SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: Mermaids: Not a real thing

0:03Speaker 1:Hey, everybody. We're back for another Gets Weird edition. Stuff You Should Know Gets Weird playlist, and this is episode three. It's about mermaids, everybody. It's a pretty fun episode from what I remember, and it is called Mermaids, colon, Not a Real Thing.

0:20Speaker 2:Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Yeah, that's right. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there in the ether, floating, possibly not existing. Who knows? And this is Stuff You Should Know.

0:45Speaker 1:That's right. Just a couple of mermen trying to make their way in the world.

0:50Speaker 2:Yeah.

0:50Speaker 1:Trying to keep their tails wet.

0:52Speaker 2:Yeah. You know?

0:54Speaker 1:Yeah. Because if that thing dries out, you've seen Splash.

0:58Speaker 2:Yeah, it's toast.

1:00Speaker 1:No. She dried out and she was just fine.

1:03Speaker 2:Oh, I thought, oh, you're thinking of E.T. when he turned all white and dried out.

1:08Speaker 1:I was thinking of Splash because I couldn't remember. It was one of my favorite movies as a kid.

1:13Speaker 2:It was a cute movie.

1:15Speaker 1:It was one of those early HBO movies, early Tom Hanks, which I'm a big fan of early Tom Hanks. And I just thought it was a really fun, funny movie. John Candy?

1:27Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a great movie.

1:28Speaker 1:What's-his-name played the evil man trying to expose her. Eugene Levy, I think.

1:35Speaker 2:Oh, was he the bad guy? Yeah, he was the one that- You know that's a high quality movie when Eugene Levy's the bad guy.

1:40Speaker 1:Yeah, that was the SCTV crew. And he actually tried to spray her and get her wet so she would- Oh, was that? And in fact did turn into a mermaid on the sidewalk.

1:49Speaker 2:So that's what it was. If she got wet, she turned into a mermaid.

1:52Speaker 1:Right.

1:52Speaker 2:She got dried, no problem. Yes.

1:54Speaker 1:And Daryl Hannah, of course, who's running around with Neil Young now.

1:58Speaker 2:Oh, really? Yeah.

1:59Speaker 1:How about that couple? Huh. Sure. Why not? They're both environmentalists.

2:05Speaker 2:But there's a lot of turquoise in that bedroom.

2:07Speaker 1:I wonder if you hook up with Neil Young or anyone like that if you're sort of a new relationship and not like the wife they had for 40 years. If you're like, play a song, why don't you? What? I wonder if you ask them to play music.

2:24Speaker 2:Oh, like you're actually into them? Yeah, like if you're Billy Joel's.

2:27Speaker 1:New 25-year-old wife, do you ever say like, hey, honey, play me a tune? Right.

2:33Speaker 2:Play that one that you wrote 10 years before I was conceived.

2:38Speaker 1:I think what I'm saying is I would have a hard time being with Neil Young and not every night after dinner just kind of nudging the guitar toward him.

2:47Speaker 2:Oh, I gotcha.

2:48Speaker 1:And saying, I'd love to hear Old Man.

2:51Speaker 2:Yeah. Please, baby, one for me.

2:53Speaker 1:And yeah, he says I've played that song 45,000 times. Yeah, I would guess that.

2:56Speaker 2:Well, I can tell you, I would guess that Once you reach a certain point in playing a song, you never want to hear that song or even think about it existing again.

3:09Speaker 1:Yeah.

3:09Speaker 2:But then you still have to play it.

3:12Speaker 1:Oh, I try not to think about that when I'm at those shows.

3:14Speaker 2:Yeah. It makes me feel bad for them. Like, they might as well be, you know, in the monkey house or something.

3:20Speaker 1:Yeah.

3:20Speaker 2:And you're just throwing bananas at them.

3:22Speaker 1:And God bless the people who really bring it still.

3:26Speaker 2:Sure.

3:26Speaker 1:Where you feel like, man, they're playing that song for me tonight.

3:29Speaker 2:Adamant.

3:30Speaker 1:Does he still bring it?

3:33Speaker 2:He's just who came to mind.

3:35Speaker 1:Whereas when I saw the police on their reunion, they were phoning it in. Really?

3:39Speaker 2:Yeah. Even Stuart Copeland?

3:40Speaker 1:Well, I mean, they were playing the songs, but it didn't look like they were enjoying themselves at all. It looked like a total money grab.

3:47Speaker 2:Sure.

3:48Speaker 1:They entered from three separate entrances and exited from three separate.

3:52Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.

3:52Speaker 1:And I got the feeling they didn't even speak much.

3:55Speaker 2:I was reading an article on the Ramones.

3:58Speaker 1:The Rolling Stone one recently?

4:00Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, I guess it was.

4:02Speaker 1:Yeah. They had a great article on them.

4:03Speaker 2:So yeah, I guess it was, it was definitely Rolling Stone. So, okay. Did you read it? Yeah. Then it was awesome. But yeah, like they, they would, they would just like get on the bus and not speak to one another. Yeah. Go to the next town and get on stage and play and then come off stage and not like they would, they would speak on stage cause they had to. Yeah. That was it.

4:22Speaker 1:And apparently, well, at least Joey and who was his big foil?

4:25Speaker 2:Dee Dee Dee.

4:27Speaker 1:Those ones who really hated each other.

4:29Speaker 2:Yeah.

4:29Speaker 1:Supposedly they didn't speak at all for like 25 years straight.

4:33Speaker 2:Right, because Joey stole Dee Dee's love of his life.

4:37Speaker 1:Right.

4:38Speaker 2:And then they were in the band together still after that. It was just like, T.S., man.

4:42Speaker 1:So weird.

4:42Speaker 2:So like a lot of songs, especially ones like the KKK Took My Baby Away, that's about Joey stealing Dee Dee's girlfriend.

4:51Speaker 1:Wow. That's a great article. Yeah. Good read. Yeah. So back to Splash. Funny movie about a mermaid. And we're going to talk about mermaids here. And mostly what we're going to cover is the lore and history and the mythology of the mermaid. Because here's a little giveaway. There are no mermaids. What? Did you look up like pictures of real mermaid sightings and stuff? Yeah.

5:17Speaker 2:And it's the same thing as pictures of Bigfoot sightings and pictures of UFO sightings.

5:21Speaker 1:Some weird distant blur that like you can't. It could be kelp.

5:25Speaker 2:Or it's. such an obviously doctored photo. What would be fun, though, is if we had a time machine, forget killing Hitler.

5:33Speaker 1:We do.

5:33Speaker 2:The playback machine. Oh, yeah, that's right. I can't believe we haven't put this into good use. Forget, like, you know, saving the world or keeping the dodo from going extinct. I would take some of these doctored photos that are just so easy to make today back to, like, the 1920s and be like, look at this. And they go, yeah, I know. We still believe in that stuff.

5:56Speaker 1:With your aim being what?

5:57Speaker 2:Just to freak them out. Oh.

5:59Speaker 1:I figured there'd be a money angle.

6:01Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.

6:02Speaker 1:Josh is traveling Wonder Emporium.

6:06Speaker 2:That's not a bad idea.

6:08Speaker 1:Where in which you just show them photos.

6:10Speaker 2:But I charge them, like, 2016 rates, and no one can possibly afford that, so I go out of business, like, almost immediately. Right.

6:17Speaker 1:There's, like, one guy in the town that's like, I'll pay $ 27. 50 to see those.

6:20Speaker 2:Right. Step right up. Town's only billionaire. Um.

6:25Speaker 1:That's a great idea. No one ever thought of that.

6:28Speaker 2:It was a terrible idea from beginning to end.

6:32Speaker 1:Forget going back and betting on the stock market or the outcome of the World Series.

6:35Speaker 2:I'm going to go back and set up a business doomed to fail.

6:39Speaker 1:All right, so let's talk about mermaid lore. Well, we can start here in the more modern age because there are still places that try and take people for money like we were just talking about even.

6:51Speaker 2:Yeah, like me.

6:52Speaker 1:In fact, in Israel... On the coast there, they actually have a town called Kiryat Yam. It's a great name. And if you go to Kiryat Yam, you could win how much money? Does it even say?

7:06Speaker 2:A million bucks.

7:07Speaker 1:A million American dollars if you.

7:11Speaker 2:If you provide incontrovertible evidence of the mermaid that is reputed to.

7:17Speaker 1:Wander the shores.

7:17Speaker 2:Live there.

7:18Speaker 1:Yeah.

7:18Speaker 2:And appear at sunset. As of 2009 was the first sighting there. Yeah.

7:22Speaker 1:And, of course, what that is is a ploy to try and get tourists to come and spend money in the town and look for the mermaid.

7:27Speaker 2:Sure. Come on, chumps. We welcome you to Kiryat Yam.

7:32Speaker 1:I'm sure Loch Ness has made plenty of tourist money over the years.

7:35Speaker 2:Apparently, they have a standing offer as well, and that's where the mayor of Kiryat Yam got the idea.

7:41Speaker 1:Yeah. Great idea.

7:42Speaker 2:Sure. And, actually, I saw that photo, too. And it's kind of neat. I don't know what it is or who created it or whatever. But there's allegedly a photo taken, obviously, from like a cliff down onto a beach. You know a beach that will have like a big just slab of rock surrounded by sand?

8:01Speaker 1:Yeah, sand and mermaids. Right.

8:03Speaker 2:There's a mermaid on that rock just kind of looking out at the sea.

8:07Speaker 1:Yeah.

8:07Speaker 2:And, of course, it could be anything. It could be totally doctored. Who knows? But it's from a distance, and at least they didn't go full out, like perfect picture of a mermaid or whatever. It's just suggestive enough that people who believe in such things would be like, they're right there. There's a picture of a mermaid, you know?

8:25Speaker 1:Totally.

8:25Speaker 2:So that was found in 2009, or that surfaced in 2009.

8:31Speaker 1:Surfaced?

8:32Speaker 2:Right. Since then, the towns had that standing offer.

8:36Speaker 1:Correct. Correct. So the interesting thing to me about mermaids is the mythology. Did you take mythology in college at all?

8:46Speaker 2:Yeah, I did. I always wanted it to interest me more than it did.

8:51Speaker 1:Me too.

8:52Speaker 2:It was just... I don't know if it wasn't explained to me quite well enough or just the ancients' non-bicameral mind wasn't fused together enough to interest people in the modern age.

9:05Speaker 1:Well, I think so. I think the stories themselves... as far as good storytelling, were just lacking. Because a lot of them were just versions of one another. And there was usually a very basic premise or moral.

9:21Speaker 2:Right.

9:22Speaker 1:And in the case of mermaids, a lot of times they were, a lot of folklore even was rooted in misogyny.

9:29Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, for sure.

9:31Speaker 1:There'll be a woman to come along and screw your life up.

9:34Speaker 2:Right, or if you screw up a woman, she will kill your children or something like that. Women were not to be trusted, and they were murderous and duplicitous in a lot of mythology. It's true.

9:44Speaker 1:The old hag. So it was in various, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of books and texts, including the Talmud, believe it or not. And we've talked about Pliny the Elder, the beer, and... the dude.

10:01Speaker 2:Yeah.

10:02Speaker 1:Rome's Pliny the Elder. He, in his natural history, talked about a mermaid-like creature called.

10:09Speaker 2:The Nereid.

10:10Speaker 1:Yes.

10:11Speaker 2:I think I'm pronouncing that correctly.

10:12Speaker 1:Yeah, N-E-R-E-I-D.

10:15Speaker 2:That E-I is a tough transition.

10:17Speaker 1:It is.

10:17Speaker 2:Because you want to say, like, Nereid. Yeah. Nereid.

10:23Speaker 1:These were sea nymphs, half-human, half-fish mermaids. And he also talked about sea men. And we should point out that mer-men, we made the joke about us being mer-men.

10:35Speaker 2:Yeah.

10:35Speaker 1:I believe mer-men were even first on the literary scene. Is that correct?

10:40Speaker 2:Well, first at least with mythology or theology, I guess. There's a Babylonian god of the sea named Ea.

10:48Speaker 1:Yeah.

10:48Speaker 2:Ea. Sports.

10:51Speaker 1:Just EA.

10:52Speaker 2:And he pops up in Babylonian mythology from, I think, 4,000 years ago. And they think that he's actually the progenitor of, or the predecessor, I should say, of Poseidon, who is the Greek god of the sea, and Neptune, who's the Roman god of the sea. Because the Greeks gave us Western culture, but they just walked around to all of the neighboring cultures and And pick their favorite parts and put them together. Yeah. And that was definitely one of them.

11:22Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, we talked in our... I guess it was in the folklore and fairy tale episodes. There were twin episodes almost.

11:33Speaker 2:Yeah.

11:35Speaker 1:About the original Little Mermaid and how she was Disney-fied to the fullest. But the original story was far darker.

11:45Speaker 2:Darker, but also... Even more touching by far.

11:49Speaker 1:Yeah.

11:49Speaker 2:Like I went back and read the last section of it.

11:53Speaker 1:Well, give me a summary at the end.

11:55Speaker 2:So at the end, this is where it dramatically differs from the Disney story. The Little Mermaid is scorned for another woman. The guy she loves chooses someone else and marries her. And the Little Mermaid is like, dude, I gave up my tail for you. Yeah. I think a witch has my tongue kind of thing. Um, and I want to get back my life. So her sisters came and bring her this ritual knife and say, you can convert back to a mermaid. If before dawn you plunge this knife into this dude's heart, this guy who loves heart and you get some of his blood on your feet, you will regrow your tail and you can jump into the sea and everything will be just fine again. So she goes and she finds the guy sleeping. with his new bride beside him, and she just can't do it.

12:47Speaker 2:She throws the knife into the sea and becomes sea foam. She disintegrates and becomes sea foam. So she gives her own happiness up for this guy, right? And dies as a result. But even better than that, when she turns into sea foam, she becomes a different mythical creature, like basically an air nymph that goes around like helping humans, right? and she can possibly get into heaven if she helps people for 300 years. Hans Christian Andersen wrote it way better than I just recounted it. A lot less ums and likes, but it's worth reading.

13:30Speaker 1:Pliny also talked about mermen back in the day, and there would be mermen or seamen who would at night climb up onto ships. There's a quote, that's why I'm reading it.

13:41Speaker 2:Weird.

13:42Speaker 1:Upon which the side of the vessel where he seated himself would instantly sink downward. And if you remain there any considerable time, even go underwater.

13:50Speaker 2:And that was something that we will see as we talk more about mermaids is they are very, they're often either an omen, that something bad is going to happen to sailors or coastal dwelling people, or they actually directly cause harm to sailors or coastal dwelling people.

14:09Speaker 1:Yeah, and most times under the guise of something beautiful and like a siren.

14:15Speaker 2:Yeah.

14:16Speaker 1:They are often, well, we haven't even described one. Surely you know that a mermaid has the head and body torso of a woman, human woman.

14:26Speaker 2:Usually with huge boobs.

14:29Speaker 1:Yeah, if you're talking about a sailor's account. Right. Sure. You're like, oh, yeah, she was busty.

14:34Speaker 2:Did I mention the boobs?

14:36Speaker 1:Yes, you did, sir, seven times. And from the torso down, she's a fish. Maybe webbed feet, maybe not. Very graceful, very fast, and always beautiful.

14:52Speaker 2:It depends.

14:54Speaker 1:Oh, yeah?

14:55Speaker 2:Yeah, there were some of legend that were not. Ugly.

14:59Speaker 1:Really?

14:59Speaker 2:Yeah.

15:00Speaker 1:Not ugly, or they were ugly?

15:01Speaker 2:That they were not. In parentheses, beautiful, comma, ugly.

15:08Speaker 1:Well, I hadn't heard about that.

15:10Speaker 2:Yeah, it's in here.

15:12Speaker 1:I thought, no, I'm just, I must have missed that part.

15:15Speaker 2:It's far more frequent what you were saying, that they were beautiful and alluring.

15:19Speaker 1:Okay.

15:20Speaker 2:But we'll talk more about that after we take a break, huh?

15:23Speaker 1:We'll talk about Josh. We'll talk about Chuck. And we'll talk about Jerry. We'll talk about all kinds of stuff. Stuff. Shit.

15:48Speaker 2:All right, Chuck. We were saying that for the most part, mermaids are beautiful. And one of the reasons why they are supposed to be beautiful is because they are frequently accused of luring men, sailors, out to sea to their death.

16:05Speaker 1:Yeah.

16:05Speaker 2:And how do you do that? You do that one of two ways. You have a beautiful singing voice.

16:09Speaker 1:Yep.

16:10Speaker 2:Or you just straight up look good yourself.

16:12Speaker 1:That's right.

16:13Speaker 2:And if you have a beautiful singing voice, you're a siren, in which case you would not be a mermaid because a siren is half bird, half woman.

16:21Speaker 1:Yes.

16:21Speaker 2:And they don't even necessarily live in the water or near the water. They're sometimes described as hanging out in fields.

16:28Speaker 1:Yeah. I guess sometimes you can be very pretty and be a good singer.

16:33Speaker 2:Right?

16:34Speaker 1:If you're a mermaid? Mm-hmm.

16:37Speaker 2:But the, yeah, it could be. Yeah. Sure. Who am I to disagree?

16:43Speaker 1:You'd be Beyonce. Right. Or Alicia Keys. Right. Or Adele. Oh, you know who I like is Rihanna.

16:51Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. She's great.

16:53Speaker 1:She's very pretty.

16:54Speaker 2:That part in, what's it called? This is the End? When she played herself?

16:59Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.

17:00Speaker 2:She was pretty great in that.

17:01Speaker 1:She was pretty funny.

17:02Speaker 2:Michael Cera, like, spanked her, and she just immediately turned around and smacked the heck out of him.

17:06Speaker 1:Yeah, I enjoyed parts of that movie, especially Michael Cera.

17:10Speaker 2:Yeah.

17:10Speaker 1:Playing like a coked-out jerk. That was really funny.

17:14Speaker 2:Yeah.

17:15Speaker 1:So back to the beautiful mermaids, though. There was one in 1000 BCE in Syria, and her name, how would you pronounce that? Adargadis?

17:25Speaker 2:Oh, I think you nailed it. Yeah? Yeah.

17:27Speaker 1:All right, we'll go with that. And you'll see a lot of duality in a lot of these stories. And she was one for sure that was a protector, a goddess. I think she protected the fertility of her people and watched over them and fell in love with a human man, as you will often see in a lot of these stories.

17:47Speaker 2:A dude.

17:48Speaker 1:Yeah, a dude. And it was fine for a little while, like in most stories. And then it goes south. Yeah. And she kills him.

17:56Speaker 2:She crushed him with her... Greatness.

18:00Speaker 1:Oh, I thought like her big tail or something.

18:03Speaker 2:I don't know. Well, she wasn't a mermaid yet. This is where she becomes a mermaid.

18:06Speaker 1:Oh, that's true. That's right. I forgot about that. So she accidentally kills him and then is very shamed, throws herself into the lake because she wants to become a fish. And she's so beautiful that it only works half as good. I really can't figure out the math on that.

18:23Speaker 2:No.

18:24Speaker 1:But I guess she's just so beautiful that the human beauty part of her is like, no, I won't be a fish.

18:29Speaker 2:Just the lower half can be a fish.

18:30Speaker 1:Yeah.

18:31Speaker 2:Because she had toe fungus. So that was easily overcome. But her face was really nice. So the fish part just couldn't overcome that.

18:38Speaker 1:That's right. So she ended up a mermaid.

18:40Speaker 2:What a weird story. But not just weird. Yeah. Like, oh, it's foreign or anything. I'm not being xenophobic, but it really says a lot about humanity and how we think of things. Like, no, she was so good looking that this magic couldn't even overcome that. Yeah, that's a good point. We place a lot of value on that kind of thing.

19:04Speaker 1:All right, should we move on to Germany?

19:08Speaker 2:Yeah, this one was kind of interesting to me because Germany's landlocked.

19:13Speaker 1:Oh, I never really thought about that.

19:15Speaker 2:Why does Germany have a mermaid mythology?

19:18Speaker 1:Well, I mean, they have lakes.

19:20Speaker 2:I guess.

19:21Speaker 1:But mermaids are 100% ocean dwellers, aren't they?

19:24Speaker 2:No, there are some river dwellers.

19:27Speaker 1:Oh, that's right.

19:28Speaker 2:Although I think the sirens were specifically river.

19:31Speaker 1:Well, in the German myth, it was a river dweller, correct?

19:34Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah. The Nix's?

19:36Speaker 1:Yeah. And they lured men into the river. Yeah, it was a river. And- So they could drown them. Like, again, the call of the siren, come in here. Look how beautiful I am.

19:46Speaker 2:Right, check these out.

19:47Speaker 1:And now I'm holding your head underwater.

19:49Speaker 2:Right.

19:50Speaker 1:And you can't breathe anymore.

19:51Speaker 2:And the guy's like, I regret nothing.

19:56Speaker 1:But this duality that we're talking about is what you see a lot of times in mermaid myths. From West Africa, the Mami Wada, the mother water, she was a mermaid. She was very nurturing and very loving.

20:12Speaker 2:If you didn't cross her.

20:14Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. That's where the duality comes in.

20:17Speaker 2:I don't even know if that's duality. I think that's just a complex person. Good complex character there. Yeah? Yeah.

20:24Speaker 1:So she's great, but when you cross her, she's murderous. Sure.

20:28Speaker 2:All right.

20:30Speaker 1:And that's what she did, actually. If you were loyal to her, you could be wealthy from her magic mirror and comb. But if you betrayed her, then what this article says is she rains down fury and destruction.

20:42Speaker 2:She rained the H word from above.

20:47Speaker 1:But the duality is an important part of it because the physical creature itself is two things.

20:53Speaker 2:Sure.

20:54Speaker 1:And they are also two things emotionally and physically.

20:58Speaker 2:So the mermaid or merman or merfolk, as they're called in this article.

21:03Speaker 1:Are they really?

21:03Speaker 2:Yeah. So merfolk are half fish, half people, right?

21:07Speaker 1:Yeah.

21:08Speaker 2:But they're not anywhere near unique in the pantheon of mythological creatures throughout the ages, right? Again, there's sirens, half birds, half women. There's just tons of, like the minotaur, half man, half bull.

21:25Speaker 1:Yeah.

21:26Speaker 2:The centaur was what, half goat or horse and half man?

21:29Speaker 1:I don't remember that sounds right.

21:31Speaker 2:I think half horse. And I was like, where did all these come from? I suspected bestiality, and it turns out I may be right.

21:42Speaker 1:Oh, yeah?

21:42Speaker 2:Yeah.

21:43Speaker 1:What'd you find?

21:43Speaker 2:There are some scholars out there who believe that This is the product of a much more relaxed attitude toward bestiality than we modern humans have today.

21:55Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I still never saw that documentary about the horse. Yeah.

22:00Speaker 2:It's a good one. Zoo.

22:01Speaker 1:Yeah. That fell off my radar.

22:03Speaker 2:Man, it's one of those ones where they largely... do recreate, like the whole thing's almost recreation. Right. And I usually am not hip on those. It doesn't feel like a documentary to me. Yeah. But that one changed my mind about that whole technique. They did it so well.

22:17Speaker 1:Really? Yep.

22:19Speaker 2:It's rough.

22:20Speaker 1:I bet.

22:21Speaker 2:It's rough. Yeah. Especially like when you think about, you know, the animals as well.

22:25Speaker 1:Yeah, of course.

22:26Speaker 2:You know? But there's more than just that that makes it rough.

22:30Speaker 1:Man, I need to see that. So I guess we can talk a little bit about some eyewitness accounts. They're all bunk, of course, but they have happened. In World War II in Japan on Indonesia's Kai Islands, supposedly they encountered a monster on the beach that had webbed hands and feet and was kind of part human, part fish.

22:51Speaker 2:Yeah, it was like, look at these jazz hands. You can't do this.

22:55Speaker 1:And then back in the day, some of our most revered explorers and adventurers reported seeing mermaids. Like John Smith and Henry Hunton.

23:09Speaker 2:And Columbus. John Smith. Everybody loves him.

23:12Speaker 1:Yeah, what was... There's a good quote in here from Columbus because he wasn't too impressed.

23:16Speaker 2:Yeah. He said... And here's the thing. I read that in his diary he's referring to himself in the third person.

23:23Speaker 1:Well, that says a lot.

23:24Speaker 2:That's odd. He's like.

23:26Speaker 1:Ricky Henderson.

23:26Speaker 2:Right. Or George Costanza. So he says that he saw some... Oh, yeah. The quote's not in here. You've got to read the quote. He's out sailing around. Oh, what is that out in the ocean? I think I'll take a look through my spying glass.

23:41Speaker 1:The day before when the admiral was going to the... And the admiral is himself.

23:46Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. He was the admiral of his fleet for sure.

23:49Speaker 1:The day before when the admiral was going on to the Rio del Oro.

23:54Speaker 2:That's the River of Gold.

23:55Speaker 1:He said he saw three mermaids who came quite high out of the water but were not as pretty as they are depicted. For somehow in the face they look like men.

24:04Speaker 2:But I still thought about it.

24:07Speaker 1:Yeah, so.

24:09Speaker 2:End scene.

24:10Speaker 1:What they think now, and I don't know how they substantiated this, is that Columbus was seeing manatees.

24:15Speaker 2:Yeah. Have you seen manatees?

24:19Speaker 1:Yeah, it looks nothing like a human.

24:20Speaker 2:From enough of a distance, though, you're like, wait a minute, what is that? Especially if you've never seen a manatee before.

24:26Speaker 1:I don't think it looks human-like at all.

24:28Speaker 2:From enough of a distance, it can. Yeah, I can see how somebody would... Especially if you believe that mermaids existed. You see a manatee?

24:39Speaker 1:Maybe it's hard for me to totally get that. Go there and put my mind in that kind of frame.

24:44Speaker 2:In the frame of Christopher Columbus?

24:45Speaker 1:Well, just to have never seen a mermaid, to have never seen a manatee, to be high on, what's the green stuff?

24:53Speaker 2:Arawak scalps. Oh, my God.

24:57Speaker 1:I just blanked on the green.

24:58Speaker 2:Marijuana?

24:59Speaker 1:No.

25:00Speaker 2:The green.

25:01Speaker 1:The green drink. Absinthe.

25:04Speaker 2:I don't think Absinthe was around with Columbus.

25:07Speaker 1:Are you kidding me?

25:08Speaker 2:No, I'm not.

25:09Speaker 1:You're shooting that stuff.

25:12Speaker 2:I can kind of see it.

25:14Speaker 1:So he maybe saw a manatee and was like, eh, they're not so great looking after all.

25:19Speaker 2:They're not that great.

25:19Speaker 1:What's everyone talking about?

25:23Speaker 2:Yeah, he saw one. This is like Jimmy Carter and the UFOs. You're kind of surprised when you hear this that somebody cited it. Apparently Reagan said he saw UFOs as well. John Smith said he saw some. He liked what he saw. He liked the look of the manatees because he said he fell in love with one with long green hair.

25:43Speaker 1:Yeah, he said it wasn't bad looking or it wasn't unattractive or something like that.

25:48Speaker 2:Yeah.

25:49Speaker 1:It was kind of a, he hedged his bets a little bit.

25:51Speaker 2:Yeah.

25:52Speaker 1:I guess he wanted to check the rest of her out. Yeah.

25:54Speaker 2:And then he saw she had a tail and he's like, oh, can't go there.

25:59Speaker 1:So what's going on here? Are they hallucinating because they've been on the high seas too long?

26:03Speaker 2:That's what a lot of people say.

26:04Speaker 1:Yeah.

26:06Speaker 2:Other people say that, again, they were predisposed to believing in mermaids because people thought mermaids existed. This was the age of exploration. So it's the beginning of the age of exploration, which means that before then, the oceans were largely unexplored. And there were tons of beliefs in thousands of year old mythologies about creatures that lived in the sea. So if you thought that those things existed... then something that looked kind of like a mermaid could be a mermaid.

26:37Speaker 2:So that was probably, they were just cases of mistaken identity.

26:42Speaker 1:They were highly suggestible.

26:44Speaker 2:Yeah.

26:44Speaker 1:We did one on sea monsters, remember?

26:45Speaker 2:We did. Yeah. That was a good one. I thought that one was going to be awful, and it turned out pretty great.

26:53Speaker 1:That episode?

26:53Speaker 2:Yeah. I remember thinking, this is not going to go well.

26:57Speaker 1:Kind of like this one. Yeah. How do you think this one's going?

27:00Speaker 2:Pretty great.

27:01Speaker 1:All right. Well, let's take a break then. And give each other a neck rub. Okay. And we'll come back more comfortable than ever.

27:09Speaker 2:All right. There is a dude. I love this guy. His name is Carl Bantz. You're not a Carl Bantz fan?

27:45Speaker 1:Well, I'm not quite sure I understand unless.

27:48Speaker 2:Did you read the article?

27:50Speaker 1:Well, just to set it up.

27:51Speaker 2:Okay, so a dude named Carl Bantz back in 1990... He wrote an article in a legitimate journal, the journal Limnology and Oceanography. And they published it. And it is an entirely tongue-in-cheek but totally played straight account of the extinct species mermaid.

28:13Speaker 1:Yeah, like where he surmises on, like for real, where they came from, what their biology was. Why they left us.

28:22Speaker 2:Yep, that they were warm water dwelling, that they ate human flesh, which is why they lured people to their death. He goes so far as to say that they most likely only produced one or two offspring at a time because the females of the species had two breasts and that was it.

28:42Speaker 1:Okay.

28:44Speaker 2:You know?

28:44Speaker 1:Sure.

28:45Speaker 2:Um, like, like this is the thought that this guy put into this, this article and the fact that he writes it totally straight and like really gives it its due attention. Like it wasn't that, that like, this is going to be a great idea and just the idea itself is hilarious. So I don't really have to put any effort into actual execution. He put effort into the execution and he did pretty good.

29:05Speaker 1:I'm not knocking him, I guess. I just don't see why this journal would put something like that out there even.

29:11Speaker 2:I don't know.

29:11Speaker 1:I mean, I guess they had a good sense of humor, and maybe it was the April Fool's episode.

29:15Speaker 2:I was wondering if that was the case, too, and I forgot to look if it was the April issue.

29:20Speaker 1:Perhaps. He did use the words horny skinfolds, though. Right. Their skin, he theorized, was not smooth-scaled like a regular fish, but it had, quote, horny skinfolds.

29:32Speaker 2:Like an armadillo.

29:33Speaker 1:Yeah.

29:33Speaker 2:What's interesting is I saw another account from 1830 in Scotland. There's a town called Bembecula on the outer Hebrides, right? Which is like the outer islands, the archipelago. It's an archipelago. That's how you say that, right? Archipelago?

29:56Speaker 1:Yeah.

29:57Speaker 2:Either way. There's a town there.

29:59Speaker 1:String of Islands.

29:59Speaker 2:Coastal, thank you. A coastal town where in 1830, the whole town swore they saw a mermaid and tried to grab the mermaid and the mermaid swam away. So some kid threw a rock at it and hit it in its back. And two days later, they found it dead on shore and they felt so bad about it that they- Killed the kid? They buried it. They gave it a funeral with like a casket and everything. Wow. And- They said that it didn't have scales, that it had kind of rough skin instead.

30:31Speaker 1:Horny skinfolds.

30:32Speaker 2:Yeah, they didn't use that term. But this is like a thing in 1830 in Scotland. Yeah, pretty interesting when you read the account of it years later.

30:40Speaker 1:That's a kind of band name, by the way.

30:43Speaker 2:Horny skinfolds?

30:44Speaker 1:Yeah. Nice. Yeah, that is interesting. Maybe there's something there. Right.

30:52Speaker 2:How do you keep the folds of the horny skinfold clean, you know? I bet, like, gunk gets trapped in there.

30:59Speaker 1:Gross.

30:59Speaker 2:I don't know.

31:01Speaker 1:Maybe that's the name of the first single, Cleaning the Folds.

31:04Speaker 2:The other thing that Bantz did in his article was explain probably why they're extinct now. He came to the conclusion that they're extinct. He said they were warm water, so they would have cohabitated or shared their ecosystem with jellyfish. And as humans started to fish more and more of the sea, we upset the ecological balance. Jellyfish populations were allowed to boom, which is the case. And they stung the mermaids to death because the mermaids had, they lacked the blubber that would protect them, not just in cold water.

31:38Speaker 2:but from jellyfish stings as well. So they died out from jellyfish stings.

31:42Speaker 1:Yeah, because their upper skin was just regular skin.

31:45Speaker 2:Right.

31:46Speaker 1:It wasn't the horny skin folds.

31:47Speaker 2:Yeah.

31:47Speaker 1:So it provided no protection. Exactly.

31:51Speaker 2:It's worth reading. Go check it out. It's called Mermaids, Their Biology, Culture, and Demise. You can find the full PDF online.

31:58Speaker 1:Well, I think we have to address the animal planet Snafu.

32:01Speaker 2:I don't know if they would call it a Snafu. I think they would call it a ratings bonanza.

32:07Speaker 1:Yeah, which, what was the other, oh, when we talked about the Megalodon, when Discovery Channel aired a Megalodon documentary that appeared by all accounts to be true and was not.

32:18Speaker 2:Same thing with Mermaids, but they did it twice. They did.

32:22Speaker 1:They did a sequel because it got, like you said, huge ratings. And this was a documentary, well, not a documentary, it was a mockumentary, That looked like, did you watch any clips or anything?

32:36Speaker 2:Of the second one, yeah.

32:38Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it looked like, you know, a show, like a hunting Bigfoot crew. It's like, you know, we got this mermaid, we know where she is, and we're down here hunting.

32:47Speaker 2:3,000 feet below the surface.

32:50Speaker 1:Yeah, and they interviewed a guy that looked like Zach Galifianakis, and if only it would have been Zach Galifianakis, it would have made it much better. But, you know, then it was one of these shows where at the end, in small lettering, well, it's probably not even small, but at the end of the credits, it's like, this was all made up. These are actors.

33:08Speaker 2:Yeah, but if you go online, people are still like arguing over the legitimacy or credentials of the marine geologist Torsten Schmidt.

33:18Speaker 1:That's a great name. It is.

33:20Speaker 2:And people are like, well, if he were a real scientist, he would have been published elsewhere besides this. And he's not published. And it's like, That's because he's not real. He's made up.

33:30Speaker 1:Yeah, this is like settled.

33:31Speaker 2:Right.

33:31Speaker 1:They didn't even pretend that it was real.

33:34Speaker 2:So I don't know if that's the case or not.

33:36Speaker 1:Well, I mean, they said it wasn't at the end of the show. Okay.

33:39Speaker 2:But they didn't come out and say, everybody, everybody.

33:42Speaker 1:Oh, well, I see what you mean. Right.

33:43Speaker 2:So actually, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had to release and they felt they needed to release a statement after the first one saying like, hey, mermaids don't exist. No evidence has ever been found. We're Noah, the end.

34:00Speaker 1:And I bet they'd love that even.

34:02Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.

34:03Speaker 1:Oh, my God, Noah's making a statement about our show.

34:04Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah.

34:05Speaker 1:It's going to be all over the news.

34:06Speaker 2:Right. And so I guess enough people bought it and bought into it that they were able to release a sequel. And in the sequel, the reason they released the sequel was because Torsten Schmidt had footage of a webbed hand, like, smacking the windshield of his little, like, underwater sub, two-man sub, and then swimming off. Yeah. And so they just kept showing that over and over and over again. Yeah, I saw that shot.

34:33Speaker 1:It was cool.

34:34Speaker 2:It was Zach Galifianakis.

34:36Speaker 1:He did look like him, didn't he?

34:37Speaker 2:A lot.

34:39Speaker 1:I thought you were going to say it was found out when Torsten Schmidt showed up on an episode of Two Broke Girls the next week.

34:45Speaker 2:Right.

34:46Speaker 1:He's like a waiter.

34:47Speaker 2:Yeah, and a progressive insurance ad. It's like customer number two.

34:50Speaker 1:Exactly.

34:51Speaker 2:There's one other sighting I wanted to mention. This one is second for my favorite after the Scottish one.

34:56Speaker 1:Okay.

34:57Speaker 2:It was in Edinburgh. Netherlands? Is it Edom? Sure. Like the cheese?

35:02Speaker 1:Yeah.

35:03Speaker 2:Okay. Two girls were like rowing their boats and found a mermaid and took it home and dressed it up as a little girl and taught it to live on land, but it remained mute its whole life.

35:15Speaker 1:Like E.T.

35:15Speaker 2:Yeah. Isn't that cute?

35:17Speaker 1:That is very cute.

35:18Speaker 2:They're like, you're coming home with us. Oh, you've got a family? T.S. We've got a family too, and it's your new family.

35:24Speaker 1:And they just made that story up and told people and it survived?

35:27Speaker 2:I guess.

35:28Speaker 1:Interesting.

35:29Speaker 2:Although they didn't, they didn't apparently, like they matriculated the mermaid into human society there, but we're talking 1430. So who knows what was going on?

35:39Speaker 1:Yeah. They were eating.

35:41Speaker 2:They probably got their hands on somebody who was like, who knows? Yeah. And they're like, oh, mermaid, this is a mermaid.

35:49Speaker 1:Oh, just someone who had some sort of physical deformation.

35:53Speaker 2:And made them come live with them.

35:54Speaker 1:Yeah.

35:54Speaker 2:Dressed as a girl for the rest of their life, like Schlitzie or something.

35:57Speaker 1:Yeah, like we did in the freak shows. They would just call them, make up whatever animal they wanted to.

36:04Speaker 2:That was another great episode, too.

36:07Speaker 1:Are you just recounting the good ones while we do this one?

36:11Speaker 2:Just to remind people, it gets better.

36:14Speaker 1:So being a mermaid is an actual job you can get. Back in the day, in the 1960s, 40s and 50s, it was a big hit to go to like a sea park and have mermaid shows.

36:26Speaker 2:And specifically one in, is it Weeki Wachee Springs?

36:29Speaker 1:Yeah, Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida, near Tampa. And it was a booming business back then. They said between half a million and a million tourists every year, including big famous people like Elvis Presley and Don Knotts.

36:45Speaker 2:Yeah.

36:45Speaker 1:Those are the two they mentioned.

36:46Speaker 2:Those two would trash a place together.

36:49Speaker 1:Oh, I bet. Don gets into the whiskey. It's all over. So, yeah, it was a huge deal back then. They're still doing it there today, but it is a real job. You can go, if you're a great swimmer, you have to know what you're doing.

37:05Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.

37:06Speaker 1:It seems like, oh, yeah, you just put on that tail thing. But that tail is heavy and awkward.

37:11Speaker 2:Well, yeah, and plus like swimming.

37:12Speaker 1:And somewhat buoyant.

37:13Speaker 2:Swimming with your legs together.

37:15Speaker 1:Yeah, that's hard.

37:15Speaker 2:It's very difficult. Yeah, it's not an easy job from what I can tell.

37:19Speaker 1:Yeah, so apparently once you put like, they look very graceful swimming around in those things, but you go put one on and get in a pool and see what happens.

37:28Speaker 2:Right, and this article I think rightly points out that the professional mermaids that you see today are... Like, this is from years and years and years of practice. Yeah. Like, they didn't just get in the water and they're like, yeah, I'm a natural.

37:42Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. It's got to be really awkward.

37:45Speaker 2:Sure. And you also have to know how to hold your breath like a mo.

37:48Speaker 1:Like a mo? Yeah.

37:50Speaker 2:I stopped myself.

37:52Speaker 1:Yeah, you do. And you have to learn how to swim the mermaid crawl, which is what they name it. But, you know, it's not like regular swimming.

38:01Speaker 2:Yeah, right.

38:02Speaker 1:You know?

38:02Speaker 2:Yeah.

38:03Speaker 1:And you can make a little dough, too.

38:05Speaker 2:A little bit.

38:05Speaker 1:It said you can be hired, like, as a one-off for a party. What is that like? You go to, like, a neighborhood pool, and everyone gathers around, like, look at the mermaid.

38:14Speaker 2:And claps out of rhythm.

38:15Speaker 1:That's so funny.

38:16Speaker 2:And you're like, what do you guys want me to do?

38:19Speaker 1:I guess you can do that. But mostly what I've seen are, like, the shows in some, like, sleepy Florida town. Right. Like, Gator Farm.

38:28Speaker 2:That was the start.

38:29Speaker 1:And the Weeki Wachee mermaids.

38:31Speaker 2:Or, like, at resorts or something like that. Yeah.

38:34Speaker 1:Back when they used to. Love that kind of thing. And some of these professional mermaids apparently use their status as a soapbox for ecology.

38:45Speaker 2:Yeah.

38:46Speaker 1:And efforts to keep the oceans clean.

38:48Speaker 2:Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah. There seems to be a real thread of that running through the professional mermaid culture. You're like an eco-activist.

38:57Speaker 1:That's a decent band name, too.

38:59Speaker 2:Professional mermaid culture?

39:00Speaker 1:Yeah. This one was rich with bands.

39:04Speaker 2:Band names. Horny skin folds.

39:07Speaker 1:Yeah.

39:08Speaker 2:Uh, if you want to know more about mermaids, you can type that word in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

39:19Speaker 1:Actually, in lieu of listener mail today, uh, we are going to ask you for something. Cause we, people also often say like, how can I help the show? Spreading the word is awesome. We always appreciate that. But one thing we haven't asked you to do in a long time is go to iTunes and leave a review.

39:37Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.

39:37Speaker 1:Because that makes a big difference if there are reviews, even if they're not favorable. Just be honest.

39:44Speaker 2:Vote with your conscience.

39:45Speaker 1:Vote your conscience. And, yeah, go to iTunes, leave a review for us. Because just having reviews is a good thing. And tell a friend. Help spread the word. I feel like years go by before we say things like this.

39:59Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think literally that's the case.

40:02Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been a long time. So we really appreciate the way the show was built was on word of mouth largely. We really count on that. So tell a friend. Go to iTunes and leave a recommendation. And the other thing that we also need are more jingles.

40:17Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.

40:17Speaker 1:These jingles that you hear, these bumpers, are from fans and listeners, musicians.

40:22Speaker 2:Very kind ones.

40:23Speaker 1:Yeah, and they really enjoy doing it, and we love throwing them out there. So send us your jingle, and we can't promise we'll use it, but we probably will.

40:31Speaker 2:Yeah, because they're pretty great.

40:33Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's all I got.

40:35Speaker 2:Well, thanks. If you want to get in touch with us to help us out with any of this stuff, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com slash StuffYouShouldKnow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.