SPEAKER_03: Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything – your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website, or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to Squarespace.com slash invisible for our free trial and when you're ready to To launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions, even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Visit CapitalOne.com slash bank Capital One N A member FDIC. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather from soft breezy layers that you can move in with ease to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear and t-shirts are the number one, two and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you'll want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bomba socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I and use code 99 P I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas B O M B A S dot com slash 99 P I code 99 P I. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. It's the end of the year in time for our annual mini stories episodes. Mini stories are these fun quick hit stories that maybe came up in our research for another episode or they were just some cool thing that someone told us about. It could be from a friend, someone on Twitter, a relative, Avery's dad, just some story that we found really interesting, but it didn't quite warrant a full episode and two months of hard reporting, but they're great 99 P I stories nonetheless. And my favorite part is we do them as unscripted interviews where I'm in the studio with the people who work on this show, who I like a lot. This is the greatest team in all of podcast land. I guarantee you that. This week we have stories about sixties cult TV shows, semi useless gadgets, woo woo miracle cures in a modern Christmas tradition. It's going to be fun. Up first is Avery Truffman. Okay. Okay. What do you got?
SPEAKER_11: I have for you, um, my oldest article of clothing. I'm interested. Yeah. I've, I've worn this my whole life. Okay. You can feel.
SPEAKER_03: It's soft. It is a soft gray t-shirt.
SPEAKER_11: I've been wearing that weirdo shirt since I was like three. So clearly my parents gave it to me. I mean, I definitely remember it went down to your knees.
SPEAKER_01: Why you took it? I don't know. Or maybe I get, I don't know.
SPEAKER_11: I don't think I had the agency to take it. I bet you put it on me. The shirt is 25 years old.
SPEAKER_01: I don't really, at least 25 years old.
SPEAKER_11: This is my dad, the giver of this shirt to me.
SPEAKER_03: So I read what's on it?
SPEAKER_11: Yes. Okay.
SPEAKER_03: Where am I in the village? What do you want? Information. Whose side are you on? That would be telling. We want information, information, information. You won't get it. By hook or by crook. We will. We will.
SPEAKER_03: Sorry. I have to scroll down.
SPEAKER_11: Scroll down. It's a shirt. This is real life. Okay. Here we go.
SPEAKER_04: Okay. I get serious. I get my serious voice on.
SPEAKER_03: Who are you? The new number two. Who is number one? You are number six. I am not a number. I am a free man.
SPEAKER_04: I am not a number. I am a free man.
SPEAKER_03: I know what this is.
SPEAKER_11: What is it Roman?
SPEAKER_03: This is a t-shirt from the prisoner.
SPEAKER_11: And my dad is going to help us explain what the prisoner is.
SPEAKER_01: The prisoner was an extraordinary television series made I think in 1966. And it was during the 60s when you had the whole James Bond secret agent thing.
SPEAKER_11: So the prisoner is a 1960s TV show about a British spy, played by Patrick McGowan, who mysteriously resigns and then that evening is abducted. And he finds himself in this mysterious place called the village.
SPEAKER_01: The village is this odd little town. He doesn't know where it is. He doesn't know what it is. That it's just a very strange little place. So the village, like it's very disorienting because it seems to be kind of removed from
SPEAKER_11: all other countries in the world. There are like castles and villas and townhouses and they're all smashed together. And it could be absolutely anywhere. And it's completely beautiful and perfect. But like too perfect.
SPEAKER_01: Everything is relentlessly cheerful. And everybody has to, you know, good afternoon, we're having a parade.
SPEAKER_11: So there are all kinds of mandatory parades and events and festivals and no one has names and everyone goes by a number and again and again the spy, now known only as number six, has no idea who imprisoned him in this relentlessly cheery place where the people are wearing peppy striped shirts and suits with white piping and they're wearing rainbow capes and KED sneakers.
SPEAKER_01: But the greeting from everybody is be seeing you.
SPEAKER_07: Be seeing you.
SPEAKER_01: Which on one hand sounds very inoculial, you know, see you later. But what it meant was that see you later means that we're watching you.
SPEAKER_11: Come one, come all. So the whole village is under constant surveillance all the time. And in every episode the members of the village are trying to break number six and they put him through elaborate mind games and challenges and temptations trying to figure out why he resigned and the spy can't leave the village or a giant weather balloon will come after him and smother him. And the show only lasted like 17 episodes or so and it was really crazy.
SPEAKER_01: James Bond meets Doctor Who.
SPEAKER_11: On acid. Yeah. So it's a little bit weirder and weirder with each progressing episode, right?
SPEAKER_01: Yes. It eventually sort of went off the rails. Everybody just went crazy.
SPEAKER_11: So the very last episode doesn't make any logical sense. It's completely crazy. But at the beginning of this bonkers absurdist crazy episode was something that my dad found truly shocking.
SPEAKER_01: At the beginning of the opening very last episode they reveal the location of the village in real life. And I'm just like oh my God this place really exists. What the hell is this place?
SPEAKER_11: So the village looks like a set but it's a real place. And for my whole life as long as I have been wearing that weird shirt my dad has wanted to go there. And this year he finally did.
SPEAKER_01: You know it's in a remote corner of Wales. It wasn't easy to get there. Wow.
SPEAKER_11: Here's the back story. After World War I there was this Welsh architect named Sir Bertram Clough Williams Ellis. And he was kind of dismayed by how the UK was rebuilding after World War I. And all these gorgeous old buildings were getting torn down or they just weren't bothering to rebuild in the beautiful classical style. They were building big brutalist concrete blocks. And so when he acquired this remote plot of land in 1925 in his home country of Wales he decided to bring the beauty of the whole of Europe back to his homeland literally.
SPEAKER_01: And as Ellis would travel around the world he'd find a colonnade or a building or a church or maybe the top two floors of a church, dismantle it, ship it to Port Myron and rebuild it.
SPEAKER_11: My dad calls it Port Myron but every British person that I've heard calls it Port Marion. And from 1925 to 1975 Clough Williams Ellis hunted for all these crumbling remains of castles and houses and villas across the continent especially the Mediterranean and rescued them by bringing them to this one spot. And to kind of fund it it became a resort.
SPEAKER_01: I've never seen anything like it because usually when you think of a hotel it's a building. But this is 35 buildings in an isolated area and each building I mean besides you know the restaurants and the support thing it's a thing that's like a miniature Disneyland.
SPEAKER_11: Except unlike Disneyland everything's actually real. Like it's all actually old architecture. But apparently I mean here I have these books that you can you can look at pictures of it. These are my dad's my dad's literature. But it still looks quite Disney-esque because it's all painted these bright colors.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah it really does. I mean it like I would have never thought it was real from what I've seen of it. Yeah. That's crazy. It's almost like why would you go to the effort of doing it for real when it looks so fake. But it does remind me that when we look at old architecture we expect to see the weathering of it. And if we do restore it it is bright and shiny and odd and brightly colored and pink and bright yellows and things like that.
SPEAKER_11: Although like Clark Williams Ellis kind of took it a step further because he added he like added stuff. He put in fake windows that weren't really there. He'd like paint them on and he added stairways that didn't go anywhere just because he thought they looked scenic and added these windy paths. So he also kind of like turned it into this tutti frutti playground of actual. And the cool thing was it was postmodernism before postmodernism. Like it looks like a lot of styles that we would recognize now where they're smashing you know colonnades on villas on gothic clock towers and painting it all bright colors. And so in a weird way like it must have looked extra crazy in the 60s when no one was doing that.
SPEAKER_03: Oh totally. Although you know maybe without having gone through postmodernism you would just see it as this weird collage whereas we might now have the language of Disney and cheesy postmodernism to apply to this thing. Like maybe it looks cheap to us because of our lived experience of these things but it might have just felt opulent and amazing to somebody before postmodernism existed.
SPEAKER_11: Funny you say that. Architecture critic Lewis Mumford wrote in 1964 Port Marion is a gay deliberately irresponsible reaction against the dull sterilities of so much that passes as modern architecture today. So it was like shocking no one had seen anything like it. And Frank Lloyd Wright went to visit it. Gregory Peck came to visit. Ingrid Bergman came to visit.
SPEAKER_01: Brian Epstein from the Beatles would stay there. George Harrison stayed there. A lot of British celebrities and stuff would go there because it was so isolated and it was so beautiful and they treated everybody with a sense of discretion.
SPEAKER_11: So it was this place that was kind of separate from the rest of the world and removed from time and context where your name didn't matter. Basically all the stuff that made it unbearable for number six.
SPEAKER_01: I was there for the prisoner appreciation society weekend. So you had people walking around in prisoner costumes and they were reenacting episodes.
SPEAKER_11: My dad was there for this thing called Port Merikhan which is basically like a giant cosplay event for the prisoner where everyone they do parades and they pretend to abduct people and there's a giant balloon floating around. Everyone's wearing striped capes and keds except my dad.
SPEAKER_01: You know it was a little much. I enjoyed the spectacle. I wasn't up for the lifestyle. Still it was kind of cool because this is my dad's favorite show.
SPEAKER_11: He loves this show. And so for him it was kind of visiting an old friend because like they tried to remake the prisoner kind of recently. They tried to do an American version of it. It was terrible.
SPEAKER_01: It was terrible. I don't know what else to say. It was just terrible.
SPEAKER_11: Because my dad says it just can't work without the main star and visionary Patrick McGowan. He's the one who made it weird. But it also couldn't work without Port Merikhan. I think if the prisoner were done in like a Star Trek thing it wouldn't have worked.
SPEAKER_01: What made it so incongruous that you were in this natural environment of these beautiful old buildings. That's what I think made it even more horrifying because it was so pleasant and it was so cute and it was so charming and it was so analog.
SPEAKER_11: And so that's the cool thing about the prisoner and Port Merikhan itself. It's not trying to be just a tribute to the past or a vision of the future. It's just kind of this like amalgamated alternative reality. But in a weird way in both cases with Port Merikhan and the prisoner they just turned into alternate realities that look like what we have today which is you know postmodernism and Disneyland and also this like world of constant surveillance and constant cheeriness.
SPEAKER_01: It shows that the sort of fantastic nightmare that McGowan was predicting in some cases is certainly now technologically possible. And that's totally why I still wear the shirt.
SPEAKER_11: Also because it's soft.
SPEAKER_03: It is very soft. That's awesome. Thank you Avery. Thanks.
SPEAKER_04: Good seeing you. Good seeing you. Up next this is producer Vivien Leigh.
SPEAKER_03: So I'm just remembering right now that the first time you appeared on this show was last year's mini stories before you were a staff member at 99 P.I.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah it's my 99 P.I. anniversary. That's so nice. This is so great. I'm so happy you're here.
SPEAKER_03: And so what is your mini story as a staff member.
SPEAKER_08: OK. So I'm going to start this with another question. OK. So you travel a lot right?
SPEAKER_03: I do travel a lot.
SPEAKER_08: And you travel with devices right? Yes. OK. So have you ever been on the road and one of your batteries runs out of power. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03: The one on the phone it's like 5 or 6 p.m. consistently. That's the way it is. Right.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. Oh yeah. It's the rule it has to run out of battery. Yes. But how useful would it be if I told you that there was an AC free battery powered battery charger that would let you fully charge that one battery and all it needs are 12 batteries of the same type to charge that one dead battery.
SPEAKER_03: That doesn't sound very useful that sounds a little wasteful. Yes.
SPEAKER_08: It's not useful but at the same time it's not entirely un useless.
SPEAKER_03: That's true. That's true. It's not entirely. I could still use that thing that monstrosity that you are describing. Right.
SPEAKER_08: So yeah the AC free battery powered battery charger is something that actually exists. Wow. And it's one example of something called chin dogu which is the art of designing nearly useless gadgets. Wow.
SPEAKER_03: OK. And it's actually by nearly useless.
SPEAKER_08: So a chin dogu is a very specific type of invention that sets out to solve one particular problem but it actually ends up causing so much more of an inconvenience that it's almost entirely useless. So in the case of the battery powered battery charger you'd technically solve your problem of having one dead battery. But you'd make a much larger problem by draining 12 other batteries to power it. Yes exactly. Yeah. So the Japanese word chin meaning weird or strange and dogu meaning tool. So strange tool. Oh that's awesome.
SPEAKER_03:
SPEAKER_03: OK. So do you have another example?
SPEAKER_08: There are literally thousands of them. There's a pair of high heels with training wheels attached to the heels. So if you're just learning how to walk in high heels you have a little bit of a little carrier right there. There's a zen kitty litter box so you can practice the art of sand raking while you're cleaning up cat crap. But do you want to know what my favorite chin dogu is? I absolutely need to know what your favorite chin dogu is.
SPEAKER_08: A solar powered flashlight. You technically could use it but you wouldn't really actually use it.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah you couldn't possibly use it. So where do these ideas come from and does anyone actually make them or are they just ideas?
SPEAKER_08: OK. So you could probably tell by the name but it started in Japan with a man named Kenji Kawakami.
SPEAKER_12: Meet Kenji Kawakami. Japan's famous inventor of the useful and absurd. His creations range from umbrellas for shoes to hair splash guards to chopsticks with fans.
SPEAKER_08: So Kawakami studied aeronautical engineering in college and he's always been interested in engineering and design and he came up with the concept and started making his own creations sometime in the 1980s. But somehow he actually ended up in publishing which is kind of how chin dogu took off.
SPEAKER_03: So what kind of publishing was he doing? Was he publishing these items? No no.
SPEAKER_08: So in the early 90s he was the editor of a Japanese catalog called Mail Order Life which is you know like one of those home shopping magazines. And so there was this one month when he realized there were some spare blank pages in the back. So instead of just leaving them blank he decided to include some images of these useless inventions that he'd been tinkering around in his workshop with. So you know they weren't for sale or anything but you know he thought it'd be just kind of a fun joke to slip in. So he had the solar powered flashlight which I mentioned earlier and also a pair of eye drop glasses which are essentially a pair of glasses with funnels over the lenses. So you could just put eye drops in and they'll funnel directly into your eyeballs like a little hole so it could just drip right in. And you know the readers ended up getting such a kick out of them that you know he started putting chin dogus in every issue after that. And so after a few years of doing this this American journalist and translator named Dan Papilla came across it and he was like I have to spread this to the rest of the world. And so the two of them together founded the International Chindogu Society and established the 10 tenants of Chindogu.
SPEAKER_03: And so so these have rules. So what are some of the tenants to make it a truly a true Chindogu.
SPEAKER_08: OK. So the first rule is that a Chindogu has to be almost completely useless. So if you've created something that's actually useful you failed. You're done. The second rule is that it has to actually exist. So you have to actually build a Chindogu. Oh good.
SPEAKER_03: So I was actually wondering this. So so you can't just make this hypothetical even you know like a picture in a mail or a catalog you actually have to make.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. It has to be great. It has to be birthed into the world. I like that rule. Yes. Cool. And so the third rule is actually my favorite. It says inherent in every Chindogu is the spirit of anarchy. And then it goes on to say they represent freedom of thought and action the freedom to challenge the suffocating historical dominance of conservative utility.
SPEAKER_03: So I think I'm getting so like a little bit of this is a is an exercise in rebellion for the Uber designed product that is perfect that hat that does its job with great efficiency and it's like it like frees you to have weirdo inventions that don't that function but don't actually function well. Yes.
SPEAKER_08: OK. So yeah we tend to marry utility and design right. They don't have to be that.
SPEAKER_03: That is totally true. I don't have to be.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. I mean it seems a little strange to use absurdist design as a form of anarchy. But before Kawakami got into publishing he was actually a radical activist in the 60s and 70s. And so the spirit of nonconformity and anti consumerism is something that's rooted in the concept of Chindogu. There's actually a couple other tenants that dictate you can't sell the invention for money and you also can't patent it because it belongs to everybody. So Chindogu are supposed to be like the embodiment of design without the restrictive threat of materialism. And you could tell by the way that he talks about it like as silly as it kind of appears he he intended them to be like a fun way to change the world. I believe that if everybody shares my idea of changing perceptions he says the world
SPEAKER_12: could change one invention at a time.
SPEAKER_03: And so what happened to Chindogu as a movement. You know these big lofty ideas.
SPEAKER_08: Right right. You know it did spread internationally. There are Chindogu societies and competitions all over the world. But Kawakami actually ended up putting a bunch of books out with unuseless inventions that he's made over the years or that people have submitted into the Chindogu society. But since one of the tenants is that you can't make money from Chindogu he actually ended up donating a lot of the money to charity. Oh that's so nice.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And I know he's a good guy but I actually have one of his books here.
SPEAKER_08: Oh cool. That was published originally in 1995. And can you tell me what you see here. It is a camera on a long stick with a plunger to force the shutter of the camera.
SPEAKER_03: This is a selfie stick. That is a selfie stick from 1995.
SPEAKER_08: It's called a self-portrait camera stick.
SPEAKER_03: Do it yourself without a palaver. I have no idea what that is. So if you're traveling alone or as a couple it's hard to get pictures with you in them. It can be embarrassing to have to ask someone to take a photo for you confusing if they don't speak your language even costly if the third party regards your camera as a gift.
SPEAKER_03: With a 57 centimeter telescoping pole your dilemma is over expanding to three times its length for a full shot of you your companion and your environs. Your only problem will be that all your shots will capture you in the act of holding a pole. This can become a tiresome feature of your photo album unless you really like poles. And it's a full on selfie stick. Yeah. And this was and this was 10 years before the patent for the selfie stick came out.
SPEAKER_08: Wow. Yeah. So I don't know if Kawakami failed at making a chindogu or if we've failed as a society because people are still using selfie sticks.
SPEAKER_03: I think we failed as a society. Thank you Vivian.
SPEAKER_08: That's great.
SPEAKER_03: So I'm in the studio with Emmet Fitzgerald producer here at 99 percent invisible. How are you doing? Good. How are you Roman? I'm good. So what is your mini story today?
SPEAKER_14: All right. So my mini story is about blue glass. And specifically it's about this strange period in the mid to late 19th century when people thought that blue glass or the light passing through a blue pane of glass could solve just about any problem you could possibly have. And this all goes back to a Civil War general.
SPEAKER_10: General Augustus J. Pleasanton was a soldier in the Civil War and he was a gentleman scientist. He did a lot of reading.
SPEAKER_14: So this is Jenny Benjamin and she's the curator of the Museum of Vision in San Francisco. Cool. Cool place. Check it out. And she has looked into this guy General Pleasanton and she says that you know he was kind of this armchair scientist really shooting from the hip. And he had all kinds of wacky scientific theories but one of them had to do with blue light. And he reasoned that you know that the blue color of the sky there must be some inherent value to that color and that blue light was part of like what facilitated the growth of plants and animals and in biological processes.
SPEAKER_10: So he built, Pleasanton that is, built a garden nursery in his backyard with alternating blue planes of glass and he ran a quote experiment to see how well the vegetables would grow.
SPEAKER_14: So this is like a greenhouse.
SPEAKER_10: Yes, like a green, but I didn't want to use the term greenhouse because it was a blue house. And when she says quote experiment, what does she mean?
SPEAKER_14: She's saying that this isn't exactly the most scientific gentleman scientist. But you know basically he was growing grapes inside of this glass house with a certain amount of the windows tinted blue. And you know you can kind of imagine what happens next in the story, right? I think so.
SPEAKER_15:
SPEAKER_10: Pleasanton reports of course that his plants grew to incredible size. So then he expanded the experiment and he created an animal pen, I believe it was for pigs. And he claimed the pigs grew to enormous size and it was all because of the blue light. That's so great.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, right. Everything you know. It's the breakthrough of the century.
SPEAKER_14: Exactly and so you know word starts to get out about these experiments and he actually starts giving talks kind of around the country extolling you know the virtues of blue light. He even got a patent or he applied for a patent for what he called his cerulean process, which I love that and it's a really amazing name. And you know this is according to him but he says the patent officer came to his farm and this is what he supposedly said. If my investigation should establish the verity of your statements, you have made the most important discovery of the century transcending in importance even that of Morse's telegraph, which at best furnished only a means of communication with distant places. While your discovery could be brought home to every living object on the planet, your patent would be one of the most valuable ever issued in the United States. Wow.
SPEAKER_03: That's some high tentative praise. Yeah, right. Exactly. And he gets the patent and you know and then he goes on to write a book about this, about
SPEAKER_14: you know how blue light but it's a panacea.
SPEAKER_10: And it was touted as a cure-all, right? Everything from skin conditions to your eyesight.
SPEAKER_14: Also baldness, insomnia, back pain, more serious diseases. He basically was saying you know this can do everything. And the book was really popular like it's a lot of gobbies and it had all these testimonials in it of people saying oh this like made my pig giant or this like cured my paraplegic child or whatever. And so for about two years, like 1876 and 1877, there was suddenly this huge fad for
SPEAKER_10: all things blue.
SPEAKER_14: There were blue eyeglasses. She showed me a pair of blue eyeglasses from this period at the Museum of Vision. There was blue wallpaper. But the big thing was blue windows. So people would build like little sun porches and put one blue glass window you know thinking that you know if you could spend time bathing in the blue light that that would cure whatever failed you. And this has become known as the blue glass craze.
SPEAKER_03: And so when did the blue glass craze come crashing down when people realized it didn't work at all? Yeah, yeah, quickly. It lasted a couple of years.
SPEAKER_14: And you know like the whole time that it was going on there were people that were kind of poking fun the same way you know happens now when people believe in pseudo scientific things. There were editorials written about these idiots installing blue glass all through their houses but the real sort of nail in the coffin was this you know scientific American. I mean it speaks to it speaks to how widespread it was that scientific American took it upon themselves to like thoroughly debunk it in their pages. So there was a really long article just debunking every aspect of this science. And you know just to be perfectly clear about this.
SPEAKER_10: There is no way that color by itself or colored light is going to cure your eye disease or any disease. Go see your doctor.
SPEAKER_03: So are there any of these blue windows left like out in the world?
SPEAKER_14: Yeah I asked Jenny that. Are there like remnants of this era that you can see today like windows and buildings anywhere or?
SPEAKER_10: That is a really good question. I don't know if there are any buildings with blue windows specifically because of this but I bet it somewhere I would not be surprised we could go chase some down probably. If we were to find this mythical house with its windowpane it would probably just one blue window. Oh please tell me you found it.
SPEAKER_14: Well okay so one of the most comprehensive pieces of writing about this era was by the writer Paul Collins. Oh he's so great. He's like one of my favorites.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_14: Yeah he's a really good historical writer. And he you know he wrote a chapter about Augustus Pleasanton in one of his books and in the chapter he talks about about himself finding a window a blue glass window when he was living in San Francisco and so I called him up to sort of talk about that.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah I just was you know looking at houses as I walked along and there was this one with sort of a front or like parlor type of area that had blue glass panes in it.
SPEAKER_14: And you know he's not 100% sure that this is from that era.
SPEAKER_05: For all I know that might have just been like some hippie in 1970 that decided that would be a cool thing to do. But the age of the house was such that it was like the right era for that to have been an original bit of that fad.
SPEAKER_14: In the book he talks about how it's between these two gas stations on this one street in sort of the sunset in San Francisco. And so I did some like Google Street View sleuthing. And so here check it out. So here is the house. And you can see yeah these two panes here. And he thinks that this little entryway on the house is one of these sort of sun porches. That's awesome. Yeah it's pretty cool. And you can tell you know it's like a kind of older looking house on the block.
SPEAKER_03: It is yeah. No it's a Victorian and it looks like it could be from that era. Right. For sure.
SPEAKER_14: And so you know I decided to go check it out. Oh awesome. In between the Shell Station and the Chevron. See what we can find.
SPEAKER_15: No. Oh no. It's gone. It's gone. The house is gone. No. Oh no.
SPEAKER_14: So it was gone. The house had been turned into like a condo. Oh.
SPEAKER_03: So even that picture from Google Street View is out of date. Yeah. And the crazy thing is that that was from 2017.
SPEAKER_14: So I went there. I was like fairly confident. I was like oh I'm going to find it. I'm going to like knock on the door and be like hey what do you think about these blue
SPEAKER_15: glass like does it make you feel any better? Like how healthy are you?
SPEAKER_14: And I get there and the house with the blue windows has been torn down and now there's a giant box with a huge clear window. It's really ugly. I'm trying not to be nostalgic about architecture and buildings but this one really looks terrible.
SPEAKER_03: And worst of all the glass is clear. Yeah.
SPEAKER_14: Clear glass. What a bummer. Yeah. You know the story after my long search I still have not found a blue glass window. You know if anyone out there. If anyone has it.
SPEAKER_03: I mean there's got it. There's certainly houses that are extant from that era. I mean let us know.
SPEAKER_14: It seems plausible that someone out there has got one of these windows we could take a look at.
SPEAKER_03: That would be awesome. Cool.
SPEAKER_14: Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Thank you. Up next we'll have one more Christmas themed mini story.
SPEAKER_03: You're going to want this for your Christmas party banter right after this.
SPEAKER_04: USA for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, responds to emergencies and provides
SPEAKER_03: long term solutions for refugees in places like Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan and many more. UNHCR supports people forced to flee from war, violence and persecution at their greatest moment of need. Every day displaced families struggle to meet basic needs like providing meals and clean water for their children. For many the last few years have been the hardest. The global repercussions of war in Ukraine leading to steep rises in the cost of basic commodities like food and fuel combined with the climate crisis and COVID-19 formed a triple threat. Because of the commitment of their compassionate donors, UNHCR sends relief supplies and deploys its highly trained staff anywhere in the world at any given time. UNHCR is able to deploy within 72 hours of a large scale emergency and jumpstart relief and protection assistance. Help deliver urgent aid. Your support can provide life saving care and hope for a better future. Support to USA for UNHCR by visiting unrefugees.org slash donation. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Families need to use their logos, colors and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva magic resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. Our final mini story of the day comes from senior producer Katie Mingle.
SPEAKER_13: You know what would make it really cozy in here Roman?
SPEAKER_03: It's not cozy enough, this three by five box.
SPEAKER_13: It's actually like so hot in here, but just roll with me. Okay, okay.
SPEAKER_03: What would make it cozy in here? A fire. I wouldn't recommend starting a fire in here right now though. Okay, but what we could do, we could go to YouTube and find ourselves a Yule log.
SPEAKER_13: Do you want me to go to YouTube right now? Yeah, will you?
SPEAKER_13: Okay, yeah, sure. Just a tiny bit of history, a Yule log is an old term for a certain type of fire that people would burn at Christmas with like a special log. Oh, okay. But now often when people talk about a Yule log, they're talking about like this. So click on that first one. Oh, this 10 hours of crackling logs for Christmas, okay.
SPEAKER_03: It does its job as soon as the fire starts crackling, like it's relaxing. Yeah. Yeah, it's nice.
SPEAKER_13: This idea of putting a fireplace on TV so that you could watch it as if you had a fire in your home actually goes back to 1966. Cool. And it started at this little television, local television station in New York City called WPIX. And yeah, it was kind of the brainchild of the station manager, a guy named Fred Thrower. And you know how people are always like looking for holiday content. Right. Like we know this from working in radio.
SPEAKER_07: And it was really an idea in his head that he wanted to give city dwellers the luxury and the warmth of a Yule log fire who didn't have fireplaces in their apartment.
SPEAKER_13: So that's Chip Arcuri. He's kind of an amateur historian of this original Yule log.
SPEAKER_07: The location for the first shoot of the Yule log in 1966 was Gracie Mansion, which was the mayor's residence and still is. At the time, the mayor was John Lindsay and he gave them permission to come and film the
SPEAKER_07: Yule log, WPIX, their filming crew. And they did. But there was a mishap where a spark flew out and it damaged a very expensive oriental rug.
SPEAKER_13: So yeah, this was this was like a four thousand dollar rug, apparently. And they really messed it up. But anyway, they got their footage. They put it on the air. It was a three hour long broadcast with a loop of this fire and it would air on Christmas Eve and you'd turn on your TV to Channel 11. And it started actually started with like this little kind of Christmastime, you know, special message from someone at the station. The one that I found online, it's just striking because it's, how to put this, it's very Jesus forward.
SPEAKER_06: Let's hear it. And more than any other person in history, Jesus taught us to respect the godliness in ourselves and give it expression by doing God's work in the world. The gifts which we give this Christmas season as symbols of God's great gift to us will pass and be forgotten. But the gift of hope. So.
SPEAKER_03: Wow. So this is a secular UHF style station, right? It's a sort of local news station.
SPEAKER_13: That's amazing. Yeah. So and then after that message, they'd cut to the fireplace, which was the governor's mansion fireplace. And the camera would kind of do like a slow zoom. Like you'd start out seeing like the whole mantle. There was stockings on the mantle. And then in the, you know, it would slowly zoom in to where you were just seeing the fire. And then for the next three hours, they would play Christmas music.
SPEAKER_07: It is classic Christmas music from the 1950s and 60s.
SPEAKER_13: So yeah, so it's like a lot of orchestral kind of big band stuff. Like people like the Ray Conniff singers, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, Percy Faith.
SPEAKER_07: Percy Faith is the king of the Ulog. There's nobody that has more songs in the program than Percy Faith.
SPEAKER_03: King of the Ulog.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah. It's on his tombstone.
SPEAKER_07: I've always said that the program, if the program aired with a great video of a fireplace and an interior soundtrack, it would have not done very well. But it aired with a great soundtrack.
SPEAKER_13: Chip loves Christmas music. Like at some point he mentioned his list of top 500 Christmas songs. And I was like, I didn't even know there were 500 Christmas songs, let alone top. Wow.
SPEAKER_03: That's great.
SPEAKER_13: So yeah, Chip basically grew up with this Ulog broadcast. It was a Christmas Eve tradition. And yeah, he and his family used to watch it together, even though they actually had a real fireplace. We did actually watch it.
SPEAKER_07: We'd sat and we'd watched the actual program, the actual footage.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah. Like you would kind of gather around and put it on and you would all like stare at it?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Oh yeah. We would watch it like it was a real fireplace. You know, actually between the two. It would be on one side of the room, the TV with the fireplace, with the Ulog, and the other side in our family room was the real fireplace. And we were probably watching the Ulog more than we were the real fireplace.
SPEAKER_13: So New Yorkers love this broadcast and eventually the station decides they need to reshoot it because the film that they shot it on is deteriorating. And it was actually a 17 second loop. Oh my God. People could see. Totally.
SPEAKER_03: You could totally see a 17 second loop. That's crazy. I know.
SPEAKER_13: But you remember how like the first time they shot it, they like burned a hole in the governor's rug? Oh, he did not forget. Yeah. He would not let them back at Gracie Mansion because of the mishap with the rug.
SPEAKER_07: Now they needed a location.
SPEAKER_13: So yeah, he wouldn't let them go back there. And somehow, and this part is kind of lost to history, someone found a very similar looking fireplace and you'll never guess where it was.
SPEAKER_07: They located a very close, a similar fireplace in California of all places in Palo Alto. And they refilmed it in August of 1970 during a heat wave in Northern California.
SPEAKER_03: Whoa. The Bay Area zone, Palo Alto, California. Take that New Yorkers. That's awesome. And so New Yorkers have been watching our fireplace for 30 years or something?
SPEAKER_13: Yeah. So the Palo Alto fire became the Yule Log. It aired for 20 years. It's the classic Yule Log, not to be confused with the original Yule Log.
SPEAKER_07: The 1966 Yule Log that was shot at Gracie Mansion that aired for those first four years is the original, but it's not the classic because most people don't remember those original years that it aired.
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
SPEAKER_13: So yeah, this one, this one aired for a really long time. So 20 years. Yeah. And then in 1990, Christmas comes and Chip turns on his TV just like he did every year. And he turns channel 11. And it just wasn't on.
SPEAKER_07: We were all looking for it. It wasn't on. Luckily for me, I just had a feeling that it might not be on forever and I recorded it. So yeah, Chip had a recording.
SPEAKER_13: So he was fine, but the rest of New York was just out of luck. And people were mad. The station got a ton of letters.
SPEAKER_03: So why did they take it off the air after 20 years?
SPEAKER_13: So the station actually got a new program director. The new program director came in and said, what's this?
SPEAKER_07: The Yule Log, it's taken up too much commercial time, you know, take it off.
SPEAKER_13: Oh, heartless. So yeah, so Chip and a few other people actually started a petition to get it back on the air. They set up a website called bringbackthelog.com. But yeah, but nothing seemed to persuade the station that it was worth bringing back until actually 9-11.
SPEAKER_07: What happened is after the terrorist attacks, Betty Ellen Berlamino, who was the president of the station at the time, felt New Yorkers needed comfort food television. They needed something to remind them of the past, something of, you know, more simple, happier days.
SPEAKER_13: So yeah, they put it back on and it still runs today. It runs, I believe it's an hour on Christmas Eve and then a few hours on Christmas Day. Chip believes very strongly that the best time to watch it is Christmas Eve. And the way he talks about it, it's like, it's spiritual for him. It's like Christmas Eve mass. It's like a vigil, so to speak, with, you know, the cards are sent, the cookies are
SPEAKER_07: baked, the gifts are wrapped. And now it's just time to relax and enjoy the solemnity of the moment. Enjoy, you know, the peace and tranquility of Christmas before the crazy Christmas rush on Christmas Day.
SPEAKER_03: That's nice. Yeah. Is it the same Palo Alto Fire or did they film something new?
SPEAKER_13: I believe they're still using that same Palo Alto Fire. Yeah. So that's Chip Arcuri. He runs the Bring Back the Log turned into just the Yule Log.com. He's basically the keeper of all things Yule Log. And he even helped the TV station add another hour of music to the broadcast because he has this huge Christmas record collection. And a shout out to our own Avery Treffelman, who first told me about this history and to her dad, who I think told her.
SPEAKER_04: Oh, that's so cool.
SPEAKER_03: Wow. The Yule Log.
SPEAKER_03: We'll hear more mini stories from the rest of the 99PI crew as the first episode of 2019. But we will have episodes in the feed for the final two Tuesdays of 2018, even though they land on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. I figured there's a good portion of you who are traveling and resting, but still need nice things to listen to while you might have some time off work. And if you don't have time off work, we'll still be here for you. So stay tuned and happy new year.
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SPEAKER_00: When the weather app says rain, the McDonald's app says make delivery. Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app. And participating McDonald's delivery prices may be higher than restaurants delivery fees
SPEAKER_02: may apply. Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today. Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's fruit loops. Just so you know. Fruit. Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's fruit loops. The same way you say studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit loops, find the loopy side.
