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Your Brain on Facts

Your Brain on Facts

Moxie LaBouche

Host Moxie LaBouche brings you a weekly half-hour of things you didn't know, things you thought you knew, and things you never knew you never knew. Topics range from the history of nursing to the Balinese funeral rite David Bowie requested, from the origin of the Vulcan salute to the theft of Canada's strategic maple syrup reserve. This is your brain on facts. yourbrainonfacts.com
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Top 10 Your Brain on Facts Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Your Brain on Facts episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Your Brain on Facts for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Your Brain on Facts episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Your Brain on Facts - We Can't Have Nice Things - Radio Contests (ep. 193)
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04/26/22 • 36 min

It's the return of our occasional series, We Can't Have Nice Things. This week, we look at radio contest and promotions that went badly wrong, often at the draft stage. Free nude wedding anyone?

1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch

02:45 Radio Luxembourg's Ice Block Challenge

06:02 Bait & switch

10:12 Rules are rules

17:36 Review and news

20:40 No accounting for taste

22:15 Library of Chaos

27:27 Good, better, breast

30:08 Playing matchmaker

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt.

Music: Kevin MacLeod, Bobby Richards .

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Your Brain on Facts - Courthouse Rock (ep 192)

Courthouse Rock (ep 192)

Your Brain on Facts

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04/19/22 • 34 min

Not all heroes wear capes.  Some wear leather jackets with chains, long hair, and lots of eyeliner!  Today we look at three times heavy metal musicians said "We're not gonna take it" and defended the freedom of speech, but were they "Breaking the Law" and just "Howl(ing) at the Moon"?

0:42 Twisted Sister vs Congress

17:07 Reviews and news

19:58 Ozzy Osbourne's Suicide Solution

26:20 Judas Priest, Better Than You

28:28 Subliminal back-masking

1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on FacebookTwitter,  or Instagram. 

Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt.

Music: Kevin MacLeod,

It’s not unusual for the business side of the music business to include trips to the courthouse.  Usually, these are for copyright infringement, someone else ripping off your schtick.  In the halcyon days of 2005, the band Slipknot was moved to sue, of all people, Burger King for their commercial with a fake band, all in scary masks and costumes, called Cock Rock.

 

The best way to describe the 1980’s would be to say, you had to see it to believe it.  Weird times, man.  If we weren’t panicking about Russia, we were moral-panicking over Satanic things like heavy-metal music and Dungeons and Dragons, the things that make life worth living and were supposedly at the core of wildly rampant crises of child sex abuse and teen suicide.  In the red corner, the busy-body buzzkill today is Tipper Gore, then-wife of then-congressman Al, who had it in her head that rock music was a huge threat to the bedrock of society.  Feel free to picture Helen Lovejoy [sfx clip].  And in the blue corner, an unlikely hero in the form of Dee Snider, front man of oh so typical larger than life hair metal band Twisted Sister.  

 

The trouble started when Tipper bought her 11-year-old daughter a copy of the album "Purple Rain," the smash-hit album from the *R-rated film, both courtesy of *Prince.  And Tipper was shocked, *shocked to hear inappropriate lyrics.  She clearly did not know his body of work.  "Darling Nikki" was a bridge too far, and if you know, you know.  With bra cups brimming with righteous indignation, Tipper gathered like-minded, and I’m assuming bored, wives of senators, cabinet members, and prominent businessmen to for the Parents Music Resource Council or PMRC.  But this wasn’t censorship, the PMRC wanted everyone to know.  It was just about helping parents make informed decisions.  They wanted to see music rated like movies, with warnings for the R-rated stuff.

 

Critics pointed out that that was easier said than done.  The Motion Picture Association of America rated about 350 movies a year. By contrast the Recording Industry Association of America saw 25,000 songs a year being released in those days.  To focus their efforts, the PMRC threw down the gauntlet on the "Filthy Fifteen," a list of songs from the likes of Madonna and Sheena Easton to AC/DC and Judas Priest, that were part of what Gore called "the twisted tyranny of explicitness in the public domain." I did a Thundercats burlesque number to one of the songs.  Care to guess which one? 

 

While the PMRC wasn’t an official government anything, the record industry needed to stay on their good side.  They were lobbying for a tax on blank c...

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Your Brain on Facts - Yaarrrr Brain On Facts (ep. 194)
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05/10/22 • 31 min

What started as a need to tell the real story of "Gentleman Pirate" Stede Bonnet has turned into a myth vs history two-parter! I love when that happens. Hear about pirate pensions, the makeup of the mariners, and civil unions on the seven seas. Special thanks to Charlie and Jesse over the in Brainiac Breakroom for help with the title.

1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt.

Music: Kevin MacLeod, and Tabletop Audio

Calm History Podcast

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Your Brain on Facts - Hidden Histories - Rosewood, Tulsa, Chicago (encore)
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06/14/22 • 29 min

(Chronic health problems sometime require an encore performance of a past episode.)

Hundreds dead, thousands homeless, entire communities wiped out, yet most of us have never heard of what happened in Rosewood 1923, Tulsa 1921, or Chicago 1919.

Music by Kevin MacLeod

Read the full script.

Reach out and touch Moxie on FB, Twit, the 'Gram or email.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Your Brain on Facts - Worst. Christmas Song. Ever. (ep. 176)
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12/21/21 • 27 min

Voted on by our Patreon, we look at the what, how, and for-gods-sake-why of some of those most hated holiday songs!

02:40 Banned songs

08:09 Wonderful Christmastime

10:45 Chipmunks Song

16:36 Little Drummer Boy (Peace on Earth)

Like what you hear? Become a patron of the arts for as little as $2 a month! Or buy the book or some merch. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesliyan.

Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

Sources:

https://www.cbc.ca/music/read/david-bowie-bing-crosby-and-the-story-of-the-strangest-christmas-duet-ever-1.5008343

https://theconversation.com/christmas-earworms-the-science-behind-our-love-hate-relationship-with-festive-songs-89268

https://www.slantmagazine.com/music/worst-christmas-songs-of-all-time/3/

https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/story-behind-the-christmas-song-paul-mccartneys-wonderful-christmastime/

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/paul-mccartney/wonderful-christmastime

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/637970/banned-christmas-songs-past

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chipmunk_Song_(Christmas_Don%27t_Be_Late)

http://www.christmassongs.net/chipmunks-christmas-song

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Bagdasarian

https://nowweknowem.wordpress.com/2013/05/04/david-sevilles-the-chipmunk-song-won-three-grammy-awards-today-in-1959-the-top-winner-at-the-inaugural-grammy-awards-now-we-know-em/

https://holidappy.com/holidays/History-of-Christmas-Carols-Little-Drummer-Boy

https://www.newsweek.com/story-behind-bowie-bings-unlikely-holiday-duet-sends-welcome-message-divided-times-opinion-1478295

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Your Brain on Facts - Apple of Our Eye (ep. 191)

Apple of Our Eye (ep. 191)

Your Brain on Facts

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04/12/22 • 34 min

1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross.

It's another one of those episodes all about a topic that sounds totally mundane and boring!  Where did apples come from?  Was Johnny Appleseed real?  Why does planting apple seeds lead to disappointment?  And why are some apples considered intellectual property?

 

 

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on FacebookTwitter,  or Instagram. 

Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt.

Music: Kevin MacLeod, Tabletop Audio, and Steve Oxen

Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn with coupon code "moxie."

Sponsor: Starfleet Leadership Academy

 

What’s more wholesome and iconic than an apple?  In the Bible, Eve ate an apple and now half of us have to have periods and crap.  In fairness to apples, the Bible just says “fruit” and it was Milton’s “Paradise Lost” that declared the fruit was an apple because the Latin word for apple, m-a-l-u-s, is also the word for evil.  There’s the Greek myth of Atalanta, who would only marry the man who beat her in a footrace, so Aphrodite helped a Melanion cheat by dropping golden apples that she stopped to pick up.  An apple fell on the head of Isaac Newton, leading to the discovery of gravity – prior to that, everyone weighed a lot less.  The record label that gave the world the Beatles and one of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world use an apple as their logo.  [tiktok] Bonus fact: The Apple computer logo has a bite taken out of it so it isn’t mistaken for a cherry, which I don’t think would really have been so great a danger, and is *not a nod to Alan Turing, the famous mathematician who helped Britain win WWII but was hounded by that same government for being gay and took his own life with a poisoned apple.  Steve Jobs and co repeatedly said they wished it was that clever.

 

We say something is “as American as apple pie” and even though Ralph Waldo Emerson dubbed apples “the American fruit,” the tasty, sweet malus domestica as you’re used to it is about as native to North America as white people.  That’s not to say there was nothing of the genus malus in the new world; there was the crabapple, a small, hard, exceedingly tart apple, which is better used for adding the natural thickener pectin to preserves than anything.

 

The story of apples actually begins in Kazakhstan, in central Asia east of the Caspian Sea.  Malus sieversii is a wild apple, native to Kazakhstan’s Tian Shan Mountains, where they have been growing over millions of years and where they can still be found fruiting today.  There’s evidence of Paleolithic people harvesting and using native crabapples 750,000 years ago, give or take a week.  The original wild apples grew in ‘apple forests’ at the foot of the snow-tipped mountains, full of different shapes,sizes and flavors, most of them ba...

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Your Brain on Facts - Dumping out my purse (update on the podcast)
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07/19/22 • 5 min

YBOF's gonna take a break for a month or two.

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Your Brain on Facts - Shapeshifters (encore and personal update)
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10/06/21 • 42 min

From Irish selkies to Japanese kitsune, from Navajo skin-walkers to Ethiopian werehyenas, there doesn't seem to be a culture in the world that doesn't have at least one shape-shifter in its folklore or mythology.

Personal update:

Hey, so can we talk for a minute? Come sit by the fire while I dump out my purse. You might have noticed (you really couldn't have missed it), there hasn't been a lot of YBOF happening lately. The reason for that, as some of my longtime listeners know –I can't believe people have been listening this long– I have a chronic, idiopathic pulmonary condition. Idiopathic means we don't know what the hell it is. We being myself, three pulmonologists, two cardiologists, endocrinology, a full GI workup, even saw a Johns Hopkins doctor who had no idea what I was dealing with and stumping a Johns Hopkins doctor isn't as cool as it sounds. So it's kicked up again. It does this. It could last for an hour, a day, a week, or 6 weeks, like now. The trouble is, I do voice-overs for a living. The irony is not lost on me. And I got into voiceover after the onset of this mystery condition because it's what I want to do. And when covid hit it was goddamn jolly well time to get out of retail. So doing voiceover requires my lungs and then there's no lungs leftover for the podcast, and VO pays the bills.

For those who like things quantified, as I dom for the past week, for example, I've been able to record for about 2 minutes andt hen I need to stop for 5. I can repeat that cycle for up to 30 minutes, but then I have to lie down for 30 minutes at least. So work gets done really, really, really slowly. It's especially complicating because I just took on the largest job by word count that I've ever done. I'm not saying this to pity whore, get sympathy, get attention, fish for compliments or anything like that –I always feel so awkward when that reaction comes in. I just wanted you to know what's going on with the show, which means what's going on with my lungs. Because what's going on with my lungs is what's going on with the show.

What's the bottom line here for the podcast going forward?I'm not giving up on it – 160+ episodes in, I'm not going to bail now. I just can't always do it. I've also become increasingly reluctant to rerun the old episodes because I go back and listen,and I just can't stand the way they sound. It's probably much worse for me than normal people because my ears have become increasingly attuned to vocal and sound qualities.

So I will do my utmost to get new episodes made, but if there isn't one that week, it's not because I didn't want to. And I appreciate everyone sticking with me through this inconsistent schedule. I know it's not good for the algorithms and stuff like that, but I don't care about algorithms. I care about you enjoying the show. I am doing my best to take care of myself, but it's hard when you have these mercurial changing shifting symptoms and no continuity of care. I don't even know who to see at this point. So please be patient, stick with me spread the word on social media, whether you see me post or not. And hey, if you know a good diagnostician within say 3 hour drive of Richmond, Virginia to shoot me their number. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program already in progress.

Special guests: Worst Foot Forward

Pink river dolphins

Linfamy

Need some light reading in a heavy world? Good thing there's the YBOF book!

Read the full script.

Reach out and touch Moxie on FB, Twit, the 'Gram or email.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Your Brain on Facts - Suspect Sustenance Stories (ep. 197)
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05/31/22 • 35 min

Who was General Tsao of chicken fame? Where do Danish pastries come from? Is pad Thai actually Thai food? All that and more in this patron-voted episode!

1-star review shirt! and shirt raising money for Ukraine Red Cross

Links to all the research resources are on the website.

Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi. Or buy the book and a shirt.

Music: Kevin MacLeod,

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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FAQ

How many episodes does Your Brain on Facts have?

Your Brain on Facts currently has 239 episodes available.

What topics does Your Brain on Facts cover?

The podcast is about Society & Culture, History, Documentary and Podcasts.

What is the most popular episode on Your Brain on Facts?

The episode title 'This Land is Our Land (ep 173)' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Your Brain on Facts?

The average episode length on Your Brain on Facts is 33 minutes.

How often are episodes of Your Brain on Facts released?

Episodes of Your Brain on Facts are typically released every 7 days.

When was the first episode of Your Brain on Facts?

The first episode of Your Brain on Facts was released on Feb 1, 2018.

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Chris Yeany

@cyeany

May 11

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Darn good show with a delightful and dedicated host.

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Kyle

@whoarted

Apr 25

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