039 Shut-in Trivia

Bob Smith 0:01
Coming up today on the off ramp Where did Hawaiian pizza originate? You may be surprised.

Marcia Smith 0:06
And what is the real meaning behind the term? white elephant gift?

Bob Smith 0:11
answers to those another questions coming up today on the off ramp with Bob

Marcia Smith 0:16
and Marsha Smith.

Bob Smith 0:25
Welcome to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith the chance to slow down steer clear of crazy take a side road to sanity and get some perspective on life. Well, we’re sheltering in place like you are as the Coronavirus hits. And first of all, I guess we want to say if anybody has someone who’s suffering from that our prayers are with you. And we want to try to make things as light and fun as possible as we’re all working together. You and I are working together. Yes, we are every waking hour. Yes. And

Marcia Smith 0:58
the virus can’t get over quick enough. Yeah. Why? Get back to the real show?

Bob Smith 1:05
I thought we were kind of having fun. We are. Okay, we are. Okay. Before we get started, I have a couple of facts. I thought you might find interesting about the volume of traffic and stuff on the internet which resolvable this? How many downloads of zoom, the video conferencing app, do you think at one given day that might be happening in any given day? Well, this is from the second week, actually the first week of March, but it was on a Wednesday. And the Wall Street Journal had a statistic here. Zoom is a video conferencing app.

Marcia Smith 1:37
I know and we use it we use it for family. Kids. Yeah. It’s great fun. All right. I don’t know 5 million.

Bob Smith 1:45
No, not that many amazingly. I think it’s not it’s not as ubiquitous as you might seem. 275,000 downloads though a video conferencing app zoom on Wednesday on Wednesday this week. Now, here’s another one. This is interesting of the top 100 Amazon Best Sellers. Books. Yeah, what 74% Of those

Marcia Smith 2:07
who I’ll bet you they’re catastrophe books. You think that? But no, no? Romance? No, wait, wait. Don’t tell me. Okay. Okay. Another show? Yeah.

Bob Smith 2:19
It’s just makes sense. Because you think of families being at home?

Marcia Smith 2:23
Yeah. Oh, I didn’t know self help books. I have no idea. children’s

Bob Smith 2:27
books. Oh, 74 of the top 100 Amazon bestsellers on a certain date last week? Were children’s books, or they were either books for children or books on how to educate children. Yeah.

Marcia Smith 2:40
Oh, yeah. Bucha. There’s a boom on that. That’s pretty cool. I love that.

Bob Smith 2:44
Yeah. And there was a 300% increase in sales of a card game called virus in recent weeks. That makes sense. And I guess, YouTube for all kinds of things is getting people to watch because that’s almost like a television

Marcia Smith 3:00
live. Oh, sure. Sure. Go watch kitty cats and

Bob Smith 3:04
dogs. So you got a question to start us off today?

Marcia Smith 3:07
Sure. Yeah. You know, Bob, ha, every Christmas, my book club. And I we exchange white elephant gifts? Yeah, one of the

Unknown Speaker 3:16
things. We have some of those in our garage. Oh, we have

Marcia Smith 3:19
a lot. And we get an I get all my white elephant gifts. You know from your relatives Christmas presents. They give you good. They’re listening. I’m sorry. But sounds me it does. But I’m sure you’re wondering where that term came from.

Bob Smith 3:33
Right? Where did it come from? I’ll tell you. Okay. Oh, she’s opening a huge reference book. Okay. Okay,

Marcia Smith 3:41
for a large part of the world. White Elephants have always been signs of power and portent really? Yeah, they were prized by monarchs and Buddha’s mother dreamt of one before giving birth to him. But they were also a mixed blessing. Because if it was a gift from a king gave you a white elephant, it would be dishonorable to reject it. Oh, you have to keep it. Well, yeah, white elephant, but what the heck, you know how much it costs to keep an elephant a lot of money. And it was horribly expensive to keep for anybody except the king. So white elephant has become our term for useless extravagance. It was everybody feared getting a white elephant from the King.

Bob Smith 4:29
So this is from India. Is that where this comes from? Or no,

Marcia Smith 4:33
I’m sorry. It’s Japan.

Bob Smith 4:35
Well, how far back does this go? Well, this

Marcia Smith 4:38
is between 1650 and 1700. That’s older than me.

Bob Smith 4:44
It is older. What’s your source there? It’s interesting.

Marcia Smith 4:47
The book is a history of the world in 100 objects. And along with this story, there’s a picture of two white elephants beautifully carved and decorated.

Bob Smith 4:56
But that is interesting. So it was like an axe. stravagant gift, a useless gift and it costs you tons

Marcia Smith 5:03
of money. The last thing you wanted from the local King was oh, he’s thanking me. Oh, no, no,

Bob Smith 5:07
it’s a white elephant. I had no idea. That is a fascinating thing. That’s a great thing. I’ve got this question I told you about and it sounded stupid. When I asked him. Where did Hawaiian pizza originate?

Marcia Smith 5:22
You would think you would think Hawaii right? Oh, okay. I was gonna say South Dakota, but yeah, possibly. Yeah, but

Bob Smith 5:29
that’s not true. So where? And it’s not South Dakota. It’s

Marcia Smith 5:33
okay. Sorry, Polynesia.

Bob Smith 5:35
No, okay. You think it would? It’s Canada? You’re right. I

Marcia Smith 5:40
wouldn’t. That had been our last guest. Yeah,

Bob Smith 5:43
it was invented by a North American who lived in Canada. Hawaiian pizza, which of course is tomato sauce, pineapple bacon or ham. It’s been controversial since it was introduced, you know, to some Hawaiian pizza tastes great to others. It’s a sacrilege, you know, taking tastebuds from pizzas, Italian origins, but Mental Floss says Hawaiian pizza is like doodling on the Mona Lisa. I don’t feel that way. But the story is that I love that

Marcia Smith 6:11
actually, with barbeque sauce.

Bob Smith 6:13
I think it’s great. Chatham, Ontario, Canada, and it originated GE it was a Canadian Greek immigrant, Sam Papadopoulos, who owned the satellite restaurant. That was the name of it. He just returned from Detroit where he had tasted pizza for the first time. And back. Oh, God. In the old days, pizza was considered an ethnic food. It wasn’t widely available in Canada. So he bought a small oven and he began preparing with traditional ingredients. But in 1962, he added pineapple just for the fun of it to see how it would taste and the sweetness and the salty ham added a new flavor. And he did he name it Hawaiian pizza. Yeah, apparently he called it Hawaiian, because that was the name of the brand of canned pineapple. Hawaiian pineapple. Cool. Yeah.

Marcia Smith 6:57
Well, I have a pizza question back at ya. Okay, since we don’t confer on these things, sometimes we overlap. But this is probably even more interesting than your response. Oh, no, I don’t think so. You want to guess what the earliest origins are for the modern pizza?

Bob Smith 7:13
No. Pizza goes back to like Roman times. I mean, long, long. It does. But I thought it was World War Two veterans brought it to America from Italy. I thought War Two.

Marcia Smith 7:24
I said, Well, there’s some overlap there. Yeah. My My sources tell me. They called me this morning. Okay, but I can’t reveal them. That more than you know, 2000 years ago, the Roman soldiers. So you were right there. They take matzah, Jewish matzah and put olive oil and cheese on the top, you know, to eat where they were out slaying dragons, or whatever the Roman soldiers did. And they didn’t come to the United States until the Great Depression years because it was cheap. And it was easy. And today, little factoid we have over 61,000 pizzerias in the United States. That’s from the year 1000. And and those pizzeria sell over 3 billion pies a year. And we contribute to that number Bob. Yes, we do considerably. That’s

Bob Smith 8:14
one of the carryout foods we have fried yes and love that was at the end of the first or second week of site. Let’s there’s some pizza. You know, you venture out from your home felt dangerous to go to the pizzeria to pick up the pizza. But we did. And it was kind of crazy. It was kind of fun. You know, as this is a time of disease, obviously. And everybody’s looking for cures and treatments. Can you tell me the answer to this question, Marcia. How did Coca Cola lead to the wonder drug that saved millions from infection?

Marcia Smith 8:46
Well, I bet I know this one. Okay, what is the drug? Cocaine? No, no, no, then I don’t have to listen to

Bob Smith 8:53
the full question here. Has nothing to do with cocaine. How did Coca Cola lead to the wonder drug that saved millions from infection? So what would that

Marcia Smith 9:03
be? That would be an antibiotic? Yes. There is antibiotics and Coca Cola? No.

Bob Smith 9:08
Oh, okay. It’s penicillin. How did Coca Cola lead to penicillin? I don’t know. Okay, well, here’s the answer. Okay. And it’s not the story of Coca Cola. It’s the story of a Coca Cola supplier. And the reason I’m telling this story is like this is a time of invention. We’re seeing all kinds of people coming up with new ways to treat things or to make masks or whatever. This happened in wartime and World War Two. Now. Pfizer, the name of a company Pfizer, we know today is a big pharmaceutical company, but back in the 30s. It was a company that made vitamins and using a deep tank process. They made the citric acid used in Coca Cola. Okay, so they made tons or gallons hundreds of gallons of citric acid in these tanks. Well, in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt pulled all These people in and said we got to find a way to make penicillin on a large scale because 1928 penicillin was invented by discovered by Alexander Fleming, Alexander Fleming. He invented penicillin. And it worked. But it was in very small in growing these bacterial molds, it was like in a laboratory, and even in 1939, a British policeman had a serious infection. He recovered in just 24 hours with penicillin. Great, right. But he died a few weeks later because the supply ran out. In fact, I didn’t know this. But in 1942, half the US stock of penicillin was used to treat a single patient’s blood poisoning. So it was nowhere near ubiquitous like we think of today. So FDR called all these titans of industry and people from universities and said, Come up with a way to make penicillin on a large scale. Well, Pfizer, John McCain of Pfizer, and Jasper Kane, they decided, why don’t we grow penicillin mold in our big deep tanks that we use to make these gallons of citric acid for Coca Cola. So in four months, they transformed an ice factory to a commercial grade manufacturing. And less than two years later, on June 6 1944, every allied soldier who landed in Normandy and D Day had a penicillin injection kit. That’s how fast they ramped up. And most of those kits came from Pfizer, and now they’re a $50 billion company, but it was that kind of invention that we’re looking for today to try to treat the Coronavirus COVID 19.

Marcia Smith 11:29
That’s amazing about the soldiers particularly having FDR did that. Yeah, made sure everyone was inoculated. Well, they had

Bob Smith 11:37
it so that they got infected while they’re fighting that would take care of an infection right away. Yeah. Wow. What do you got?

Marcia Smith 11:43
What is the only food we eat? That doesn’t spoil. Now, this is a food that actually you eat more than I do. It never, ever spoils.

Bob Smith 11:55
It doesn’t ever spoil. Now. It’s cornflakes? No, Golden Grahams? No. Graham crackers. Okay,

Marcia Smith 12:06
this is something that you consume, rather than I do raisins. No, well, that’s a good guess. I prefer raisins in the form of wine. But yes, that is raisins in the form of wine. Well, I think grapes either reduce grapes or raisins. Raisins in wine, but Well, I didn’t either until just this month. Okay. Okay. Okay. Let me give you another hint. Okay. It’s something you use with your tea. Oh, honey.

Bob Smith 12:33
Yeah, honey never goes bad. Oh, wow.

Marcia Smith 12:36
That’s interesting, isn’t it? It is short. coagulates

Bob Smith 12:40
yeah, sometimes it gets crusty kind of thing in the back. So you should just heat that up and use it because that’s not bad. Never throw honey away. Right. So is this also a romantic thing to say? Never throw your honey away?

Marcia Smith 12:51
I think so. I like it. I like that’s a good way. Yeah, it is. All right. You know about that the Lake Superior is the biggest, the deepest and the coldest of all the great lakes. But the question is, how big is it? If you drained it out and to the continental United States? How deep would the water be? I’ll give you three choices. Well, okay, six inches. This is overall of the United States. Six inches, one foot five feet.

Bob Smith 13:22
Oh, my goodness. Well, can’t be I’ll say six. I was thinking like three inches because that’s a lot. That’s a lot of water all over the 48 or 50. States.

Marcia Smith 13:32
It can’t be 50 Because how do you get the water to Hawaii?

Bob Smith 13:37
Hawaii you surrounded by

Marcia Smith 13:38
right now if you? It would well, you’re wrong. Oh and sell them? You are my dear. But it’s five feet.

Bob Smith 13:45
Oh my god. You made a few took and dumped Lake superiors water all over the continental United States. It would be five feet deep.

Marcia Smith 13:53
That is hard to believe. That’s amazing. That’s pretty deep. That

Bob Smith 13:57
makes you realize it’s really an inland sea. Yeah, that’s amazing. That is amazing. We should take a break and then come back in just a moment. You’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marsha Smith. Hi, we’re back. And I got a question here. It’s food oriented. Okay, yeah, we’re in the food. Okay, I like it. After doing his research into the meatpacking industry for the jungle. How did Upton Sinclair change his eating habits?

Marcia Smith 14:24
Oh, I think I’ll bet I read that book was one of my favorites. I would guess he’d become a vegetarian real quick. That’s exactly right. I couldn’t even read your hot dog after I read that book.

Bob Smith 14:35
Yeah, like many of his readers, but I’ve recovered. Well, he won the Pulitzer Prize. He became a vegetarian. He ate a diet of only rice and fruit for many years. It really

Marcia Smith 14:46
affected him. Oh, never want to tour a meatpacking plant. That’s the old adage. Yeah,

Bob Smith 14:54
okay. Let’s talk about hit records. Okay, just hit records over the past 100 You There’s been more than 100 years of recorded music in terms of numbers of members. What is the largest group ever to have a hit record? The largest group ever to have a hit record, not the Jackson Five

Marcia Smith 15:13
like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. That’s exactly.

Bob Smith 15:18
Yeah, Marsha, and this was in 1959, the group hit the charts with their version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. And there were 375 members who sang on that record. Really? Yeah. Oh, no.

Marcia Smith 15:32
No, no. Marines. What is the song they sang? They battle him. Yeah, the best. I’ve seen

Bob Smith 15:38
your you are on the right track. But let’s get to your question. Instead of singing. That’s,

Marcia Smith 15:43
I got that one. Right. Very good, overconfident now. Okay. All right. Here’s one. I’m pretty sure. Bob, you don’t know that the average marathon running distance is 26.2 miles. Yeah. You didn’t know that? Yes, I did. How did you know that?

Bob Smith 15:58
Because we recently talked about that. We watched the show Brittany runs a marathon. Yeah, that’s where we learned that since we’re not runners, it’s probably why I

Marcia Smith 16:07
was attracted to this question. Alright, but my question is, why is it this specific distance? 26.2 miles the average? You know, you know, that’s a fair question, because

Bob Smith 16:19
you’d think I would have thought, well, 25 miles, 50 miles, you know, why is it 26 mile? I don’t know. I have no idea. I do. Okay, well, that’s the answer.

Marcia Smith 16:29
Because it all started in Greece, right where everything started. And that is the exact distance between Athens and wait for it a city called marathon? No kid. Yeah. And now you know how the event got its name to 26

Bob Smith 16:44
miles from Athens to marathon. So a marathon run is 26 26.2.

Marcia Smith 16:48
And as a bonus question, Bob, how long does it take the average runner to run a marathon?

Bob Smith 16:58
I think it’s three or four hours, five hours? Yes.

Marcia Smith 17:02
That’s pretty good. You’re in the ballpark? Yeah, it’s the average is between four and five hours. And the average to run a mile is between nine and 11 and a half minutes. Okay. I thought that was very interesting. You

Bob Smith 17:15
know, we’ve been using communication a lot and I found an interesting, there’s an article called Okay, fine. Let’s all get back on Facebook. Written by Joanna stern in the Wall Street Journal. I just want to read you one quote. It’s kind of funny. It says our new Coronavirus reality confronts us with an extreme challenge stop our physical selves from being in contact with almost everything and everyone yet remain connected. Coincidentally, that’s the world Facebook’s been building for us all. Yeah, so it’s ambivalent. You know, people don’t like Facebook, but now they’re on Facebook and people were doing video on Facebook and she described after her mom using the Facebook portal. That’s the physical piece of hardware. After my mom donning a digital bowtie hat and glasses read my son, the itsy bitsy spider. He cried out again, Grandma, how

Speaker 1 18:02
cute is that? And she said, I began to tear up. Oh, see, it’s it’s meaningful. So I have

Bob Smith 18:08
a communication question now. Okay, so you notice how he’s

Unknown Speaker 18:12
so smooth segue. Awesome. Okay. In the days

Bob Smith 18:15
before the telegraph and the telephone and the Internet, how did Napoleon gain a communications advantage over his enemies?

Marcia Smith 18:25
I would think he’d have a contingency of slaves. He kept sending back forth with information Napoleon had slaves. I didn’t know this. I you know, just people okay? soldiers, soldiers, okay. Soldiers, and it was like telephone line. And they’d say, tell, and I run a half mile and tell the next person and okay, you’re telling the next person it

Bob Smith 18:47
is it was a relay and it was soldiers. He hit on the idea of us a semaphore telegraph visual message. So they had flags that signal x to and he had them as far as the eye could see he had a network of, of visual ciders across the countryside. And he could send a message from Paris to Rome in four hours. Wow. Which was a lot. You know, we’re talking back in the early 1800s.

Marcia Smith 19:13
Before I mentioned the really I was gonna say flags because you but I never thought of combining them, which makes perfect sense good for nappy. nappy nappy. Bobby

Bob Smith 19:23
was here. Okay.

Marcia Smith 19:24
What was his first name again? Bonaparte’s?

Bob Smith 19:27
No Bonaparte was his actual last name Napoleon Napoleon Bonaparte. Right? Because it was the Bonaparte family. Yeah, they were in our neighborhood. little pushy, too. Well, Yoshi little people.

Marcia Smith 19:40
Come on. He has a thing about okay, that’s right. This doesn’t like being short. That’s where we get the Napoleon Complex. That’s exactly right. I won’t name names but okay. There are all sorts of fun facts. You’re reading about now. For everybody staying at home, and a lot about food like you were talking about. So, according to our local newspaper, Bob, you want to take a venture. How many different uses there are for corn?

Bob Smith 20:13
This is from what the Milwaukee Journal. How many different uses there are uses? Yes. So beyond just being food

Marcia Smith 20:21
and on the cob, and on your plate and in your teeth? Well, yeah.

Bob Smith 20:27
It’s used as a source of embarrassment. Yeah. If you haven’t brushed your teeth, how many uses for corn? This is a weird thing, like cornmeal, corn bread, all the different corn things? Yeah, just venture flakes, which I mentioned earlier. So one thing with you, I don’t know how many 4000 Oh, my goodness, somebody has actually catalog? Well,

Marcia Smith 20:48
that’s what my question is, who counted them and why? Yeah. I mean, who gets up in the morning says, I think I’ll catalog how many uses for corn. Oh, my God.

Bob Smith 20:59
You know, you said something about Napoleon Complex. That’s a term right. That’s a term meaning somebody who is very overly sensitive about being short, right? Yes, there is a term the you know, what the term Semmelweis reflex I do not assemble a vise reflex. It’s interesting that you brought that up because Semmelweis was the physician who originally said, doctors should wash their hands. This is back in the 1900s. He’d set up an experiment at a hospital, he was in it, he had the doctors dip their hands in this lime solution, and the lime was kind of a limey chlorinated lime solution in a hospital because he was working in a hospital that catered to women who were having babies, a lot of women got infections. But he found out that the midwives didn’t have as much infection as they watched. They wash their hands and also the doctors were going from they were working with cadavers everything else and then intuitive, I know it is. But he set up this experiment they had a mortality rate of 18.3%. And after they wash their hands, the mortality went down to 2%. But he went for years he published books, he was ridiculed by physicians. For years he was ridiculed as the this this eccentric thinking doctors should wash their hands. But later on, or Yeah, in the 1880s, when the pioneers of germ theory proved that disease could be transmitted by microscopic particles, he was vindicated. From that point on, if you had a knee jerk reaction to reject new evidence because it contradicted established norms. You had a simple vise reflex, you’re rejecting things like the people who rejected Semmelweis. What’s his name? Well, Cemal Weiser Semmelweis. He was a Venetian doctor in Austria. Okay, in 1820. His name is Ignacio IGN, AZ, some advice? A lot of that going around. Yeah, yeah, you’re right, that people are rejecting science. In many cases now. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what’s getting people in trouble. It’s getting so that’s a very,

Unknown Speaker 23:00
I thought it was relevant. I’ve heard on it thing. It is.

Bob Smith 23:03
I’ve got a transportation question. There’s a railroad called the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. It’s still around. It’s in various forms. Now. It’s been absorbed into other railroads. But what was it the first to do that of all railroads in the world? What did the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad do a transportation milestone?

Marcia Smith 23:23
It crossed the mountains? No states? No rivers? No. I’m running out here. Don’t know.

Bob Smith 23:32
Okay. It was the first railroad to provide for both freight and passenger transportation. Prior to that time, it was all freight.

Marcia Smith 23:40
Oh, so they’re the ones that came up with, Hey, we could take people on this thing. Yeah, get on top of a bunch of logs and take you over to Akron.

Bob Smith 23:49
Yeah, it’s interesting because Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland, started it. He was the richest man in America. When he backed the railroad. It was the first railroad in the United States. And it was they actually produced the first US built locomotive in 1828. The Tom Thumb, Peter Cooper, who’s 28 year old inventor invented it, but it was the first railroad to pull passengers as well as freight. So they started a whole new business and funny

Marcia Smith 24:14
how it never occurred to anybody. And then one day, someone said, let’s put a person on. Yeah. Besides the there’s always an engineer. Right? Well, yeah. Right. He brought his wife and an idea.

Bob Smith 24:25
Or his girlfriend, it could have been Yes. The wife at home the passenger that wasn’t supposed to. Yeah, right. You got that? Right. They came upon. What do you have you got some questions? Yeah.

Marcia Smith 24:36
Okay. Bob, you know, what a Commonwealth is. It’s mostly former territories of the British Empire. Okay. So there are four US states that have the designation of a Commonwealth. Name those states Bob. Okay.

Bob Smith 24:52
All right. Let me say they are the eastern states. I think. I think the Commonwealth of Virginia is one correct? I thought Maryland was one. Okay, not Maryland. Were the Carolinas Commonwealth. Nope. Not doing too well here. Pennsylvania, correct. to Virginia. So then,

Marcia Smith 25:16
one obvious one, the only one I would get is this one.

Bob Smith 25:20
Georgia. No, that’s not. Okay. What were the what were the What do you mean? No. How would I know? No, I never react that way. When I ask you a question. No, that’s so stupid. What? What? What’s the answer?

Marcia Smith 25:31
Well, the other two. Yeah. All right. I’ll give you a hint. A lot of Kennedy’s like the state of Massachusetts. Okay. From the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I remember hearing that. And then there’s the fourth one that surprised me is Kentucky. Oh, really? Yeah. So it’s Massachusetts, Kentucky, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the only four Commonwealth states in America. Wow.

Bob Smith 25:53
Because I thought Kentucky in went to Kentucky was one of the first states outside of the 13 Verse 13 colonies

Marcia Smith 25:59
even think that it would be a Commonwealth. Yeah, I don’t get it. I’ve

Bob Smith 26:03
got one for another food one. Okay. And it’s something that happened in an emergency. In 1945, the German je RPE commission company of Omaha chirp, changed its name and introduced a new line of poultry food using techniques that developed during World War Two. What’s the name of the company today?

Marcia Smith 26:23
Chirp, Tyson is one that’s what you’d think. Yeah. But no, no. And I don’t know then

Bob Smith 26:30
Swanson. Swanson. Swanson. They began their line of Swanson canned and frozen chicken and turkey using experience they gained during the Second World War. And so all their poultry during that time was shipped to the armed forces. And then they introduced TV dinners in

Marcia Smith 26:46
1954. I bet you there was a lot of corn in some of those chicken dishes. What one of the many 4000 uses

Bob Smith 26:53
your get your corn it didn’t

Unknown Speaker 26:56
count and Bob, you do like corn. I

Bob Smith 26:58
didn’t like corn. I like corn too. That’s it for today for trivia for the off ramp. I’m Bob Smith.

Marcia Smith 27:04
I’m Marcia Smith. Join us again next

Bob Smith 27:05
time when we come back with more fun and interesting information here on the off ramp.

The off ramp is produced in association with CPL radio and the Cedarburg Public Library Cedarburg, Wisconsin.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai