Marcia Smith 0:00
What was the very first artificial Christmas tree made of and what sea creature can make

Bob Smith 0:06
a sound louder than a gun? Oh, yeah, answers to those and other questions coming up in this episode of the off ramp with Bob and Marcia

Marcia Smith 0:14
Smith. You

Bob Smith 0:31
Music. Welcome to the off ramp. A chance to slow down, steer clear of crazy and take a side road to sanity with fascinating facts, tantalizing trivia, something that should give you some perspective on life. Yes, indeed, hopefully. Okay, Marcia, the

Marcia Smith 0:48
first Christmas tree, artificial Christmas tree. Well, we had our first artificial Christmas tree this year. It was, it was a big deal for us or for me, not for you, for you. Yeah,

Bob Smith 0:57
it was a big conversion. It was like going to another religion or something. It

Marcia Smith 1:01
was, but I did it, and it’s, it’s stunning. I’m not sorry, yes,

Bob Smith 1:05
you’ve reacted very good to that. Except every morning when you get that water and just about ready to pour water on that, I’m thinking, No,

Marcia Smith 1:13
I still have the urge to water it all these years. Okay, Bob, what was it made of? The first Christmas tree, artificial Christmas tree? Well,

Bob Smith 1:27
I thought the first one was made out of toilet brush. Well, that was a thing

Marcia Smith 1:30
in America. The guy had he made one. But the very first, this goes back to the 19th century,

Bob Smith 1:36
okay, the very first Christmas tree that was artificial was made of feathers. What? Yeah,

Marcia Smith 1:42
it only seems right that the creators of the modern Christmas tree would also create the first artificial version. By the 19th century, demand for holiday trees had caused issues in the German lumber industry. Oh, they were the first right, and they were going through all their blood trees. Yeah, small country, so they had to make room for SAP free alternatives to emerge. So they came up. The first artificial trees were produced in Germany during the 1880s and commonly made from goose feathers. That’s amazing, although turkey, chicken or swan feathers died, green were also used. Oh, dear. The plumes were attached to metal wires to form delicate branches that got their lift from a wooden base. I

Bob Smith 2:29
can’t believe that. I just can’t imagine bringing in all

Marcia Smith 2:31
these plumes of swan feathers and bird feathers, kind

Bob Smith 2:35
of unsanitary bird feathers in the house,

Marcia Smith 2:38
I guess so. Bob, what about your question? Okay, my

Bob Smith 2:41
question is, what type of sea creature can make a sound louder than a gun? I’ll give you some alternatives. Thank you. Is it a crab, a jellyfish, a sponge or a shrimp?

Unknown Speaker 2:52
Really?

Bob Smith 2:55
Again, what type of sea creature can make a sound louder than a gun? A crab, jellyfish, sponge or shrimp? I’ll

Marcia Smith 3:03
say, I’ll say, a sponge. No, that doesn’t seem like it would make a lot of noise. I’ll say, a crab. How many

Bob Smith 3:09
sponges sound louder than guns to you? I don’t know. I

Marcia Smith 3:13
don’t know. Tell me. I really it’s not what was the second thing I know

Bob Smith 3:17
this is interesting. It’s a shrimp, believe it or not, shrimp. It’s called the pistol shrimp. Really, when a pistol shrimp senses prey is nearby, it will open the top part of its big claw, which allows some water to enter a small chamber in the crook of the claw, and then when it clamps down, the pressure from a small plunger on the top claw forces the water out of the chamber, it happens so fast it creates bubbles and the snap of one recently discovered species of pistol shrimp can reach 210 decibels.

Marcia Smith 3:48
Can you believe that? Well, give me a comparison.

Bob Smith 3:50
Well, that’s louder than a gun shop, which is around 140 to 175 Wow. But the funny thing is, they named this thing after something also loud. They named it synopheus, pink floydious,

Unknown Speaker 4:04
Pink Floyd.

Bob Smith 4:06
Naming it after Pink Floyd. That’s

Marcia Smith 4:08
funny. Yeah, okay. Are they edible? I eat a lot of shrimp. I

Bob Smith 4:12
don’t know. I was wondering if they were edible when I read this, because I thought, oh, Marcia likes shrimp. I surely she won’t believe it’s a shrimp that sounds louder than a gun. That

Marcia Smith 4:20
is interesting, yeah, okay, Bob in 2024 researchers discovered a 35,000 year old newborn Saber Tooth cat in Siberia. Wow. What made this discovery so unusual,

Bob Smith 4:35
it’s a fossilized newborn. Is that what they found? No, oh, they didn’t. No. This is a newborn animal, yeah, 35,000

Marcia Smith 4:42
year old. Well, maybe, how

Unknown Speaker 4:43
can it be?

Marcia Smith 4:44
How can it be? Is

Bob Smith 4:45
it in some kind of rock or something? No, okay, I don’t know.

Marcia Smith 4:50
Okay, it was a perfectly preserved animal found in the Siberian permafrost, complete with its whiskers, claws and thick fur, still intact. Wow.

Speaker 1 5:00
So they could actually see what it looked like. It looked like it died yesterday. Jeez. And

Marcia Smith 5:04
the extraordinary find allowed scientists to get an unprecedented glimpse into the saber tooth biology and climate adaptations it had to make. So it’s was perfectly preserved. A lot

Bob Smith 5:16
of that going on with these glaciers melting and everything, they’re finding things frozen in the permafrost, right? Yeah, people and animals and tools that they never knew before. Okay? Marcia, this is an offbeat one. All right, sure. This is very offbeat. I love bringing things together that you can’t believe they have any relationship to one another. Okay, what roles did Tab Hunter, Bob Newhart and the Eberly brothers play in helping launch and save what became one of the world’s most successful music companies.

Marcia Smith 5:47
Tab Hunter, okay, Bob Newhart, he had all. Bob Newhart, yeah, I’m trying. And what was the third one? Tab

Bob Smith 5:55
Hunter,

Marcia Smith 5:56
could he sing? And

Bob Smith 5:56
the Everly Brothers? Everly

Marcia Smith 5:58
Brothers, wow,

Bob Smith 5:59
yes. Tab Hunter could sing, apparently, in 1957 he had a number one hit song for Dot Records, dot which was a division of Paramount Pictures. The only problem is, Warner Brothers was his studio, and they didn’t like the fact that he was recording for a division of Paramount Pictures. Okay? They didn’t want other Warner actors recording for rival Film Studio. So they created their own label, Warner Brothers Records. That’s how it got started. Is there still one? Yes, there still is. Actually there’s a Warner Music Company. We’ll get to that in a second. So anyway, so there’s this Warner Brothers Records. And for a couple years they went along, and it was doing so poorly in 1960 It was rumored that Jack Warner the brothers were still alive. He thought, let’s pull the plug on this thing. It’s not making any money. Then two things happened at once. One, Warners recorded a new comedians nightclub act which became a monster hit,

Marcia Smith 6:49
Bob Newhart, that’s

Bob Smith 6:50
right buttoned up Mind the button down mind of Bob Newhart. It sold 600,000 albums and dominated the charts for 14 weeks. Not only that, it was the first comedy album to win a Grammy for Album of the Year, and the first time a comedian ever won a Grammy for new artist. That’s Bob Newhart. The second thing in 1960 was the Eberly brothers Kathy’s clown, their first big hit after they had signed a million dollar contract with Warner Brothers, nothing was happening. All of a sudden, that happened, and those two things made Warner Brothers realized, I guess we’ll stay the course here, and today, the Warner Music Group is one of the giants of the recording industry, one of the top three. So that’s how Tab Hunter Bob Newhart and the Everly Brothers helped launch and save one of the world’s most successful music companies. Okay? And here’s a funny tidbit on how influential Bob Newhart was as a comedian in 1998 in his acceptance speech winning the Kennedy Center Mark Twain prize for American humor black comedian Richard Pryor, he received his award from Bob Newhart, and he confessed to Bob that night that as a young man, he shoplifted a copy of the button down mind of Bob Newhart. He wanted to study it to perfect his own comedy. And you know what Bob Newhart said to him, what? Well, then Richard, you You owe me a quarter in royalties, because that’s what he got paid for album.

Marcia Smith 8:11
I like the way you stuttered a little bit. Then you owe me money a quarter. That’s funny. That’s very funny. Okay, Bob, what was the point, so to speak, of the spikes on World War One era German helmets.

Bob Smith 8:27
Oh, that’s good question. That’s right. Didn’t they have those as a spike so they could spike them in the ground and then use them to feed themselves, eat their food out of their helmet if they needed to.

Marcia Smith 8:36
Hmm, it’s not in the many answers I have here, but no.

Bob Smith 8:41
Or they could wash their clothes in it. You know, they spike it into the ground. They got a bowl there, like a soup bowl. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 8:46
no, the famous spike adorned German helmet from World War One is called a pickle. Haba hobby, H, A, U, B, E. How would you pronounce that hobby? I think so. And it was designed in 1842 by King Frederick Wilhelm, the fourth Wilhelm of Prussia. Hmm. Its original purpose as a point was to attach the decorative strands of a Calvary helmet plume, you know?

Unknown Speaker 9:14
Okay,

Marcia Smith 9:15
it would hold the plume. Oh, I

Bob Smith 9:16
see. So it’s like to help when they’re dressed in their high uniform.

Marcia Smith 9:19
Yeah, later, the spike itself, without the attached plume, gained esthetic value for its aggressive appearance and was favored by the German infantry. Well, you can see that coming at you that would scare though, that would heck out a Yeah, the pickle harbor didn’t last for the entirety of the war, though it was discontinued in 1916 due to its ill suitedness For trench warfare, I’m sure they stabbed each other a lot with these things accidentally, and the shortage of materials necessary to manufacture them, that didn’t stop it from being an enduring symbol of the German army, as its sinister appearance was ideal. For War propaganda depicting the Germans as vicious aggressors. Yes, I

Bob Smith 10:05
think I remember seeing that in some of those old World War One posters you see once in a while

Marcia Smith 10:09
to celebrate the end of the war, New York City built a pyramid out of about 85,000 pickles. They stacked them up, 85,000 of them. Wow.

Bob Smith 10:20
Where did they get all those? He had to ship them over from Europe, I guess, for the war, right? Oh, yeah. Speaking of pickles, Marcia, what famous, really? You

Marcia Smith 10:29
have a transition for pickles. That wasn’t

Bob Smith 10:30
the original question. But speaking of pickles, what famous, famous female figure in history credited pickles as being one of her beauty secrets? Really? Yes, what famous female figure in history credited pickles? Was

Marcia Smith 10:46
she an actress? No, was she a queen or something? She was a ruler, a ruler? Well, it had to be one of the nutty ones.

Bob Smith 10:54
Oh, I don’t know, one of the beautiful ones. She said pickles were part of her beauty. Secrets. Cleopatra, believe

Marcia Smith 11:01
it or not, that wasn’t in the movie.

Bob Smith 11:04
I don’t think Liz showed that a Liz Taylor, Cleopatra claimed pickles contributed to her beauty. Now, pickling dates back 4000 years to ancient Mesopotamia, where cucumbers were preserved to extend their shelf life. Pickles have since been enjoyed by various cultures, including Romans, Greeks and Egyptians, and their staple in many cuisines, but only Cleopatra claimed pickles as part of her beauty regimen. How did she didn’t say it. Didn’t say didn’t say how they used it. Did she just eat them or what? Well, did

Marcia Smith 11:33
she wipe her body down? No more. Bring me the pickle juice. Cassandra, all right, okay.

Speaker 2 11:39
Marcia, I have a question for you, which is taller, the London Eye or the Dubai eye? What are you? What am I talking about? Okay, so they’re both wheels, okay, they’re both observation wheels, like the Ferris wheel, yeah. Original was called a Ferris wheel, designed by civil engineer George Washington, Gale Ferris for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. That was 264 feet tall, very tall. Although the 443 foot tall London Eye was the first observation wheel to exceed 400 feet in height. What is the Dubai eye? How big is that?

Unknown Speaker 12:13
Is that the question? Yeah, it’s

Bob Smith 12:14
the largest Ferris Wheel. How tall is it?

Unknown Speaker 12:16
Why do they call it an eye? Because it’s circle. It’s

Bob Smith 12:19
a big circle. Okay, and

Marcia Smith 12:20
how tall was the other one in

Bob Smith 12:22
the other one in London was 443 feet. The original was 264 I’ll

Unknown Speaker 12:26
say this is 600 feet. It is 820

Speaker 2 12:30
feet, and it contains 48 rotating cabins. Oh, really, yeah, that’s a lot. Opened in 2021 apparently some other wheels have since surpassed it. But these are much bigger than the Ferris wheel that comes to your county fair. You know, there’s nothing like it. It’s huge.

Marcia Smith 12:46
Okay, all right, it’s time for a break away.

Bob Smith 12:50
I think it’s time for a break. You’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith, we’ll be back in just a moment. Okay, you’re listening to the off ramp with Bob and Marcia Smith, we do this each week for the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and its internet radio station. After it airs, it is put on podcast platforms and is heard all

Marcia Smith 13:10
over the world. Did I overdo it? There was it too much?

Bob Smith 13:15
It’s still it’s still echoing. I can’t. How do you stop that? Okay, there we go. All right, it’s clean now, all right. Marcia, what do you got? Why

Marcia Smith 13:22
is something tasteless and cheap said to be tawdry? Where does that word come

Unknown Speaker 13:27
tawdry, T A, W, D, R, Y, correct. Audrey, where does that come

Bob Smith 13:32
from? Was a girlfriend’s name of mine, tawdry, or did he just call her that again? Let’s see

Marcia Smith 13:39
any clue, no, I don’t know. This is just so weird. In 672 ad, you remember that? Wow, the eventual st Audrey entered a convent for a life of penance and prayer. Although she had been married twice, I guess it was time to relax. As a young woman, she used to wear very fine, beautiful necklaces. It was a habit she thought was the cause of a terminal neck tumor, oh, dear, which was huge in her neck, and she covered it with a scarf, really. Yeah, after her death, people honored her by wearing fine silk scarves around their necks. Over time, the expensive and fancy st Audrey scarves were followed with cheap imitations used by the English lower classes who pronounce st Audrey as tawdry st, tawdry st, Audrey.

Unknown Speaker 14:30
Yes. So

Marcia Smith 14:31
they came out tawdry.

Bob Smith 14:33
So if it was cheap and not as good as the original, as tawdry,

Marcia Smith 14:37
they would say it’s my tawdry scarf.

Bob Smith 14:39
Oh, my god, is that right? That’s right. So it’s a colloquial term. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 14:44
they would just say, This is my tawdry scarf. Audrey and the upper classes shun them for their tawdry scars. If you’re wondering, I had to look it up. Who was St Audrey, a patron of she was a patron saint of widows. I. Oh, and she was married twice. All right. All right.

Bob Smith 15:03
Okay. Marcia, let’s look ahead. 2050 how many people do you think the world will have? What’s the projection?

Marcia Smith 15:09
What is it now?

Bob Smith 15:10
Right now, it’s about 7.9

Speaker 1 15:12
billion in what year did you say in 2050

Bob Smith 15:16
What do you think it’s going to be? Okay,

Marcia Smith 15:18
I’ll say 10 billion.

Speaker 2 15:19
That’s exactly what they think that estimate is based on the current global fertility rate, which averages 2.3 births per women and dropping, I think yes, as well as other population indicators that are tracked in 200 countries, you’re right. In fact, they say many countries in Africa will have doubled their populations, with some countries like Angola, expected to increase by 150% by that time. But most countries, the population is growing about 1% to 1.1% per year, and 60 years ago, is growing at 2.2% Yeah, big difference. So half of the world’s population will be concentrated, they think in nine countries by 2050 Do you know what the nine countries are? No just nine countries expected to make up for more than 50% of the population growth. What are they? Well, the United Nations says they are these countries, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt. And this is surprise, the United States,

Marcia Smith 16:16
really. United States doesn’t fit in with that. I know much kind of odd, isn’t it? And just in our lifetime, we’ve seen families really shrink from three, four kids to one or

Bob Smith 16:27
none, one or none, exactly. Well, when you have none, it’s not a family anymore. Well,

Marcia Smith 16:31
there’s a husband and wife and their dog and

Bob Smith 16:34
family, I guess. Yeah, a furry family, a furry family of friends.

Marcia Smith 16:38
It’s time for, oh, aka

Bob Smith 16:42
also known as, that’s right. All right, what’s going on today? All

Marcia Smith 16:45
right. The category is Disney movies. All right. You ready for this? So if I said snoozing hottie, what Disney movie am I referring to? Snoozing

Bob Smith 16:56
hottie? Sleeping Beauty, very good. I got that one. You did. That’s about the only one. I’ll bet. No, no, okay, most

Marcia Smith 17:02
of all. Right, frost bitten.

Bob Smith 17:04
Frost bitten, frozen. That’s

Marcia Smith 17:06
right, that tiny fish, Woman,

Bob Smith 17:09
The Little Mermaid.

Marcia Smith 17:10
See, you’ve seen all these many firehouse dogs.

Bob Smith 17:15
What’s that many firehouse dogs? 101 Dalmatians. Excellent.

Marcia Smith 17:18
Here’s one you liked. The unbelievables, the

Bob Smith 17:22
unbelievables, the unbelievables. What would the unbelievables be? Ghosts?

Marcia Smith 17:27
I don’t know. You like this movie, okay, the incredible The Incredibles, yeah, they

Bob Smith 17:32
were funny movie, hot chocolate,

Marcia Smith 17:35
hot

Bob Smith 17:36
chocolate, hot chocolate. A Disney movie. That’s hot chocolate. Yeah,

Marcia Smith 17:41
you probably, I know this movie, but you probably don’t just think, what is hot chocolate? Hot

Bob Smith 17:46
chocolate,

Speaker 1 17:47
it’s called, also mocha Coco. Coco.

Bob Smith 17:51
That’s a, Oh, that’s right. That was the Mexican film. Okay, gotcha.

Marcia Smith 17:54
Yeah, that was cute. Coco. And finally, Bob Frampton skillet.

Bob Smith 18:00
Frampton skillet, Frampton, like Peter Frampton, Peter

Unknown Speaker 18:04
skillet, Peter

Bob Smith 18:06
Pan, Peter Pan. All right, Little Rock and Roll reference there. I could get that one, all right. Oh, well, boy. I tell you every time you say AKA, I’ve had such bad experience in a couple of these. It actually starts me being a little anxious, like, oh dear. What’s

Marcia Smith 18:24
this gonna be? Oh, that. I think you made up for it with your splendid performance today. Thank

Bob Smith 18:30
you so much. Marcia, all right, a couple more questions here. What state is famous for its crab cakes? Doesn’t

Marcia Smith 18:38
that? Massachusetts? Oklahoma?

Bob Smith 18:42
Maryland, Wisconsin, Wyoming or Virginia, Maryland. That’s it. That’s it. Yeah, crab cake, a fish cake consisting of crab meat.

Marcia Smith 18:52
All right, Bob, did you know that shrimps have hearts in their head? Shrimps?

Bob Smith 18:57
Or is it shrimp have hearts in their heads? Shrimp have like fish. We don’t say fishes. No,

Marcia Smith 19:02
we say Shrimp, shrimp. Yeah, did you know that a shrimp heart is in its head? No, I did not. Well now, you know anyway, why don’t most fish blink? Bob?

Bob Smith 19:12
Why don’t most fish blink? I didn’t know. They didn’t blink. Yeah, they

Unknown Speaker 19:16
don’t really.

Bob Smith 19:18
I thought we had, I thought we had goldfish that blinked when I was a kid,

Marcia Smith 19:23
probably blinking. He was winking at me.

Bob Smith 19:27
Okay, I don’t know why most fish don’t blink, because they’ve got water in their eyelids, and they don’t need to.

Marcia Smith 19:32
That’s that’s half of it, yeah, keep cleaning like we do. They keep moist with the water, and plus, they don’t have eyelids. The shark is the only fish known to be able to blink with both eyes, so they blink.

Bob Smith 19:47
That’s bad news. If

Marcia Smith 19:48
something comes out of the water and blinks at you, move on. You’re

Speaker 2 19:50
in big trouble. Oh, my God, don’t oh no, no, no, no, okay. Marcia, I have a question for you on landmarks. Okay, okay. Well. Which landmark contains more square footage or area? The White House or the US Capitol? The US Capitol? Yes, you’re right. Okay, now we think of the White House. It looks like a small mansion compared to a lot of things that you see built today, but that’s a big place. Can you imagine having a house with 55,000 square feet? That’s the White House. That’s a lot, but that pales in comparison to the US Capitol, which has 1.5 million square feet of floor space. 1.5 million

Marcia Smith 20:32
could be a good Airbnb.

Speaker 2 20:34
I don’t think so. Okay, not marble floors, yeah, might be hard to sleep on that thing. Okay, all right. Marcia, which freestanding tower in the United States is taller? Is it the Space Needle in Seattle or the CN Tower in Toronto? Have you ever seen the CN Tower?

Unknown Speaker 20:48
No, okay, that’s

Speaker 2 20:49
pretty big. I’ve been up in it. So which is taller? Seattle or Toronto? Seattle? No, believe it or not, the Space Needle in Seattle is 605 feet tall. The CN Tower is three times that tall. Okay, what does cn stand for? Canadian National the railway company that built the tower. Oh, okay, that tower is now 1815

Bob Smith 21:15
feet. Contains two observation decks that offer panoramic views. It was built in 1976

Marcia Smith 21:20
it was built to be a lookout tower for drains, apparently, I don’t know. Let’s run up that. Let’s

Bob Smith 21:27
see if we can see the end of our railroad.

Marcia Smith 21:29
All right, according to science focus Bob, approximately how much weight does the Earth take on each year from meteorites and space debris?

Bob Smith 21:38
Oh, I never thought of that. Yeah. So these things, whatever hits, it doesn’t burn up, is actually adding weight

Marcia Smith 21:43
to the earth, to the earth. How much weight?

Bob Smith 21:47
Well, I wouldn’t think it would be huge, because I don’t think there’s been any massive asteroids, but I’ll say 300 pounds, 40,000

Marcia Smith 21:55
tons. What? Yeah,

Bob Smith 21:57
there’s that many asteroids hitting the Earth, and

Marcia Smith 21:59
Meteor dust is huge. Meteor dust, dust, it adds up. Holy cow, adds up every year. Mom

Bob Smith 22:06
always said dust added up. Think she was talking about something else,

Marcia Smith 22:10
Goldilocks, Bob The Three Bears fame, had a different name in Victorian times. Oh, really. You know Goldilocks was not the original name. You knew it had out two other names before that, two other

Bob Smith 22:22
names. Now, is there any way I would know this, or is this just something out

Marcia Smith 22:25
of the obscure past, obscure Marsha file, totally

Bob Smith 22:29
different than all the questions I ask you, that’s right, which have logic to them in

Marcia Smith 22:35
your dreams. Okay, okay, I don’t know the answer. So her name was during Victorian times, silver hair, silver

Bob Smith 22:42
hair. Was he a senior citizen? What

Unknown Speaker 22:45
was going on there? Oh, no, that’s awesome.

Bob Smith 22:47
Oh, Greta, old silver here later

Marcia Smith 22:49
she became golden hair, golden and eventually it morphed into Goldilocks in the three bears. Well,

Bob Smith 22:57
that’s that’s a cuter name, Goldilocks. Yes,

Marcia Smith 23:00
it is it’s adorable in comparison, like ponytail or

Bob Smith 23:03
something, okay, okay, Marcia. We all know Benjamin Franklin for his experiments with electricity, with the bifocal glasses, the Franklin stove, which we mentioned. What medical device did he also develop? I didn’t know about this. Okay?

Marcia Smith 23:17
The scalpel. No, the lung machine, heart and lung machine. No, no, no, no. The saw for cutting the sternum open, no, I don’t know what he developed

Bob Smith 23:29
the flexible urinary catheter, really, yeah. Now catheters apparently had been used since about 3000 BC to relieve urinary retention, you know. But he fashioned silver catheters for use by his older brother, John, who suffered from kidney stones and to make things less painful. Franklin worked with his local silver Smith on a design for a flexible catheter. He used silver because you could bend silver into any desired shape and it was believed to have antiseptic properties at the time Ben Franklin, a flexible urinary catheter. This guy thought of everything. Okay,

Marcia Smith 24:05
Bob, what is the only constitutional amendment that cancels out another amendment? The

Bob Smith 24:13
only constitutional amendment that cancels out another amendment that? Well, I don’t know if it canceled out an amendment. I’m thinking the anti slavery one, nope, that canceled out the three fifths part of the Constitution where black people were only three fifths of a vote. You know, that kind of a thing, okay. What is it?

Marcia Smith 24:30
It’s the 21st amendment, ratified on December 5. 1933 repealed the prohibition laws. Oh, which was the Yeah, 18th Amendment, okay, I never thought of that. You’re right. So you had two amendments. It repealed the prohibition laws established by the 18th Amendment back in 1919, thus legalizing alcohol once again.

Bob Smith 24:53
That’s why the 20s were Roaring 20s, because they got their alcohol back. This

Marcia Smith 24:57
made the 21st amendment the first. And so far only US constitutional amendment to repeal another, hmm, okay, well, there you go. Mary Shelley, Bob, uh huh. She’s the author of Frankenstein,

Unknown Speaker 25:10
that’s right.

Marcia Smith 25:11
She kept what organ of her husband after his death.

Bob Smith 25:17
I think I read about this. Did you? I think she kept her husband’s heart in her desk. Yes. How did you know that’s a famous story. She was very strange, of course. I mean, she wrote Frankenstein For God’s sake, but to keep her husband’s heart in her desk for how many years? How long was it?

Marcia Smith 25:32
Well, it says, following the drowning death of her husband, poet Percy, his body was cremated. Percy Shelley, right, yeah, but his heart allegedly did not burn, so it was retrieved from the fire and given to Mary, who kept it in her writing desk. As you said, it was finally buried with the body of their son, Percy Florence Shelley in 1889

Bob Smith 25:55
jeez. Interesting. Yeah, now you know how the story got going, the story of Frankenstein. What was the inspiration for that?

Marcia Smith 26:04
I don’t know. That was, I

Bob Smith 26:06
think it was three friends sitting around at night with a contest for the best ghost story.

Marcia Smith 26:10
Oh, really, yeah, was Mary there? She

Bob Smith 26:13
was one of them, and so she came up with her story Frankenstein. It was the best story of the authors who were together. Oh, that’s good, yeah. We’ll have to find out more about that, because that because that is kind of an interesting story in literature. They

Marcia Smith 26:24
probably had sitting around, had a little too much wine and cheese, I assume that.

Speaker 2 26:27
And then, what if the monster? Yeah,

Marcia Smith 26:30
they put all his parts together and he wakes up. Okay, okay, I’m gonna wrap it up with a couple of quotes, all right. Rick Warren said humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less. That

Bob Smith 26:45
is true, isn’t it? Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less. That’s a better way to look at it. It

Marcia Smith 26:54
is and the and the amazing Yogi Berra, he said, It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.

Bob Smith 27:06
Oh, that’s great. All right. Well, as we head out, we want to thank everyone for being with us again for more fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia. Drop

Marcia Smith 27:14
a line if you want to or don’t. Tune in again. Next week, we’ll be here,

Bob Smith 27:19
all right, and we’ll be spending some time with some holiday shows in the next week’s coming up and some fun stuff. Oh, that

Marcia Smith 27:25
means we’re going to get out of town. Don’t tell people that. All right,

Bob Smith 27:29
I’m Bob Smith,

Marcia Smith 27:30
I’m Marcia Smith. Join us again when

Bob Smith 27:32
we return next time with more fascinating facts and tantalizing trivia here on the off ramp. The off ramp is produced in association with CPL radio online and the Cedarburg Public Library, Cedarburg, Wisconsin, visit us on the web at the off ramp dot show.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai