come on, get out of the car and embarrass yourself in front of all these fucking tourists. Get out of the car and embarrass yourself in front of all these fucking tourists. And he rolls the window up and drives away kind of slow. And I was just like, you fucking pussy, that's embarrassing.

• 8:04November Kelly?

  I am a patriot of Liam Nation. I, I cannot respect you enough.

• 8:11Liam McAnderson?

  I just, I, I have, listen, my, my favorite thing in my life is that I am good at arguing and yelling, right?

• 8:19November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Liam McAnderson?

  But I am relatively large. I'm six, one. I played football, et cetera. I, I, I look big. The scary one is my wife because she is smaller than me and she's somehow even more aggressive than I am. And she has worked out that no one will do anything to her because I'm standing behind her. So she just kind of, well, lose her mind. And then she'll just like turn around and be like, okay, he's still there. I could keep yelling.

• 8:47Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 8:48November Kelly?

  I was just relied, I always just relied on a finely balanced sort of matrix of, um, caffeine and nicotine to make me the sort of angriest woman in the world. And even being sort of, even when I was like five foot, I, I still am five foot six, being five foot six and even my weight like 90 pounds. Somehow this just kind of worked out for me. I've been riding my luck for a long time. Um, yeah, I guess one day we'll find out. But I guess that's true of everything.

• 9:20Justin Roczniak?

  My, my biggest outbursts of aggression are I jaywalk any opportunity I have.

• 9:26Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, he sure does.

• 9:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's, that's about it.

• 9:30November Kelly?

  Well, the thing is, all of us are still protected by the Pennsylvania Secret Service.

• 9:35Liam McAnderson?

  Yes. Yes. I, I was, I was, like, my thing is like, hey, man, you want to roll down your window and yell at me and, and call me a fat ass or whatever? That's fine, right? Like, get out of the fucking, get out of the fucking car. Get out of the fucking car. Fight me like an adult in front of all these fucking tourists, you big baby.

• 9:51Liam McAnderson?

  That actually did happen to me one time. I was walking in our old neighborhood. I was at 40th and Chestnut. And, uh, I, a guy almost, Roz knows this intersection right where, where New Style is, or was.

• 10:03Justin Roczniak?

  Was, yeah. RIP. Greatest, uh, greatest cheesesteak in the neighborhood.

• 10:11Liam McAnderson?

  Irreplaceable. But the guy that kind of runs the light and I, and I like, you know, out of anger, because I almost got hit by a car, I like hit his truck and he gets out and he's threatening me and I like, I'm like, okay, like hit me, come on, like, come on, big dog. You're, you're five, eight. I believe that you can take me down reasonably. Like, and then he, he just started, started screaming at me and I like took a couple of steps towards him and like didn't put my, importantly in this story, for legal reasons, I did not put my hands on him. And the story, and, and the problem was resolved without issue.

• 10:42Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm. There we go. It's a peaceful escalation, as we call it. Um.

• 10:51Justin Roczniak?

  Well. We're not, we're not here to talk about

• 10:56Liam McAnderson?

  We're here to look at all those

• 10:57Justin Roczniak?

  road rage incidents.

• 10:59Liam McAnderson?

  A problem on a podcast where we kick your ass.

• 11:02November Kelly?

  Yeah, the, the bonus episode on the time I fought a guy by your friends at, well, that's your problem.

• 11:10Justin Roczniak?

  I, I did have to de-escalate Liam once, uh, when he was trying to fight a guy in a car.

• 11:17November Kelly?

  See, not to do the like, you're lucky I'm on parole thing, but like, everyone involved is lucky it was you and not me. Because I'm not de-escalating shit for that man.

• 11:29Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you, Nova.

• 11:31November Kelly?

  Of course, I am, I, I'm, I'm, I'm on, I'm, I'm your, I'm your sort of like cheerleader wing woman here. I'm leaning out of the car like fuck him up Socrates.

• 11:41Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I was, I was like, we're one block from home and I want to just go home.

• 11:48November Kelly?

  I don't want to go home. I want to see Liam put a guy's head through a window.

• 11:54Liam McAnderson?

  I, Ross is right to do it.

• 11:55November Kelly?

  I can go home anytime I want. I can, I've, I've been home before. I know what it looks like. Whereas if I see Liam escalate, I can see some shit I've never seen before.

• 12:05Liam McAnderson?

  That is true. Uh, I, I will say that, that yes, the twin eternal flames of Roz and I souls find each other in every lifetime. And in some of those lifetimes, uh, it's kind of annoying.

• 12:19Liam McAnderson?

  But yeah, Nova, I appreciate it. If we ever get in, if I ever get in a fight, uh, Garrett was here and I think I got in a fight with a car, but I don't remember that.

• 12:28November Kelly?

  Remember, it's always legal to be someone who is very small, very angry, um, smokes a lot, wears combat boots everywhere. And if someone yells at you to kick a dent in their car door, now for legal reasons, I'm keeping that to generalities, but it's legal to do that.

• 12:45Justin Roczniak?

  The, the, the boots are for combat.

• 12:48November Kelly?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:49Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, you may as well use them.

• 12:51Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, might as well, might as well use them. I, yeah, I mean, listen, listen, the worst thing that ever happens is some guy fucking gets out of his car and gets his ass beat. That's his problem.

• 13:00Justin Roczniak?

  As a, as a cyclist.

• 13:02Liam McAnderson?

  Opportunity, you had every opportunity to drive away, but you wanted to be a tough guy. Whose fucking fault is that? It's yours. And now you're bleeding out on the sidewalk.

• 13:12Justin Roczniak?

  As a cyclist, most arguments I have with car doors, I either lose or end in a draw.

• 13:18Liam McAnderson?

  I gotta get you a gun, man.

• 13:19November Kelly?

  We made the whole cyclist out of the combat boots.

• 13:26Liam McAnderson?

  We gotta get you a gun.

• 13:27Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 13:28November Kelly?

  I'm saying.

• 13:30Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, what you see on the screen in front of you is a zinc smelter.

• 13:38November Kelly?

  Oh.

• 13:40Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, no, no, no, this is not a silent hill. Those mills are working, you know?

• 13:45November Kelly?

  Loud hill.

• 13:46Justin Roczniak?

  People live here. There's, yeah, loud hill.

• 13:53Liam McAnderson?

  I hate when you do a dumb guy joke like that. I think it's the funniest shit in the world.

• 14:00Justin Roczniak?

  Now, in this picture, we don't see the problem because if we had taken a picture when the problem was occurring, it would have just been just a black screen, right? Because today, we're going to talk about the 1948 Donora, Pennsylvania smog.

• 14:21November Kelly?

  Oh, love a smog. Is this the first smog we've done?

• 14:26Justin Roczniak?

  I think this is the first smog, unless you count, unless you count like Bo Paul or something as a smog.

• 14:33November Kelly?

  No, to me, to me, a smog is like, it's, it's not immediately poisonous, right? Like, yeah, it can be noxious. Yeah, it can have a lot of carcinogens, but a smog is like a, I, I, I guess there's a sort of like, you know?

• 14:47Justin Roczniak?

  It lingers.

• 14:48November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's a spectrum from like fog to smog, depending on how bad it is for you, but like a smog isn't as bad. It's not like tox airborne toxic event, you know, that's different.

• 15:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well.

• 15:01Liam McAnderson?

  By the way.

• 15:02Justin Roczniak?

  Well, we'll, we'll get pretty close in this episode though, but before we do that, we have to do the goddamn news.

• 15:10November Kelly?

  Okay. So when I said that I promised.

• 15:13Liam McAnderson?

  Doesn't even matter anymore.

• 15:14November Kelly?

  Next time, do, listen, your, your, your dad is coming back for sex.

• 15:21November Kelly?

  Your dad is coming back from the store. Uh, the Chicago Cubs are gonna win the World Series. Uh, and I will fix the fucking audio setup with the iPad with the Nate that got me and the cables and shit. That's part of why the office is like, I can't do it in here. It doesn't, my brain isn't going into gear. It goes into the secret ADHD gear of, of called like hoardly walking and it doesn't fucking go. And so like new setting, new, new place, I can, I can do it de novo, but I can't unplug this one. And so, so, so, so, so it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. Bear with me.

• 15:57Liam McAnderson?

  It's okay. Uh, can you, Roz, can you see if there's any other good, uh, if, if, if Tom put any stupid other, uh, things on there?

• 16:04Justin Roczniak?

  Uh.

• 16:05Liam McAnderson?

  Just play them. Okay.

• 16:06Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know.

• 16:08Liam McAnderson?

  Come on.

• 16:08November Kelly?

  You know, I, you know, I can literally send you the files and, okay.

• 16:13Liam McAnderson?

  There we go. Yeah, use that one.

• 16:17Liam McAnderson?

  Why do we have the come town, Russ?

• 16:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, hell yeah, dude.

• 16:26November Kelly?

  Speak a little Chinese for him, Roz.

• 16:34Liam McAnderson?

  I had a shitty day at work, but this is making it immensely better. My headache is not gonna get any better, but at least it's entertaining.

• 16:40November Kelly?

  Mm hmm. This is my fourth recording of the day. I'm insane.

• 16:44Justin Roczniak?

  I believe, I believe our most important piece of news today is, uh, go to Lulag.

• 16:51November Kelly?

  But I see a normal one of Campia do mundo, caralho. The greatest country on the face of the earth. Uh, I, listen, I, I cannot admire anyone as much as I admire Lula da Silva. Um, the man is 80 years old. He should be a victim of Brandonfication and somehow, somehow he achieves the electorally unprecedented event in a post dictatorship Brazil of losing the first round and coming back from behind to make Bolsonaro's halfway to a gangster fail son cry in public. The man is a hero.

• 17:35Justin Roczniak?

  Very funny.

• 17:37Liam McAnderson?

  Sweet, sweet tears.

• 17:39November Kelly?

  Mm hmm. The man is a hero, the Brazilian, the Brazilian people are a hero. If you are in the northeast of Brazil particularly, uh, just, I don't know, fucking award yourself a medal. Jerk yourself off with our compliments. Like you, you did it. You saved.

• 17:55Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 17:56November Kelly?

  You saved the ecology, like the, the, the Amazon, that we need that for, for, for breathing. That's in Brazil. And it's gonna not be as bad because, because of this guy crying, you know?

• 18:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I believe, uh, Yair is now back in hospital with some kind of Victorian fainting disease.

• 18:16Liam McAnderson?

  Just kill this guy.

• 18:18Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, this is, this is some exciting.

• 18:20Liam McAnderson?

  Do you think it's like a fetish thing or what are we doing?

• 18:23November Kelly?

  Yeah, he loves, it's, it's med fat. He loves to go to hospital and get the tube up his nose. I, I mean, the other thing is it's not even just Brazil, like Vucic is out in Serbia because like.

• 18:34Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:35November Kelly?

  The students, um, so it's, it's going good maybe. And I mean, you can't rest on your laurels. This is the, you're kind of cursed as a leftist. And I say this as a professional laurel rester. My job under communism will be encouraging others to do the work. Um, like Lula's gonna get impeached every week from now on. Um, and like, I don't know what's gonna happen in Serbia. I don't know what's gonna happen with the midterms and the Israeli election doesn't matter because whoever wins, uh, genocide wins. So it just.

• 19:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. You wanna, you wanna be shot or poisoned.

• 19:12November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so I guess the point is for the left is you can't rest like at all. And I'm sitting on my fat fucking ass telling you this, but you can't, right? So as soon as you and, you know, the Brazilian left have jerked yourself off to completion, you have to get back to work other, because we're all counting on you, you know?

• 19:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's why I'm excited to go vote for Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.

• 19:42Liam McAnderson?

  The only good news about that is that Stacey Garrity is underwater. So at least we have that. Um, I guess, uh, if you live in my neighborhood, uh, redacted, go vote for Representative Mary Isaacson. I guess because she is nice to me at all people events.

• 20:00Justin Roczniak?

  The one, the one.

• 20:01November Kelly?

  Jesus Christ.

• 20:04Liam McAnderson?

  Mind your business.

• 20:06November Kelly?

  Fucking hell. Get, get, see an exorcist.

• 20:10Liam McAnderson?

  You see an exorcist.

• 20:13Liam McAnderson?

  Who are you, my mother? Fun fact about the exorcist and my mother. Uh, so my mom was waiting in line at Franklin Fountain the other day, uh, and she was over, overhearing a, a couple on a very early date. And the man was lecturing the woman about Phelps and he said to her, the exorcist was filmed in my hometown of Fairfax, Virginia. And my mother turned around, I assume, like the girl from The Exorcist and said, no, it wasn't. It was filmed in Georgetown and I know that because I am an extra in The Exorcist.

• 20:47November Kelly?

  Runs in the family, huh? The like, I, I, again, I love this for you and her. Just interfere in more things in public. It's, it's your space.

• 20:58Liam McAnderson?

  It is my space. I, listen, uh, I, a great movie. Uh, did you ever do The Exorcist for Kill James Bond?

• 21:04November Kelly?

  No, not yet.

• 21:06Liam McAnderson?

  You should have my mother on.

• 21:08November Kelly?

  Okay, sure. I mean, and then we'll do that after the, after the sort of fabled all dads episode of, well, there's your problem where it's all three of our dads.

• 21:17Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that's true.

• 21:18Liam McAnderson?

  Oh dude, I, all right, let me, Roz, but we, we talked about this in Discord, but do you think, who you got? Prime Dan Roczniak, prime Bill Anderson, Helen Essel?

• 21:30Justin Roczniak?

  So dad was never like a fighting guy, but he sure as hell lifted a lot of weights.

• 21:38Liam McAnderson?

  I always forget your dad fucking lifted.

• 21:40Justin Roczniak?

  No, he was. Yeah, he also played basketball. His.

• 21:43Liam McAnderson?

  Ah, I gotta concede that.

• 21:44Justin Roczniak?

  But I believe, I believe when he was at, when he was at GW, he lifted weights with a group of guys who later went on to break a Guinness World Record for the most weight lifted in 24 hours.

• 21:57Liam McAnderson?

  God damn.

• 21:58Justin Roczniak?

  He didn't participate, but, but, um, you know, but, but those were the guys he hung out with.

• 22:04Liam McAnderson?

  I know the hell is your, your dad who apparently defies death and aging or whatever?

• 22:09November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the thing is my dad could beat up your dad because my dad's not tall. Right? He's like, I don't know, like five nine, five 10, but like.

• 22:18Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I still don't like my dad's odds there.

• 22:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, he's, he's like average height is the thing, but he just, he just does stuff. He's always on some fucking Kingsman type bullshit, you know? Like, so I've said this a million, million times, but like the thing about my dad is that I will, you know, not check in with him for a long period of time because I'm a bad daughter, but when I do, he'll go, oh yeah, I've just been fucking circumnavigating the earth, you know? I was living on the moon for six months. Uh, I, you know, I, I, I've been sort of learning how to absorb larger and larger caliber bullets for fun. It just, the man frightens me in that way.

• 23:09Liam McAnderson?

  I, I will say, uh, my, my dad, as, as we know, is the, the world's best white Maoist. And, uh, he, he was, he was complaining to me the other day. He has like a pet complaint, which is that, uh, he didn't get to be part of the trial of Chicago seven.

• 23:27November Kelly?

  Well, he was the, he was the eighth man in the Chicago seven. He was like the fifth Beatle.

• 23:34Liam McAnderson?

  He was there at Chicago 68 and he is eternally mad that he got arrested and didn't get to be part of the trial that everybody else got to be part of.

• 23:48Liam McAnderson?

  Make that make sense.

• 23:50November Kelly?

  That's really good.

• 23:54Justin Roczniak?

  So in terms of.

• 23:56Liam McAnderson?

  Go to Lululemon, right?

• 23:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, go to Lululemon. Uh, I, I only care about one election this year. That's Texas Railroad Commissioner. If you're in Texas, get out there and vote. No, vote for John Rosenthal. He has a chance.

• 24:10November Kelly?

  Do you think so?

• 24:11Justin Roczniak?

  It'd be incredibly great because Bo French is so fucking crazy. Everyone hates him.

• 24:19Justin Roczniak?

  I think John Rosenthal has a chance and having a Democratic Texas Railroad Commissioner, uh, has, you know, all kinds of ramifications for the oil industry and what you can do to regulate it. Because Texas Railroad Commissioner regulates the oil industry in Texas and de facto the entire United States. They don't regulate railroads anymore.

• 24:41November Kelly?

  That's so cool.

• 24:43Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, that's, uh, that's my one pitch, you know, uh, go, go out and vote for John Rosenthal. Democrat for Texas Railroad Commission.

• 24:55November Kelly?

  That's, that's election corner right there.

• 24:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Election corner right there, which leads us to a far more important piece of news. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

• 25:07November Kelly?

  Just use one of the drops.

• 25:08Liam McAnderson?

  Do, do, do, do. Yeah, use the Kumbatt riff.

• 25:12Justin Roczniak?

  All right. So it's that time of year, folks.

• 25:16Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, this looks like ass.

• 25:17Justin Roczniak?

  It's.

• 25:18November Kelly?

  Oh, what the fuck?

• 25:20Justin Roczniak?

  It's the 2026 Hess truck.

• 25:23Liam McAnderson?

  It's a haul truck and snowplow.

• 25:25November Kelly?

  Why is there a peppermint Stig?

• 25:29Liam McAnderson?

  Because I couldn't get the licensing rights, I assume, to a real Stig?

• 25:33November Kelly?

  Uh, and he just lives in the back of a garbage truck.

• 25:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, he lives in a garbage truck. Some say.

• 25:43November Kelly?

  Like, like, like a mobilized version of Oscar the Grouch.

• 25:48Justin Roczniak?

  Some say he drives a snowplow out of a garbage truck that he lives in.

• 25:55November Kelly?

  It's the Stig's Philadelphia cousin.

• 25:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:01Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, he'd be, be orange then. I mean, that'd just be gritty.

• 26:04Liam McAnderson?

  That's just.

• 26:05Justin Roczniak?

  Gritty in a, in a racing suit. All right.

• 26:08Liam McAnderson?

  Can you imagine trying to fit a racing suit for Gracie?

• 26:10November Kelly?

  Gracie, Jesus Christ.

• 26:13November Kelly?

  Grissy mansion.

• 26:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Liam McAnderson?

  Gracie, gritty Abrams.

• 26:18Justin Roczniak?

  This, this year they call it the hauler truck, the first ever Hess hauler, inspired by the iconic garbage truck design, one of the most requested vehicles from fans with a classic Hess green and white design with chrome color detailing. It has 72 lights.

• 26:35November Kelly?

  I mean, yeah, it looks like a garbage truck, but then it, then you, you're imprisoning your cast of a Monty, a guy in the back.

• 26:44Justin Roczniak?

  A man, hold on a second though. 72 lights with both steady on and animated flashing modes.

• 26:51November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 26:51Justin Roczniak?

  Seven unique animated light patterns activated via button switch, rear hatch and ramp. Six total sound effects, the most ever on a holiday Hess toy truck.

• 27:04Justin Roczniak?

  Four cab top activated sounds, engine start, horn, backup alert and compacting.

• 27:12November Kelly?

  They're gonna kill the Stig.

• 27:15Justin Roczniak?

  They're gonna kill the Stig.

• 27:16Liam McAnderson?

  They're gonna sell the cake. They're gonna sell the cake. Jesus.

• 27:19November Kelly?

  They're gonna, they're gonna feed him into a trash compactor like the end of Fargo?

• 27:25Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Liam McAnderson?

  It's good. People gotta die, you know?

• 27:32Justin Roczniak?

  Rear hatch opening, sound effect, wrapped, ramp deployment, sound effect, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Three AAA Energizer batteries included. Snowplow is the first ever Hess snowplow vehicle, which is weird because it's a Christmas toy. You'd think they'd done that before.

• 27:47November Kelly?

  I feel, I feel like it's weird to put like a snowplow on an ATV, right? Like, isn't that the thing that almost killed Jeremy Renner?

• 27:55Justin Roczniak?

  I would imagine you would need some heft in order to move the snow, which is something that an ATV notably does not have.

• 28:05November Kelly?

  Yeah, I feel like it just flips over and kills you.

• 28:09Justin Roczniak?

  Pullback motor for high speed play. 12 steady on lights.

• 28:17Justin Roczniak?

  Rider activated lighting. You turn the helmet to turn the lights on.

• 28:23Liam McAnderson?

  What?

• 28:24November Kelly?

  Make, make the Stig do the exorcist head thing.

• 28:28Liam McAnderson?

  So you do a chiropractor to the sky?

• 28:32November Kelly?

  He's gotta have a very flexible spine if he's getting compacted every day.

• 28:41Justin Roczniak?

  The ad copy says six wheels on three axles. I'm seeing four wheels on two axles on this thing, but you know,

• 28:51Justin Roczniak?

  loads into and deploys from the hauler truck's rear ramp. Uh, another three. Oh, it, it takes button cell batteries. Oh, that's gonna be annoying. Mom's never gonna replace those.

• 29:02Liam McAnderson?

  No, you're doing.

• 29:03November Kelly?

  How much, how much is this?

• 29:06Justin Roczniak?

  How much is the new Hess truck? That's a good question. I didn't write that down.

• 29:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, like if inflation measure, how much? 50, 50 bucks for this?

• 29:17Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, plus tax.

• 29:19November Kelly?

  Jesus, and they've got like a kind of CGI trailer for it.

• 29:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. It's $49.99. Oh, this, this looks, it looks like AI almost. I don't know if it is.

• 29:34November Kelly?

  Yeah, I, I'm not thrilled about this.

• 29:39Justin Roczniak?

  Why are they loading the snow into the garbage truck?

• 29:42Liam McAnderson?

  I don't know.

• 29:43Justin Roczniak?

  Where do they fit?

• 29:44November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's the Stig's house.

• 29:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was about to say.

• 29:48Liam McAnderson?

  He has to live there.

• 29:50Justin Roczniak?

  It's not the Stig. It is the Stig's frozen cousin.

• 29:59Justin Roczniak?

  Oh my God. All right. So.

• 30:03Justin Roczniak?

  I, I don't know about this year's Hess truck. Uh, it's kind of, it, it, it is, it is.

• 30:10November Kelly?

  Mediocre to me.

• 30:12Justin Roczniak?

  Mediocre. Yeah, it's not, it's not something I'm looking at and saying, I, I really want that Hess truck.

• 30:18Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 30:19November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 30:23November Kelly?

  Another symbol of American decline.

• 30:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, we it they literally they they they they've decided it's a garbage truck full of snow. It's very confusing and which compacts a man.

• 30:44Justin Roczniak?

  Or woman. We don't know the gender of the Stig.

• 30:47November Kelly?

  Hmm, or non-binary person.

• 30:50Justin Roczniak?

  Could be non non-binary, but it is the Stig's non-binary cousin.

• 31:00Justin Roczniak?

  Just just the Stig shows. The only way you can really tell is that the Stig sits really weird.

• 31:07November Kelly?

  Dev's gonna kill us and they'll be right to do it is the thing. Like I had them threatened, by the way, to me, right? I'm delivering this message as a kind of emissary to Liam. Devon is gonna like come and like cut the cable to your keyboard.

• 31:23Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 31:25Liam McAnderson?

  That was your last episode, I think.

• 31:27November Kelly?

  No, no, it wasn't. I don't I don't know.

• 31:30Liam McAnderson?

  No, no, it wasn't me. Nah, nah, nah.

• 31:33November Kelly?

  You were typing earlier. Fuck off. Don't try and frame me.

• 31:38Justin Roczniak?

  Devon has Devon has the audio tracks. Devon can tell.

• 31:43Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, fuck, that's right. God damn it.

• 31:48Liam McAnderson?

  Foiled again. Sorry, Devon. My bad.

• 31:51Justin Roczniak?

  Denial proof of guilt.

• 31:53Liam McAnderson?

  I love you, Devon. I'm sorry. Your privacy is in vain.

• 31:56November Kelly?

  If you wanna if you wanna if you wanna sort of like, um, you know, be unproductive at work, what you need is like a Steam Deck or something that you can play and you've got to be kind of kind of careful with it. So you don't like have the kind of rattling controller noises, you know?

• 32:11Liam McAnderson?

  I'm playing Indiana Jones, the Great Circle right now, not literally right this second.

• 32:15November Kelly?

  Oh, shit. How is it?

• 32:17Liam McAnderson?

  It's much better than I thought it was going to be. I when it first came out, I remember it because it's a Bethesda game, I needed some work, right? Uh, yeah. And, uh, but my wife got it a few weeks ago and she loved it. And I was like, okay, like, I'll give it a shot. So far, it's it's really they've done a really good job of sort of capturing the spirit of Indiana Jones in a way I really like. So recommended for me.

• 32:42Justin Roczniak?

  And that was the goddamn news.

• 32:44Liam McAnderson?

  Man, fuck you.

• 32:51Justin Roczniak?

  All right, let's talk about the beautiful city of Donora, Pennsylvania.

• 32:56November Kelly?

  Such that it is, I assume.

• 32:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So William Henry Donner was the son of a German immigrant and he managed his family business, but then went off to seek his own fortune.

• 33:09November Kelly?

  Yeah, I heard that guy for a great party. Great kebabs as well.

• 33:14Liam McAnderson?

  Donner, party of six. Oh, no, thanks. We already ate.

• 33:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 33:20Justin Roczniak?

  But he sought his fortune in tin plate. But then he sold his tin plate company in 1899 to go on to found American Steel and Wire. That company manufactured, and get this, steel and wire.

• 33:38November Kelly?

  Pretty important to the to the sort of historical progress of the United Snakes of America, you know?

• 33:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 33:48Justin Roczniak?

  So he needed a new company town for his new steel and wire plant right along the Monongahela River.

• 33:59Justin Roczniak?

  And the problem was, what's the name gonna be, right?

• 34:05Justin Roczniak?

  He wanted to name it name. No, he wanted to name it after himself. But his co-founder, Andrew Mellon, a little bit more famous.

• 34:16Liam McAnderson?

  Ah, what a piece of shit. That dead bitch.

• 34:20Justin Roczniak?

  Andrew Mellon wanted to name it after his wife. Oh, so they compromised.

• 34:27Liam McAnderson?

  They shouldn't have. He should have he should have done a propaganda deed to Andrew Mellon. That dumb piece of shit. I hate those fucking people.

• 34:36Justin Roczniak?

  Don for Donner and Nora for Nora Mellon, hence Donora, Pennsylvania.

• 34:42Liam McAnderson?

  That is short.

• 34:44November Kelly?

  Dumbest shit I've ever heard in my life.

• 34:46Liam McAnderson?

  Who gives a shit, right? It's Washington County, Pennsylvania. Man, who cares?

• 34:51November Kelly?

  I like the safety yellow bridge. That's very attractive.

• 34:53Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, that's that's right. Yeah, all kinds of nice.

• 34:57Liam McAnderson?

  You root for the pirates. You'll love the pens. You fuck some goats, you know, Pittsburgh.

• 35:01Justin Roczniak?

  Lots of nice trust bridges in this area.

• 35:04Liam McAnderson?

  Talking to you, Maggie. Yeah, go ahead.

• 35:08Justin Roczniak?

  All right, what can we see in Donora, Pennsylvania?

• 35:11November Kelly?

  Uh, they have some good leaves. I like the orange leaves. That's very attractive to me.

• 35:16Liam McAnderson?

  Ken Griffey's house.

• 35:17Justin Roczniak?

  They got the Cement City Historic District because most of the town's early houses were all sort of board formed concrete, just like they built an American four square, but out of concrete.

• 35:32November Kelly?

  Nice.

• 35:34Justin Roczniak?

  They got a they got a nice stair street. Uh, pretty soon a Waymo will fling itself down here.

• 35:40November Kelly?

  Like level one, low density residential off to this side and like some like low density commercial down here.

• 35:48Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah. Um, and this is sort of one of those kind of like John Fetterman type towns that can't really keep a storefront occupied. This is this is McKean Avenue. Most of the buildings are intact, but there's no businesses, right? Yeah. Um, you know, maybe this could be like an easy commute into Pittsburgh if they like, I don't know. You know, there maybe there would be a commuter train or something, but PennDOT doesn't understand that kind of thing. So, you know, that's that's not a that's not a thing. It would very, very economically depressed on account of the lack of things there anymore. The mills, you know, closed down, you know,

• 36:30Justin Roczniak?

  everything is just kind of, you know, there's there's no there there anymore. Except for, of course, the new Donora Smog Museum, which you can go to.

• 36:41November Kelly?

  Oh, do they have a gift shop?

• 36:44Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, I hope so.

• 36:47November Kelly?

  I mean, if there's merch, like

• 36:51November Kelly?

  a solid three stars on TripAdvisor.

• 36:54Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 36:55November Kelly?

  Does not have a website.

• 36:56Justin Roczniak?

  Like actually the the museum does look kind of nice. Um.

• 37:02November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 37:02Justin Roczniak?

  Now, in addition to American Steel and Wire, the other big business in Donora was the US Steel Donora Zinc Works, right?

• 37:14November Kelly?

  Come back zinc.

• 37:16Justin Roczniak?

  Zinc, that's the next slide. Um.

• 37:19November Kelly?

  Sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm fucking up. It's my fourth recording today. I will do the mandatory Simpsons reference when I'm told to. I'm sorry.

• 37:33November Kelly?

  It's not a huge pool of zinc jokes that I've got to like.

• 37:39Justin Roczniak?

  Get giant, giant pool of zinc for your hot dip galvanized jokes.

• 37:45November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, uh, Andrew Mellon walking into this foundry being like, let that zinc in. And he's got a big thing of zinc with him and everyone wants to shoot him real bad.

• 37:58Justin Roczniak?

  It's gonna it's gonna it's gonna preserve it. It's gonna stand the test of time. You'll have a, you know, that joke is still gonna be good 100 years from now.

• 38:09Justin Roczniak?

  This is a this is an old fashioned type of zinc plant where they made zinc, you know, zinc was what they made.

• 38:17November Kelly?

  I thought it was I thought it was an element like it doesn't it just come out the ground or whatever?

• 38:22Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, you gotta take the zinc out of the ore.

• 38:26November Kelly?

  Ah, okay.

• 38:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. There is some aspects here where I was a little confused. We'll get to that in a minute. But yeah, what what do we use? What's zinc for?

• 38:36November Kelly?

  I'm interested in the concept of an old fashioned zinc plant because like the implication is that it's they're doing like making Pepsi the old fashioned way. You know, you gotta jerk off the fucking soda dispenser or whatever.

• 38:48Justin Roczniak?

  They they used worse chemicals back then than they do now.

• 38:54November Kelly?

  Ah, okay.

• 38:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 38:58Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, what what is zinc? What do we use zinc for? What's what's the thing with what? What what what makes zinc a useful commodity? You know, this is atomic number.

• 39:09November Kelly?

  I I like being the one bitch at the function whose deodorant contains it.

• 39:15Justin Roczniak?

  There you go. That's a good start.

• 39:19November Kelly?

  Mm hmm. Uh, springs? Do you use zinc in a spring, maybe?

• 39:25Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, I probably in several alloys. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. Um, but yeah, zinc, it's.

• 39:35November Kelly?

  Liam, what do you know about zinc? Give me five uses of zinc right now.

• 39:39Liam McAnderson?

  What's your zinc? I don't know. I don't know. Well, I'm gonna type very softly.

• 39:46Liam McAnderson?

  The body needs it. Uh, but enzyme support, wound healing, apparently. Uh, galvanization, alloys, batteries and sunscreen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Type very softly so I don't get beat to death.

• 40:04Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, zinc is zinc is up there. It's atomic number 30, top right corner of the transition metals, right? Uh, yeah, and zinc, it's in deodorant, it's in anti dandruff shampoo, it's in your diet just a little bit. It's in brass, right? So we need it for instruments, right? Um, you know, it would be pretty bad if all the zinc disappeared one day in that hypoth- hypothetical situation. Um.

• 40:33November Kelly?

  Don't think it's ever been explored.

• 40:36Justin Roczniak?

  No, no.

• 40:40Justin Roczniak?

  But one of the biggest uses for metallic zinc, right, is something called hot dip galvanization, mostly for like steel structures, right?

• 40:51Justin Roczniak?

  And the idea is very simple. Rather than painting steel, right? You take your big structural member, you know, it could be like a big I beam or a W section. It could be like some kind of truss or something. It could be even, even stuff like bolts and like things like that.

• 41:11Justin Roczniak?

  And you dunk it into a huge vat of molten zinc.

• 41:15November Kelly?

  God damn, that's cool.

• 41:16Liam McAnderson?

  Okay.

• 41:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And it comes out the other side galvanized, right? That is, it has a thin layer of zinc over the steel to prevent corrosion of the steel underneath. Right? And this is a coating which is more durable than paint. And it makes the steel nearly entirely, you know, corrosion proof, right? And it gives it a nice metallic gray color instead of like a sort of rust color that you would get by just, uh, uh, leaving steel out in the environment.

• 41:49November Kelly?

  Nice.

• 41:50Justin Roczniak?

  You know.

• 41:50November Kelly?

  Plus, galvanized is just a fun word to say.

• 41:53Liam McAnderson?

  Sick word, yeah.

• 41:54Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, definitely, definitely. You know, that, that's, that, that is a pretty good one. I should have looked up the etymology. I don't have.

• 42:02November Kelly?

  Luigi Galvani, I assume.

• 42:05Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that would make sense. Yeah.

• 42:07November Kelly?

  You're, you're Galvaniizing something, but you know.

• 42:14Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, this is fancy Italian steel.

• 42:17Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, boy.

• 42:20Liam McAnderson?

  The steel Alfa Romeo's are made of, which can only be a good thing.

• 42:23Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, I make it the steel. I cook it the pasta.

• 42:26November Kelly?

  It's like, you know, you were a sort of mad 18th century Italian who's busy on yourself, electrocuting dead frogs and unbeknownst to you in the far future, this sort of like extremely, you know, tech priest looking process of, of, you know, dipping steel in molten zinc is going to be named after you.

• 43:00Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, it's Justin. Uh, so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes. So you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

• 43:43Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com/ W T Y P pod. Do it if you want, or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show.

• 44:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, the, the, the one thing I can't figure out is it does feel like all these steel sections should wind up with some kind of like Achilles heel somewhere. You know, where they like lifted it out or something. I don't know how that works.

• 44:25Justin Roczniak?

  So how do you smelt zinc from ore? And I can tell you quite confidently, I don't know what the process they used in this plant is.

• 44:38November Kelly?

  It's one of those things where once you exhaust your resources and our research assistant, then it's down to like, well, I'm not going to ask fucking Google Gemini, am I? Because it will be wrong.

• 44:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the problem. It's like, I don't want to, I don't want to consult the wrong answer machine. I can just tell you, I don't know exactly what's going on in this factory.

• 45:02November Kelly?

  Is to be told. Yeah, we looked into it. Don't know.

• 45:06Justin Roczniak?

  Don't know.

• 45:09Justin Roczniak?

  I don't, I don't know in Donora.

• 45:13Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, I mean, what I can say is, you know, ore goes in one side.

• 45:20Justin Roczniak?

  Molten zinc comes out the other side. And there's a bunch of chemical processes in here because it's not, it's not, you know, just like, okay, we're going to heat it up and like add flux and bring off the impurities. You have to do like a bunch of shit with stupid chemicals in order to get zinc out of the ore.

• 45:41Justin Roczniak?

  You know, it's, it's, it's a little bit more of, uh, you know, and some of those chemicals that come out of the smoke stacks as a result, you know, acids, other nasty chemicals. You got a lot of sulfur dioxide and you've got a lot of fluorine gas.

• 46:01November Kelly?

  Ooh, fluorine, fluorine nasty. That's a.

• 46:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, not so good, not so good. Not to mention, of course, carbon dioxide.

• 46:13Justin Roczniak?

  But, you know, in the words of.

• 46:15Liam McAnderson?

  CO2, yes.

• 46:16November Kelly?

  And clearly from the fact that you've got like, uh, this, you've got like nine smoke stacks. You have to vent a lot of stuff to atmosphere, right?

• 46:25Justin Roczniak?

  You got, yeah, you gotta vent a lot of stuff to atmosphere. I assume whatever process unit is in here. There's, you know, just, uh, one of these for every one of these sheds, you know, I, I again, unfortunately, I am not familiar at all with this process, but I can say, okay, what do you do when you have a lot of really nasty chemicals and gases coming out the smokestack? Well.

• 46:51Liam McAnderson?

  Make up somebody else's problem.

• 46:53Justin Roczniak?

  What do you, what do you do? You build a, today you would build a really tall smokestack, right? What is a smokestack? What is the purpose of this?

• 47:03November Kelly?

  I, I, I feel my sort of Fred Dipner tulpa. One of my less important tulpas, but he's around. Just, just coming out of retirement here being like, yeah, it's, it's something to do with, I don't know, like graft and being working class and a short A vowel sound. And you gotta, you gotta like climb up it. And then when, you know, Thatcher destroys British industry, you gotta knock it back down.

• 47:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, he's gotta go up, go up there on the world's, the world's most rickety ladder.

• 47:33November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:35Justin Roczniak?

  You know.

• 47:36November Kelly?

  There's a guy like at the bottom next to a Land Rover, holding a string and Fred Dipner's just like throwing bricks at him. Um, that's, he could die at any minute. Some of the most thrilling TV ever recorded.

• 47:49Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, that guy, I mean, he could die at any minute and he just didn't do that. You know, he persevered through sheer force of, um, you know, folksy, uh, existence.

• 48:01November Kelly?

  But this is the thing, right, is, is he knew a deep existential truth, which is you only die if you fall off. And so he just went, well, I'm just not going to fall off then. And because he never did, we're not laughing at him now. I mean, we kind of are, but we're not.

• 48:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 48:19Justin Roczniak?

  We're not, we're not laughing at him. We're laughing with him.

• 48:21November Kelly?

  There's a simple trick to this steeplejack thing and it's never falling off the smokestack.

• 48:26Justin Roczniak?

  If you just, just don't fall off the thing and you're fine. Yeah.

• 48:31November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 48:31Justin Roczniak?

  So

• 48:34Justin Roczniak?

  smokestack, um, serves a couple of purposes, right? So you can use it to like increase draft through like a furnace. In an industrial setting, it can assist in air changes in the building, right? Because all the air is getting sucked up through the smokestack inside the building. So that means you get more air infiltrating from outside. It'll improve the, uh, air quality inside the industrial building. But notably, it moves all these dangerous gases really high above your head where they can dissipate into the atmosphere and hopefully decompose.

• 49:13November Kelly?

  Yeah. I mean, the solution to pollution is, uh, distance. And by distance, you know, in this case, the, the more up it is, you know, out of sight.

• 49:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 49:26Justin Roczniak?

  That'd be a really tall smokestack.

• 49:30November Kelly?

  Yeah, I've played Ace Combat.

• 49:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 49:33November Kelly?

  Building a space elevator to the moon solely for the purpose of throwing pollution at it?

• 49:40Liam McAnderson?

  Isn't that a Futurama premise? I'm pretty sure it is.

• 49:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, a lot of sense, you know, I figure, figure you gotta freeze the pollution into like cubes of pollution ice and then send them up the space elevator. Yeah. So sometimes if you have particularly nasty, you know, affluence into the atmosphere, they have to be very tall, like this guy, this is the Inco Superstack in Sudbury, Ontario, right? Which was until recently, this was, uh, 1,250 feet tall.

• 50:17November Kelly?

  Does that change recently and like higher or lower now?

• 50:22Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, it's lower now because they installed the stack scrubber. So they don't need it to be as high anymore.

• 50:29Justin Roczniak?

  But the nickel smelter in question here at the Inco plant, this is right in the middle of town. So it's like, let's get all that, let's get all that stuff way up there, right?

• 50:43Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, this, this sort of really tall smokestack is useful if, if you're emitting a lot of pollution, a lot of nasty chemicals, like you're the nickel smelter, or like, you're a Polish coal power plant, which is adjacent to Germany and uses German brown coal. Uh, but because it's over the border in Poland, it doesn't count towards energy when, uh, you know, or something like that, you know?

• 51:12November Kelly?

  It's all going that way.

• 51:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So now, why, why is this useful? It's because of another phenomena called a temperature inversion, right?

• 51:26November Kelly?

  Oh, good weather.

• 51:27Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm. You may recognize, uh, this photo from the East Palestine derailment when Norfolk Southern decided to blow up those tank cars rather than let the chemicals sort of, uh, you know, settle on their own.

• 51:43November Kelly?

  Yeah. When, when Norfolk Southern got really into, into white noise, um, and decided to do it.

• 51:53Justin Roczniak?

  So usually

• 51:57Justin Roczniak?

  air becomes hot near the ground, right?

• 52:02November Kelly?

  Yeah. Cause the hot stuff is on the ground. Like, you know,

• 52:05Justin Roczniak?

  Hot stuff's on the ground.

• 52:07November Kelly?

  Dogs, truck engines, uh, uh, windmills, you name it.

• 52:13Justin Roczniak?

  Attractive people.

• 52:15November Kelly?

  Hmm. Yeah. Well, no, I don't, I don't want to suggest, I, I, I don't want to conflate hot as in attractive and hot as in temperature there. When I've put dogs on the table, you know?

• 52:25Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that's, that's

• 52:29Justin Roczniak?

  There's a lot of, there's, there's a lot of furries in our audience. Yeah.

• 52:36Justin Roczniak?

  Bucks bunny in a dress.

• 52:41Liam McAnderson?

  Brother, you could just say Lola Bunny. Lola Bunny is right there, man.

• 52:48November Kelly?

  Yeah. But if, if it's just, if it's just a sort of girl bunny, then there's no free song, you know?

• 52:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 52:56Justin Roczniak?

  So the air near the ground becomes hot, it goes up, right?

• 53:04Justin Roczniak?

  Now, that means it gets cold and it goes down, right?

• 53:12November Kelly?

  Just looking, looking at the concept of weather and being like, this is some bullshit. Nothing's even happening here. It's just going around in circles.

• 53:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. It's just going around in circles. Yeah. It goes up, it goes down, right? That means there's a constant convection current that's moving air around all the time, right?

• 53:34November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 53:34Justin Roczniak?

  Now, sometimes

• 53:37Justin Roczniak?

  somewhere else gets really hot and a bunch of air from there blows in above this convection current, right? So then we have a bunch of hot air up here. And then we have a bunch of cold air down here. The result being the cold air stays down here and the hot air stays up here, right? And, and this is why after they blew up the tank cars in the East Palestine derailment, you saw like this almost mushroom cloud like phenomena. It was because this, this could not dissipate further up. It was all just stuck there. Cause there was an atmospheric

• 54:21Justin Roczniak?

  inversion going on. As you may imagine, if there's a lot of heavy smokestack industry, right? All the gases and smoke can just hang around for a long time in one of these atmospheric inversions, right? If you don't have like a stack that goes up through it, or if you don't have like, uh, you know, it, it, this is, this is uncommon enough event that you don't really necessarily factor this into often enough.

• 54:51November Kelly?

  Sending Fred Dibner up into the smog to build the smokestack higher.

• 54:56Justin Roczniak?

  You gotta make it taller. Yeah. Gotta do this by the end of the day. He's like, yep, I can do that.

• 55:01November Kelly?

  He's like breathing through a really long garden hose that's being trailed down to a guy he's throwing bricks down at.

• 55:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 55:12Justin Roczniak?

  But this was pretty common in Western Pennsylvania, right? Um, you know, this is sort of, these are images of Pittsburgh from, I want to say the 1920s or 30s. Um, can't be too much later than the 30s because this is the Wabash Bridge here, which got torn down pretty early on despite being the best bridge in Pittsburgh. Um,

• 55:37November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 55:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 55:39November Kelly?

  Thanks for nothing.

• 55:40Justin Roczniak?

  But, um,

• 55:43Justin Roczniak?

  you know, in, in 1948, the term smog had not been popularized, but certainly Pittsburgh, suburbs of Pittsburgh, cities around Pittsburgh were very familiar with it, right? You can have, you know, an atmospheric inversion.

• 56:00Liam McAnderson?

  The death, just the death.

• 56:02Justin Roczniak?

  No, they just called it fog.

• 56:05Liam McAnderson?

  All right. Well.

• 56:06Justin Roczniak?

  There was no acknowledgement that the industries may be contributing.

• 56:11Liam McAnderson?

  So they're just like, oh, yeah. You die at 50. It's very normal out here. That just, yeah.

• 56:17November Kelly?

  Wait, smog is a portmanteau, uh, first attested in 19, 1905.

• 56:26Justin Roczniak?

  What do you go for? Smoke, smoke and fog. Hmm. Um, I don't think it really got popularized until, you know, Los Angeles became a cultural center. And then, you know, everyone became familiar with it. Um, cause Los Angeles has, you know, frequent enough, it like both the mountains around and, you know, atmospheric inversions tend to keep all the crap there, you know? Well, similar in Pittsburgh though, there's mountains all around the city. Um, but yeah, now this, this, uh, this smog, right? You know, it could show up, it would turn days into nights. It would shut down road traffic.

• 57:08Justin Roczniak?

  It could make anyone with respiratory issues pretty miserable. But it usually did not last very long, right? Usually.

• 57:21November Kelly?

  Oh God.

• 57:26Justin Roczniak?

  So October 27th, 1948 starts like any other day in Donora, Pennsylvania, right? The men wake up for their shifts at the mills. The kids all go to school. The stores are open. Everyone's happy having, you know, a nice late 40s American day, right?

• 57:50Liam McAnderson?

  So we're gonna, I don't know, lynch somebody for no reason.

• 57:52Justin Roczniak?

  Wow.

• 57:55Justin Roczniak?

  The town's Halloween parade was that evening.

• 57:58November Kelly?

  The fuck is a Halloween parade?

• 58:01Liam McAnderson?

  Exactly what it sounds like. You get a bunch of kids and a bunch of costumes.

• 58:04November Kelly?

  Downstream of like Ulster, like Ulster Scots way more often than I mean to.

• 58:10Liam McAnderson?

  Mm hmm. Sure.

• 58:15Justin Roczniak?

  So a warm front rolls in, which triggers a particularly strong inversion. Everything goes black.

• 58:24November Kelly?

  Oh, I mean, there's your Halloween, you know?

• 58:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 58:28Liam McAnderson?

  Spooky as your

• 58:29November Kelly?

  Oh my God, it's topical. Oh, you did a topical one.

• 58:33Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that's, that's, well, yeah. Tomorrow's the 27th.

• 58:36November Kelly?

  Boo, boo scares your problem rides again.

• 58:39Liam McAnderson?

  Who scares your problem?

• 58:41Justin Roczniak?

  There's not, there's not much, uh, not many photos of this incident, but this is one.

• 58:48Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. I wonder why. Oh yeah. I've, I've played Silent Hill. Yeah.

• 58:51November Kelly?

  I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna waste a bunch of film going out and taking photos of, of the void.

• 58:56Justin Roczniak?

  The void. Yeah. This is apparently

• 58:58Liam McAnderson?

  It calls to me.

• 59:00Justin Roczniak?

  I want to say this is before it got really bad, but this is broad daylight.

• 59:04November Kelly?

  Hmm. I'm enjoying the sort of visible thick layer of soot on every car.

• 59:13Justin Roczniak?

  So

• 59:16Justin Roczniak?

  something about this fog was much worse than the other fogs that the, uh, residents of Donora were used to, right? Now, what's in there? It's sulfur dioxide and fluorine gas from the zinc plant. And it refuses to dissipate, right?

• 59:39Justin Roczniak?

  A lot of people in the town, they don't see anything out of the ordinary, right? This sort of thing happens all the time.

• 59:46November Kelly?

  Western Pennsylvania.

• 59:48Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 59:50Justin Roczniak?

  The Halloween parade goes on as scheduled, even though no one can see the floats or the fire trucks or anything.

• 59:56Liam McAnderson?

  They're all choking to death. Yeah.

• 59:59Justin Roczniak?

  Monongahela High beat the Donora Dragons 27 to seven, but no one could quite see how the field goal in the third quarter went.

• 1:00:08November Kelly?

  Just kicking, kicking the field goal into void.

• 1:00:12Justin Roczniak?

  Into the void. Yes.

• 1:00:16Justin Roczniak?

  By and large, people went about their day.

• 1:00:21Justin Roczniak?

  But anyone who was a little bit sick started fucking dying.

• 1:00:26November Kelly?

  Yeah, you don't say.

• 1:00:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:28Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, that's a good lapel doobie, baby.

• 1:00:32Justin Roczniak?

  So by the end of the first day, the town's eight doctors were completely overwhelmed, right? Their offices were swamped.

• 1:00:39Liam McAnderson?

  Doctors, I'm not gonna lie to you.

• 1:00:40Justin Roczniak?

  Eight whole doctor, you had 14,000 people in this town.

• 1:00:46Liam McAnderson?

  That's still a much better, I listen K to D ratio, but I don't think that's what I want.

• 1:00:53Justin Roczniak?

  Their offices are completely swamped with patients. They have too many house calls to like be able to visit everyone. Nothing's coordinated, right? Because, you know, it's just like, this is an ordinary fog. It's nothing weird. There's no reporting on it. There's no declaration of emergency.

• 1:01:11November Kelly?

  I guess boomers were kind of telling the truth when they were like, yeah, my day used to be called weather. It's just that everyone fucking died.

• 1:01:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:23Justin Roczniak?

  You know, so there's, there's nothing, you know, this, this, there's nothing in the newspaper. There's nothing on the radio because this takes multiple days to dissipate. This causes what I would call a mass salipsism event.

• 1:01:37Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, wait, hang on, I got a joke for that. Is it salipsism here or is it just me?

• 1:01:44Justin Roczniak?

  No one really understands that they aren't the only one who's sick. So they're all, they're all calling every doctor in town, like just to get, just to, just to get any kind of treatment. It's like, okay, we're gonna call all eight guys because it's that kind of town. I guess you know all eight of them.

• 1:02:10Justin Roczniak?

  So they, no one knows where to send who. There's no possible way to triage at all, right?

• 1:02:18Justin Roczniak?

  You know, and everyone's just, everyone who is sick is just like, just give me something, anything, right? But again, most of the town, at least on day one, is fine. They don't see what the big deal is, except the smog gets worse and worse, right?

• 1:02:36Liam McAnderson?

  Sister morphine, baby.

• 1:02:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Driving became impossible, right? The smog was so thick, one resident reporting having to steer by hugging the curb and hoping for the best.

• 1:02:50November Kelly?

  Great.

• 1:02:51Liam McAnderson?

  You just don't.

• 1:02:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54November Kelly?

  That is. Well, I'm not gonna stop driving.

• 1:02:56Justin Roczniak?

  I'm not gonna stop driving, obviously, no.

• 1:02:59Liam McAnderson?

  Given right as an American to curb rash the shit out of myself, my wife and my entire family.

• 1:03:08Justin Roczniak?

  Some people reported the smog was so thick, they couldn't even get their cars to start. There wasn't enough oxygen in the air.

• 1:03:15November Kelly?

  Jesus, and, and this for a 40s car as well, like a big fucking engine.

• 1:03:23Liam McAnderson?

  Seven liters and 143 horsepower.

• 1:03:27Justin Roczniak?

  It, it takes three days of smog until October 30th, when Mayor August Z. Chambon.

• 1:03:37November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 1:03:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. It's probably it's Western Pennsylvania, it's probably Chambon.

• 1:03:45Justin Roczniak?

  He finally was like, we should do some emergency management, right? Sets up a phone switchboard in City Hall for all emergency calls. So people could stop calling all eight of the town's doctors at the same time.

• 1:03:59November Kelly?

  Hadn't invented 911 yet.

• 1:04:03Justin Roczniak?

  Pretty much, yeah. Oxygen tanks had been hauled in for the suffering and they had completely depleted the supplies of the nearby municipalities of McKeesport, Monessen and Charleroi. I don't know how they pronounce that over in Western Pennsylvania. It's probably at least as fucked up as how they pronounce for sales.

• 1:04:31November Kelly?

  I love, I love, I love to be from Jardine Des Plantes, Pennsylvania.

• 1:04:36Liam McAnderson?

  Stop it.

• 1:04:36Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:04:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, the, the, the Western Pennsylvanians give the French language the respect it deserves, which is to say none.

• 1:04:50Justin Roczniak?

  Except for Duquesne for some reason.

• 1:04:53Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, make that make sense.

• 1:04:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Liam McAnderson?

  Go Dukes, baby.

• 1:04:57Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 1:04:59Justin Roczniak?

  But, you know, at this point, it's like, three days in, people just start dropping dead, right? The town's funeral home is completely overwhelmed. They have to start storing bodies in like public areas.

• 1:05:14Justin Roczniak?

  And the mayor decides, all right, maybe we should finally take action.

• 1:05:21Justin Roczniak?

  So on Sunday, October 31st, Mayor August Z. Chambon marches into the Donora zinc works and tells them to shut down the line, shut down the plant, right?

• 1:05:35November Kelly?

  A mayor throwing his weight around. We love this episode of No Gods, No Mares.

• 1:05:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And they said, yeah, we already did that this morning.

• 1:05:45November Kelly?

  Probably with a lot more coughing.

• 1:05:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50Liam McAnderson?

  Just like, it's not even black log, it, it transcends black log, it's void, baby.

• 1:05:57Justin Roczniak?

  Of course, leaves the mayor puzzled as to how to take charge of the situation, you know? And this is the point, it's, it's, it's, we're four days in. Even the hail and hardy of the town are starting to get sick from the smog. If something wasn't done soon, this would be a hell of an incident.

• 1:06:17Justin Roczniak?

  And well, later that day, the weather turned. A rainstorm rolled in, cleared out the smog.

• 1:06:26November Kelly?

  And the mayor started bossing God around.

• 1:06:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I guess so, I guess so. All was well? No. 20 people were dead, 50 more would die of respiratory illnesses over the following weeks.

• 1:06:42Liam McAnderson?

  Quick kill, Jesus.

• 1:06:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Respiratory disease rates remained elevated in Donora for quite a long time afterwards.

• 1:06:52November Kelly?

  Yeah, I can imagine.

• 1:06:56Justin Roczniak?

  And this was a confusing incident, to say the least. I mean, because it was, no one had seen anything like this before, you know? And it's, it's like, okay, who, who is at fault, right?

• 1:07:11November Kelly?

  God, question mark.

• 1:07:13Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, we're with God.

• 1:07:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. That, no, that was what US Steel argued.

• 1:07:17Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:07:21November Kelly?

  US Steel versus God, you know? Applying for a kind of default judgment because he didn't show up in court.

• 1:07:29Justin Roczniak?

  I, you know, that's, that's always an annoying one. He very rarely shows, he doesn't even send his lawyers.

• 1:07:38Liam McAnderson?

  We're his lawyers, man, you can do the math.

• 1:07:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Justin Roczniak?

  Autopsies of the deceased indicated 20 times the normal level of fluorine.

• 1:07:50November Kelly?

  Amazing teeth.

• 1:07:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, amazing, everything else just completely collapsing. The teeth, great.

• 1:08:00Justin Roczniak?

  A University of Cincinnati study indicated that if the smog had lasted just a little while longer or had been just a little stronger, everyone would have died.

• 1:08:13November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 1:08:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, like, like, just, just the whole town would be dead, all 14,000 residents, no, no survivors. It was, it was really close to being something much, much worse, even though it was very, very bad.

• 1:08:26November Kelly?

  American bofha.

• 1:08:29Justin Roczniak?

  Pretty much, I mean, this was also one of the first times that a smog like this had had any kind of epidemiological research put into it.

• 1:08:42Justin Roczniak?

  You know, because it was a severe enough event that it was like, maybe we should look into this air pollution thing, right? Because, you know, we're still firmly in the period of American history where, you know, a big smokestack spewing black smoke, that's a sign of industry and commerce, right? As opposed to now, and we say, well, that's the pollution factory from Captain Planet.

• 1:09:10Justin Roczniak?

  And this is sort of a, a, a turning point where, you know, everyone sort of starts to understand, huh? Maybe air pollution is bad.

• 1:09:21November Kelly?

  Huh.

• 1:09:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:26November Kelly?

  But isn't that liberal?

• 1:09:29Liam McAnderson?

  It is.

• 1:09:31Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know, um.

• 1:09:35Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know. I mean, there's, there's obviously been a reaction against that since, once people realize that part.

• 1:09:44Liam McAnderson?

  We have to be able to pollute indiscriminately to save America first.

• 1:09:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So there's some effort among the victims, the victims' families to bring a lawsuit against US Steel, who seemed to be, you know, the main perpetrator here. They run into some basic problems, which is number one, the mill employs everyone in town. And if you put it out of business, that's going to be a problem.

• 1:10:13November Kelly?

  I'm sure US Steel are keen to make this point to them.

• 1:10:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes. Number two, US Steel has better lawyers.

• 1:10:23Justin Roczniak?

  They were prepared to make the case in court that this was an act of God and we can't trace the source of pollution to one specific source.

• 1:10:33November Kelly?

  Your honor, what do you want us to do? Make a smokestack of infinite height?

• 1:10:39Liam McAnderson?

  Space elevator smokestack. Here we go.

• 1:10:41Justin Roczniak?

  Your, your honor, stack scrubbers won't be invented for another 10 years.

• 1:10:51Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, US Steel was gonna say this is just an act of God, you know, there's nothing we can do. They wind up settling out of court with 80 plaintiffs for $235,000 total.

• 1:11:06November Kelly?

  That's, I mean, not a lot of money for 1940, whatever.

• 1:11:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16November Kelly?

  $235,000.

• 1:11:18Justin Roczniak?

  That's not a lot of money.

• 1:11:19November Kelly?

  In 1948 is, uh, that's about 3.2 million today, 3.2 million divided by 80 is, uh, gonna be about $40,000 ago. Minus your legal fees, that's a lot to pay for like, you know, mostly being extremely fluoridated.

• 1:11:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, it was.

• 1:11:45Liam McAnderson?

  Your teeth, though.

• 1:11:46November Kelly?

  Hmm. Never need to brush your teeth again.

• 1:11:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, never need to brush your teeth again, but yeah, most of that money was eaten up in legal fees.

• 1:11:55November Kelly?

  Well, in fact, if you, if you ever brush your teeth again, it might put you dangerously over the odds into fluorine poisoning. So you gotta like.

• 1:12:02Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that's that, well.

• 1:12:04November Kelly?

  Donora become British.

• 1:12:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yep, fluorine poisoning is like a going concern in the town for quite a while afterwards. There's, there's just elevated levels of respiratory disease in general. You know, everyone got, got by this, uh, smog. Some people just didn't realize it for like 20 or 30 years.

• 1:12:27November Kelly?

  Grim.

• 1:12:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Justin Roczniak?

  And the town of Donora, like, never quite recovers from this incident, right? Both the mills, both the steel and wire mill and the zinc mill closed in the 1960s. Cause population went into sort, yeah, cause, cause the woke that can't poison the town a second time.

• 1:12:51November Kelly?

  They were gonna try.

• 1:12:54Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Just gotta wait for another, another inversion that lasts five days.

• 1:13:02Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, the population went into sort of a permanent decline. Since then, this whole debacle was largely forgotten about, except in, you know, specialist environmentalist circles. Um, you know, this is sort of a inciting incident that's credited for the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1963, so 15 years later.

• 1:13:24Liam McAnderson?

  Easy peasy.

• 1:13:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And, well, in 2008, the Donora Smog Museum opened in downtown Donora. And it's one of the only occupied storefronts on McKean Avenue.

• 1:13:41Liam McAnderson?

  Man, that's grim.

• 1:13:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:43November Kelly?

  Okay, so road trip?

• 1:13:47Justin Roczniak?

  Look, I, I, I would go, I would definitely go actually.

• 1:13:57November Kelly?

  Amazing. Uh, this is one of the saddest things I've ever fucking heard. Um, what, what we learned is, uh, I, I, I dream of vengeance against capital. Not that I, listen, the reason why I said that this was a sort of a liberal concern is because, you know, our beloved communism not got a great track record with not poisoning the environment, you know?

• 1:14:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but you get to hit, you know, the steel beam with the hammer.

• 1:14:22November Kelly?

  Well, these guys are getting to hit the zinc beam with a hammer, you know, like.

• 1:14:26Justin Roczniak?

  That's true, yeah.

• 1:14:28November Kelly?

  You know, they, they were just doing it under a sort of a capitalist mode of production and then they poisoned the entire town, like, obviously not short of examples of, say, the Soviet Union poisoning an entire town. So, uh.

• 1:14:41Justin Roczniak?

  Or an entire region.

• 1:14:44November Kelly?

  I don't know, maybe we just gotta like, uh, de, de, de, de, de-growth, de-growth, like.

• 1:14:52Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, well, the president's way ahead of you on that one.

• 1:14:55November Kelly?

  Okay, good, good. Maybe, maybe we just like, uh, poison the environment in like a way that we, we can just automate it as much as possible. So that like, nobody's getting like exposed to the stuff and then hopefully we just, we just hope that the machines never achieve sentience because then we've just done the animatrix to ourselves. We could do that.

• 1:15:18Justin Roczniak?

  We also have better industrial processes that use fewer toxic chemicals to extract zinc.

• 1:15:24November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 1:15:25Justin Roczniak?

  You know, so that is.

• 1:15:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, okay. I like the sound of that last one.

• 1:15:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, sometimes, sometimes, uh, sometimes you can just eliminate the hazard. Thanks, thanks to technology. We don't invent technology anymore. We're gonna let the AIs do that. But for a while there, there was a lot of progress.

• 1:15:43Liam McAnderson?

  It was almost looking hopeful, yeah.

• 1:15:45November Kelly?

  Also, cause, cause of globalization or, you know, I mean, this is 60s version of it, like, yeah, it's a lot safer, but it's not happening here. So if you're in Donora, then, um, you're kind of out of luck, right?

• 1:15:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, you can just, uh, you know, you can enjoy the clean air and you, you know, but the, the downtown is dead.

• 1:16:07November Kelly?

  Build a train.

• 1:16:10Justin Roczniak?

  It's probably, probably, uh, probably a pretty good, pretty good place to start, you know, if you had a, had a commuter train into Pittsburgh. There used to be a lot of them. Now there's zero.

• 1:16:23November Kelly?

  Pennsylvania railroad dictatorship once again.

• 1:16:27Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I'm begging for it.

• 1:16:31Justin Roczniak?

  You could be the Pennsylvania president.

• 1:16:36November Kelly?

  I've just seen the preview for the next slide. What the fuck?

• 1:16:43Justin Roczniak?

  Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

• 1:16:52Liam McAnderson?

  Shake feet with the, oh.

• 1:16:54Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 1:16:55Liam McAnderson?

  Shake feet with AJ Roz.

• 1:16:57Justin Roczniak?

  Greetings coworkers of Gareth.

• 1:17:02Justin Roczniak?

  Greetings coworkers of Gareth and Victoria.

• 1:17:06November Kelly?

  Okay, fair enough.

• 1:17:09November Kelly?

  Cruel even.

• 1:17:13Justin Roczniak?

  I have a story from you, a story for you from the world of university laboratory hazmat disposal.

• 1:17:23November Kelly?

  Oh, I'm seated. Okay, cool. Go, go, go.

• 1:17:27Justin Roczniak?

  This happened to a relative of mine back in the early 1990s. As a graduate student at a university in the north.

• 1:17:38November Kelly?

  Britain queer?

• 1:17:39Justin Roczniak?

  They worked at a lab, I think so. They worked at a lab which used metallic sodium for some of its experiments.

• 1:17:48November Kelly?

  The forbidden Mars bar.

• 1:17:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:51November Kelly?

  No, it's, it's the forbidden Milky Way.

• 1:17:57Justin Roczniak?

  Wouldn't it be the forbidden Mars bar if it's in Britain?

• 1:18:00November Kelly?

  The forbidden tofu?

• 1:18:01Justin Roczniak?

  Milky Ways are different.

• 1:18:03November Kelly?

  Yeah, so we have a Milky Way that's like a Mars bar, except the, the center is like white and it doesn't have caramel.

• 1:18:09Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 1:18:10Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:11Justin Roczniak?

  I see. Okay, yeah. Our, our Milky Way is the same as your Mars bar, I understand.

• 1:18:18November Kelly?

  That's fucked. What the fuck is your Mars bar?

• 1:18:22Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, good question.

• 1:18:26Justin Roczniak?

  It's like a three musketeers or something.

• 1:18:28Liam McAnderson?

  No, we don't have a Mars bar.

• 1:18:30Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, sometimes I've seen Mars bars at stores, but very rarely.

• 1:18:34November Kelly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:38Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, apparently it's a Snickers almond. No, that can't be right.

• 1:18:42November Kelly?

  No, no, cause we have Snickers, like, um.

• 1:18:48November Kelly?

  Okay, well, the forbidden fucking Turkish delight over here.

• 1:18:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:18:52Liam McAnderson?

  Sure.

• 1:18:54Justin Roczniak?

  Sodium is an enthusiastic and energetic reducing agent, beloved the world over by the more Mythbusters influenced, uh, inflected breed of science influencer. For the explosive reaction it causes when combined with water. But it will try and throw that spare electron it has damn near anywhere it can, if given the opportunity.

• 1:19:24Justin Roczniak?

  Exposed to air, it will quickly form a layer of sodium oxides. Even though the lab kept its sodium supply immersed in inert metal, inert mineral oil, it built up a crusty rind of oxide over time. That's, uh, the stuff on the side here.

• 1:19:46Justin Roczniak?

  Whenever the metal was needed for an experiment, one of the grad students would fish the chunk out of its jar of oil, slice off the rind like a moldy cheese. To expose the unoxidized metal beneath with a small knife, cut enough pure sodium off for the experiment. And then toss the rest of the metal, plus the cut rinds back into the oil.

• 1:20:10Liam McAnderson?

  What? Brother, what?

• 1:20:14Justin Roczniak?

  It's, it's like a, it's like a cheese that builds up a rind.

• 1:20:18November Kelly?

  What are you gonna, what are you gonna do? Throw it in the bin? Like, yeah, it's fine.

• 1:20:23Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 1:20:24Justin Roczniak?

  After a couple of months, the jar would be full of unusable waste sodium and a new piece of metal would be ordered while the rinds were disposed of.

• 1:20:36Justin Roczniak?

  Now, the best practices for safely disposing of sodium looks something like producing relatively safe soda ash. Using a chain of a couple sequential reactions in a temperature controlled container. This way, the sodium never quite has the chance to produce a shitload of explosive hydrogen gas and enough heat to ignite it at the same time.

• 1:21:06Justin Roczniak?

  Now I say best practice was something like that because neither I nor my relative know or remember the university's disposal process for sodium. This was a lab whose day-to-day operations were run by a bunch of bored 20-something grad students.

• 1:21:24November Kelly?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:21:26Liam McAnderson?

  The backbones of society, yeah.

• 1:21:28Justin Roczniak?

  The observed common practice for disposing of waste alkali metals was to wait until the jar was almost full. Go to the store to buy a case of beers and a pack of tube socks. And then spend the afternoon at the local river drinking beers and slinging socks full of the waste rinds into the water.

• 1:21:50November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 1:21:56Justin Roczniak?

  This worked great during the warm months of the year, but as previously mentioned, the university was in the north and the north has winters.

• 1:22:08Justin Roczniak?

  It was the middle of a particularly bitter January when the incident happened.

• 1:22:13November Kelly?

  Oh, God.

• 1:22:14Justin Roczniak?

  Work was slow and the waste jar had been full for nearly a week. The lab members decided it was time for the standard disposal procedure, albeit with some slight changes. It was well below freezing outside and because holding an aluminum can is not a magic cure-all for frostbite, the beers were omitted and a single, very large sock.

• 1:22:37November Kelly?

  I love that it's capitalized like vertical launch system, the VLS.

• 1:22:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:22:46Justin Roczniak?

  The very large sock full of sodium scraps that could be thrown into the river in one go was prepared.

• 1:22:52November Kelly?

  Like a depth charge.

• 1:22:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the lab members.

• 1:22:56Liam McAnderson?

  Take that, Argentina.

• 1:22:58Justin Roczniak?

  The lab members bundled up and went to the place in the river where the center channel was open and ice free. The very large sock was thrown and came up short and it bounced across the ice.

• 1:23:12Liam McAnderson?

  So they little tried to make a depth charge. Okay.

• 1:23:16November Kelly?

  Oh, you fucked up so bad. You fucked up so bad. You made a chemistry unexploded ordinance.

• 1:23:26Justin Roczniak?

  Eventually skidding to a stop a foot or so short of the water's edge.

• 1:23:31Liam McAnderson?

  No problem. Stick it in.

• 1:23:33November Kelly?

  All right, lads, I've got a brilliant idea.

• 1:23:38Justin Roczniak?

  Despite evidence to the contrary, neither my relative nor any other, any of the other lab members were dumb enough to go creep out onto the ice to try and retrieve their makeshift bomb or to push it into the water. Instead, a crude recovery plan was devised. Throwing rocks at the sock in hopes that it could be pushed off the ice ledge and into the water.

• 1:24:04Liam McAnderson?

  Jesus, whap.

• 1:24:07Justin Roczniak?

  The athleticism that had.

• 1:24:09November Kelly?

  Why wouldn't you try throwing like a fucking, I don't know, like a water balloon at it?

• 1:24:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, anything.

• 1:24:17Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, probably didn't have a balloon with, they had rocks.

• 1:24:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, fair enough.

• 1:24:24Justin Roczniak?

  The athleticism that had gotten them into this mess turned out not to be a fluke, but after about five minutes of spirited throwing, the students managed to range in their target and drop a good sized stone right next to the very large sock, causing the ice shelf to cav off into the channel and then begin to float downstream.

• 1:24:46November Kelly?

  No, fuck.

• 1:24:50Justin Roczniak?

  They watched in mesmerized horror as their explosive ice flow approached the pedestrian bridge across the river, ran aground on an ice dam and flipped over, dumping its payload into the water.

• 1:25:04November Kelly?

  Uh, playing the theme from the dam busters in my head.

• 1:25:09Justin Roczniak?

  There was a crack and a crack and a crack and a boom and a bang and a wham and a, I don't know, shabam, right?

• 1:25:18Justin Roczniak?

  As the metal reacted, heaving up the dam with a column of water. Now, the explosion wasn't much more powerful than a firecracker, but it did scare the shit out of everyone in the area. While, while the culprits fled.

• 1:25:35November Kelly?

  Just, you are a 20 something chemistry grad student and have inadvertently joined the weather underground.

• 1:25:45Liam McAnderson?

  Hello, Kate.

• 1:25:46Justin Roczniak?

  Eventually, this relative moved to a different job in a different lab in the university, but from that point forward, they found someone who knew the best practices procedure to dispose of sodium and all other alkali metals. At least during the winter.

• 1:26:09Justin Roczniak?

  Best regards from an aspiring forester.

• 1:26:12November Kelly?

  Dare I ask why the knee socks?

• 1:26:16Liam McAnderson?

  I don't think we want to know, frankly.

• 1:26:17November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 1:26:18Justin Roczniak?

  Those are the chemistry socks.

• 1:26:20November Kelly?

  Ah.

• 1:26:20Justin Roczniak?

  You've heard of, you've heard of programming socks. These are chemistry socks.

• 1:26:24November Kelly?

  Okay, okay, sure, sure.

• 1:26:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27November Kelly?

  Learning a lot.

• 1:26:30Liam McAnderson?

  Wish I wasn't.

• 1:26:33November Kelly?

  Well, you're gonna learn against your will.

• 1:26:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yep, against your will, yeah. Oh, that was safety third.

• 1:26:40November Kelly?

  But I'll bang, but I'll bang. Soon, soon, I promise you.

• 1:26:47Justin Roczniak?

  Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

• 1:26:52Liam McAnderson?

  Unfortunately, I do. I have to give a friend of the shit, god damn it, let me find his name. Max Brolston, a friend of my sister-in-law's is currently listening, is currently in Italy, listening to the Frankfurt Junction rec. Max, thank you for listening. No one else asked for a shout out. You will not be getting one. My wife made me do this. Shut the fuck up.

• 1:27:12November Kelly?

  Okay, okay, fine. Subscribe to, subscribe to my Patreon. Patreon, it's like post-October. There's some more stuff coming, probably at some point, maybe, I don't know. Just do it anyway. Thank you.

• 1:27:24Liam McAnderson?

  Give her money. Do it.

• 1:27:25November Kelly?

  Give me money.

• 1:27:26Liam McAnderson?

  Give me money. Give me money. Give me money.

• 1:27:28Justin Roczniak?

  You can also give November money by subscribing to our Patreon.

• 1:27:32November Kelly?

  Money so bad.

• 1:27:33Liam McAnderson?

  You do.

• 1:27:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was about to say, yeah, we want all your money.

• 1:27:37November Kelly?

  Oh, jeez.

• 1:27:38Liam McAnderson?

  We do want all your money.

• 1:27:41Justin Roczniak?

  We're all doing great today.

• 1:27:43Liam McAnderson?

  Be happy this was not presented to you in smell-o-vision.

• 1:27:46November Kelly?

  It's like a gunshot.

• 1:27:48Liam McAnderson?

  It's not like a gunshot, you big baby.

• 1:27:52Justin Roczniak?

  It's more like a sock full of sodium going off.

• 1:27:56Liam McAnderson?

  Go fuck you.

• 1:27:57November Kelly?

  Yeah, I've had IBS like that. Bye.

• 1:28:01Justin Roczniak?

  All right, bye, everyone.