Mental Floss

And my sources were gods and monsters.

And if you want to look at the historical sightings, I got those from Mental Floss.

Cool.

I'll take you.

Yeah, so it was four squirrels with their tails tied together.

That's interesting.

And if you want to see that, that's also on Mental Floss.

It's not nearly as disgusting as the Rat King.

And if you're like, "I'm not quite convinced of this Mangesh guy," put this in your pipe and smoke it.

He, along with another colleague of ours, Will Pearson, co-founded Mental Floss-

Yeah

... back in the day when he was in college.

And, and in our lifetimes we have experienced a, a, a true revolution with, uh, digital technology certainly.

And, uh, there are a few things that have been lost that we haven't touched on that we're going to be reviewing today based on a list from, uh, Mental Floss.

I love my boys at Mental Floss.

It's, uh, quite interesting.

Great guys.

Uh, there's a couple things I had forgotten about and when I read this list that there were a couple things they'd forgotten about.

I forgot that Mental Floss itself was a magazine.

Yeah.

And I have seen a lot, this theme of like- You know, I saw something this morning on like the most Googled whatever in every state.

I still feel like I see those once a week on like a "Reader's Digest" or like Mental Floss or something.

But to your point, like how much are they moving the needle for clients? I don't know.

I don't know what the needle is for some people.

And he made it tiny enough that you could mail it anywhere.

So according to Mental Floss, during Christmas, he advertised it as, quote, just the thing to send to members of the armed forces.

And that's how the game really took off.

That's so classy.

Yeah.

And by the way, key sources here are CBC Radio, NPR, and then a couple stories from Reader's Digest and from Mental Floss that I feel are too credulous about what the hot dog people are telling them.

Because here's how Mental Floss takes what the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council says.

They say there's simply no way to avoid hot dogs being in packs of 10 and buns being in packs of 8.

We simply can't avoid it.

And so then for them to just say, well, there's no way we could simply put these two things together, especially given that there's food conglomerates that own businesses making both things, you know, like it just it's just obviously false to me.

yeah of course no no obviously like it's there's no way

but mental floss is like well that's how it works uh so i

Also some elephant dung.

Mental Floss is out with its rankings of the best state fairs in America.

Minnesota is number one.

I think we're accustomed to finishing behind Minnesota.

Yeah, I was actually thinking about this not too long ago.

I was remembering back at Mental Floss, you always wanted to do this story about how they'd added caffeine to breakfast cereal, I guess for people who didn't like coffee, right?

Yeah, and it isn't just that.

Their innovations in ice cream and snacks made me actually wonder whether I should go into food science at one point because it just felt so Willy Wonka-ish.

And he was super protective of Mickey Mouse and the original IP they had, so he wanted to pick a whole new set of characters to introduce to audiences.

And he suggested gummy bears, because he knew kids were obsessed with eating gummy bears, and also gummy bears were in the public domain, so he didn't have to worry about licensing the characters from anyone else.

So anyway, according to Mental Floss, there are two fascinating things about this.

One, at the time, apparently, Saturday morning cartoons were dominated by anthropomorphic bears.