Wood Chippers, Kids Parties and Onions | Mailbag 8

Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous mail Bag MINISOD. Yes, we're returning to the minisodes because you got questions and I've got answers. Hello, dear listeners. Together, we've seen an awful lotic together across time and space, and it's only natural that you would have questions. So this is my chance to publicly answer some of the friendly, odd, and occasionally gross questions that feed in through our various social media channels. On today's episode, I'm going to look at franchising disaster into child friendly birthday fair. I'll make a very child unfriendly choice between two equally terrible ways to die, and I'm gonna make a very stummach unfriendly choice between two equally terrible things to eat. In today's mail Bag, air or re Meyer from Los Angeles, California asked which disaster would make the worst or best theme for a children's birthday party? Or is this a two parter a Broadway musical? Good question, Aaron, but he also wants to know why. Okay, I've got a few ways of answering this, so let's get into it. My very first thought when I read this question was Titanic Obviously, it makes sense. They've got the slide, and it happened so long ago that people aren't going to get all that upset to see a Titanic themed birthday party, especially not in an age where it was mostly rich people who died. Except it wasn't mostly rich people who died, was it. That's kind of a thing about Titanic that I'm only just thinking of. Now, hold on one second. Yeah, I know people are really fond of saying, wow, it was the poor people who died from third class because they were considered disposable garbage by the crew. And yes, the first class passengers certainly did pay through the nose to be on this thing, But the average wage back in nineteen ten was between two and four hundred dollars a year. People made like twenty cents an hour someone in nineteen ten, when people were basically paid in potatoes, I'm guessing, and credit wasn't a thing. I can't imagine how destitute poor people were affording the equivalent of one thousand dollars to get onto this boat. I've read all the books, and you've probably seen the movie, but they did go over and above describing these people like they were all diseased orphans or something. But these are the richest of the This is upper middle poor class. I don't know what they would have been, but they certainly did not deserve what happened to them. And they paid a lot of money, more than double a yearly salary for an average worker to be on this thing. Most of the reason that I even think of Titanic right off the bat is them. The Titanic slide ride. Picture a giant carnival sized inflatable anthe like this is fifty one feet long, it's the back of the ship thirty three feet tall, and it's angling downwards. So you climb to the top of the back of the ship and then you slide back down into the water, avoiding any of the obstacles that people plarn their heads off on the way. Like in the movie when the ship went up a full ninety degrees, this one's closer like thirty to forty degrees. Whatever it is, we collectively as society have just sort of decided that we are absolutely cool making an amusement out of this disaster. I'm just sitting here and I just did the math real quick, and it occurred to me that in the time between then and now for us to become this shady. If we continued at the same pace, by the year twenty one oh three, children at birthday parties would line up to jump out of one of two twin towers into a net below, surrounded by firemen, because why wouldn't we? Why not everything's fair game. If nobody cares about anything, then nothing is worth caring about. As a bit of a tangent, at the Titanic Museum, they have this simulator where you can steer the boat, and there was a video going around TikTok where someone just spun the wheel like Matt and the ship missed the iceber cleared it no problem. It even had a congratulations sign come up on the screen, letting the person know that they had saved all souls on board, which to me suggests that even the designers of this amusement are shaming the crew of the original Titanic by saying, you didn't try hard enough. You're out there, grab an ice to put in your drinks and make jokes for the book in the movie later, but just spin the wheel. And at the same place they now actually have an amusement where it is the back of the ship, and the ship raises up mechanically, and you just set at the back and hold on as long as you can before inevitably you have to fall into the water and die. So yeah, I'm just going to go ahead and say that given enough time, nobody's feelings matter, nothing should be judged, and everything is fair game. I guess the other thing about Titanic as a theme is that you just literally bring in a bunch of ice as decorations, and you've just made this entirely authentic historical disaster party, and you did it on the cheap, yourself a white beard and a captain's outfit, and you get to be a hilarious party clown, but you get to be it with dignity and comfort, and you get to wear regular shoes, and you don't have to honk a horn or pull ribbons out of your mouth or put on any kind of weird voice. You just maybe tell a joke or to what did the purser say to the dislodged ice that happened upon the four deck tickets? Please? Yeah, But in sitting here really considering this question, I figure, if we're going to do this, we should actually do it from a list of disasters that we have already covered together, because God, that's way worse. So if I think about all the episodes that we've done so far for a children's birthday party, I guess if you're a traditionalist like me, and you like the idea of kids parties with clowns, fistfighting firefighters, I'm gonna highly recommend taking some pointers from our Toronto Circus Riot of eighteen fifty five episode. I mean, as events go, this is something that really gives the parents something to do, like drink and watch, or gamble on the outcome, or drink and join in. Who knows what about the Great Boston Malassacre of nineteen nineteen, but instead of a fifty foot wall of molasses turning everyone into a giant overly sweetened smear, it's all scaled down and replaced with the tank of maybe kool aid or mountain dew or whatever is fashionable and popular at the time. I mean, it's gross, and you're gonna have to have your house sold or burned down when you're done, and the kids are all gonna need a change of clothes. You could do the Kalamazoo pile up of twenty fifteen. You could do that with bumper cars. That could be fun. In fact, whatever was I was thinking of there you could probably actually have done during our batter Sea Funfair disaster of nineteen seventy two. I mean, it's a theme park and it's got rides right there. I mean, it's kind of a perfect place to throw a party. But the opposite side of that coin is it's going to be expensive because you're dragging a lot of kids and you're gonna want to leave early. You know, if you remember how that episode all turned out. I look through a lot of the other episodes, you know, elevators, mining, disaster, building collapses. There's not a lot that I would voluntarily want to drag a bunch of children too. But hands down, looking at the list, there can only be one answer to my way of thinking, and my final answer is that I would be more than happy to drag a gaggle of kids and party hats down to the shore of San Diego Bay to watch the Big baye Boom disaster of twenty twelve. I am highly confident in that response. I will be of that same answer every day of the week. When you do a twenty minute fireworks show in thirty seconds. That's not something you're gonna forget. And I'm guessing all that hearing loss would make for a fairly quiet ride home Big Bay Boom Disaster of twenty twelve. Final answer, but that's for birthday parties. Now I got to think about Broadway musicals, and again, the most obvious answer is Titanic. When I was a teenager, me and my friend Mark went down to the Big Old City Improv here in Toronto and we watched a recreation of the Poseidon Adventure. The whole thing was super low key and hilarious, and Mark got his shoes thrown up on. But it proved that seaborn adventures were born to be told on the stage. Titanic as an answer is perfect for two reasons. If people lined up to see Cats for eighteen years, then people bought eight or nine copies of Titanic on VHS, it would have done a killing on Broadway. And I just looked it up and it turns out Titanic the musical opened at the Lantfonteine Theater on Broadway in April of nineteen ninety seven. It played eight hundred and four times before it finally closed in March of nineteen ninety nine. Holy cow, this less than two years later, eight hundred and four showings. That means it played thirty five times a month for just under two years. That's very ambitious, but just not long lived. It really should have lasted a lot longer than that. So Titanic was in theaters for ten months and super fans went to see it three times a day every day of the entire run, So it made over two and a quarter billion dollars. And I'm thinking, boy, then you think about their core audience. They've got to be too broke to go see it on Broadway by now, So really, I think it would have worked out better if they had just waited till after the movie had finished it's run and then launched the Broadway musical so that those few rare people with a couple of bucks still to rub together had something to run. Salivating two. But again, in my world, we work with what we've got, so we're going to choose from episodes that we've covered together. I could see some real interesting set pieces in the Niagara Falls ice Bridge disaster of nineteen twelve, or maybe the Happy Valley Race disaster and I think Broadway does a fairly good job of just taking a throwaway line or a meme and somehow creating a two and a half hour musical around it. So I'm not overly worried that someone wouldn't be able to figure out a fairly good stage play for any of our disaster episodes. But I have to choose one, and I don't want to do this all day, So ready my choice once again, the Big Bay Boom Disaster of twenty twelve. And I know the disaster is only like half a minute long, but they could add three hours of preamble and people trying to yell at each other because they can't hear afterwards, and I still think it would be damn entertaining. I think it would be better than Miss Saigon or remember that Spider Man musical that crippled all them Spider Man. I think it takes all that, rolls it into one and then beats it. I think I said it at the time when Big Bay Boom came out that I think it's possibly my favorite disaster, or at least the one that I would most like to witness for myself in real time. And I'm pretty sure I would be happy to see it as a mobile video game or a Japanese anime, or just put it into any format you want. It's a good time. Okay, all right, all right. Next question, listener carry In from the UK, wants to know, well, all kinds of things, really, but which of her questions may be the hottest, or at least the most recently weird. She asked if I would rather be killed by a wood chipper or slowly crushed to death by an elephant's foot black Okay, well, I love animals and I love elephants, just not quite enough to get killed by one. I mean, I love food, but I don't want to choke to death on it. I don't think I have any feelings about wood schippers except that they're loud, and I have no interest in being killed in one. Actually, to be specific, let me clarify in case you were wondering, I am not looking to be killed by anything other than debt. So let's explore. If I had to willingly climb into a wood chipper, my instinct tells me to just go in head first. I don't know if I've ever said this on the show before, but an old friend says that if you ever find yourself forced to eat a sandwich, the best technique for doing that is to simply take big bites and power your way through. I'm thinking go in head first, and once you get past your jawline, they can pretty much do whatever they want with the rest of your body, because the part of you that makes you you is going to be floating around the universe as a pink mist. I think the horror of all this could potentially just give you a heart attack before even your eyebrows are pulled off. But at least a wood chipper is probably loud enough so that witnesses don't have to live the rest of their lives remembering the sounds of your screams. I'm only kidding. I have every confidence and your ability to outscream a woodschipper, each and every one of you. The thing that we're not thinking about it is we focus obviously a lot on the chewy end, you know, and how awful that would need to be pulled apart by high speed spinning blades. All of that really takes the mind off the fact that whatever goes in the one end has to come out the other end as a high speed spray of blood and viscera because you're effectively going through a blender. So if it were me, I'm just saying that I would make it more My last request to have my woodschipper pointed directly at the people who made me do this. Sorry to carry in. Okay, but we don't have to go into the wood schipper. There's always the elephants. I mean, they will kill people terribly, but they only really ever do it under extreme circumstances. Elephants are pretty gentle overall. They're intelligence and empathy make them pretty unlikely to want to go out and willingly kill another animal. But because they are so intelligent, it means that they're smart enough to know how to do it as painfully as possible if you just piss them off enough. So it's going to crush me, and it's going to do it slowly, and that's going to be a problem. Are they crushing my head so I die relatively quick or are they standing on my genitals so I die by screaming myself airless. There's no real good options in any part of this question, But in this scenario, on the one hand, I get to hang out with an elephant, so that's a pro Okay, let me actually do something here once again. Oop. Sorry, okay, heads tails and damn it. Okay, So I just flipped a coin and it came back with elephant, but woodchipper went out on best two out of three. So I threw that coin in the garbage, which I really shouldn't do because money is tight, and I just really dislike this question. There are no good answers. I don't even think there's a lesser of two evils here. I'm trying to picture the court sketch artist depictions of my death. There would be a lot of goo in both scenarios. But but you could take a photo of an elephant standing on me, and you could crop it in such a way that it just becomes a lovely, g rated photo of an elephant. But there's no good way to crop a person simultaneously entering and exiting a wood chipper at the same time to make it palatable. So I'm going with elephant. Final answer. My apologies to the elephant and to my family and to anyone else who has to watch or listen. And I'll point out Carrie in Loves to send me these kinds of questions all the time, and I want her to know very specifically. I put a lot of thought into your questions and wrap this up the final question of the day, which I can't just attribute to anybody because so many people were asking, because only people on Patreon really found out my true feelings and got to watch me do this. People really wanted to know what did I hate the least, vegamite or marmite? Well, I just literally got some marmite on my hands, and this stuff wasn't refrigerated. I didn't even know if it's supposed to be refrigerated, and now they smell like a Southern Pacific bowel movement. Well, my Patreon's got to find out everything. And again I apologize to all of them, especially to Lindsay Anderson, who won this contest. And let me say, I understand that gratitude can only run so deep, and I again offer my sincere apologies to both you and your family. And a lot of people pointed out in the video that I released that I ate kind of too much. I was smearing it on, I was using peanut butter rules. I really didn't know. You're just supposed to waft it over to give a general sense of taste, and a lot of people said that I might have flavored the way I reacted when I repeatedly ate this stuff on toast, and yes, lesson learned, which I'm afraid I'm never going to actually be able to utilize unless somebody maybe sends me a ticket to Australia or New Zealand. For the most part, I really had a difficult time trying to even decide between the two. I mean, they are unique, but I think I used words like wood bark and fish parts and bicycle tires to try to describe the flavor. But because I ate so damn much, I completely destroyed my body's ability to really calculate an opinion. Vegemite has a kind of a hickory taste maybe, and it's got the consistency of Natella. Marmite, on the other hand, has I don't even know how to describe the smell and has more of a low viscosity axle grease kind of a consistency to it. The bottom line was it was a fun thing to do for my listeners in the South Pacific. I don't get to get to Australia or New Zealand all that often, so it's nice to be able to reach out to them and give something back for all their appreciation for the show. And then Peter J wrote in, and Peter J is a diligent listener of the show, And Peter J remembered that I have threatened to eat onions on this show many times. I think in our the US Navy versus Typhoon Cobra episode, I refer to people and sharks eating onions. I know. I think I actually just referred to it in our last episode. So for Peter Jay's edification today, I am going to tell you what is better between a regular yellow onion and a purple or red onion, depending on what you want to call it. And just get this out of the way. I'm just going to do it quick, and I should say I do like onions, all right, yellow onion. Hm, that's a lot of onion. Oh, that's a lot. I don't know for one point. M mm hmmm mmmm. Oh, okay, that's a good start. Yeah, that literally tastes like an onion, but just like so much onion, A lot of onion all at wants. Oh hmm okay, I like it. Good stuff. A purple onion ready, m m m m hm m hm m m m m m mmmm. Oh god, Okay, that was a bunch. What can I tell you? There is a certain rustic sweetness available in the purple a red onion, which is simply lacking in the yellow onion. All right, Peter, uh, I'm going to say that my onion of choice. It's purple whatever. It is. The vapor that's released from onion cells when you cut them that go up into the eye. I don't get that. I'm not really susceptible to that so much. But when you eat an onion like an apple, you get so much of that concentrated in you so fast it's really quite wild. It's a good vampire test, I guess. Oh. I don't know that this is the worst part. But the only thing I have to wash the taste out of my mouth with is plump sauce or jalapeno brine. That'll wake you up. That's literally my favorite of the three. So if you want to see me eat fire or something, you can reach out to me at Twitter, Facebook or whatever that other thing is called as doomsday Podcast, or you could just fire me an email to doomsday pod at g mail dot com. All our older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review. Oh and tell your friends. And if you care to support the ongoing production of the show, you can always find us at Patreon dot com slash Funeral Gazoo, or if you're not into a whole relationship, you can just visit Buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Doumbesday. We'll be back next week with an all new full length episode, this one by popular demand and designed to honor the memory of the three cars in this calendar year that have gone to the Great Auto Shop in the Sky. And that's just so far. It's only September. We'll talk soon. Safety gog goes off, and thanks for listening.