Boler boss, Yukon's Dunkin's Welcome to the Blind Bye podcast. How is everybody doing, OK? Hope things are too tough on you. It's been a tough week, hasn't it? This is the first podcast of 2021. What a strange year to even say 2021. It's the first week of 2021.

And I think it's fair to say no matter where you live in the world, it's a shit week because coronavirus numbers have spiked pretty high. Everywhere, certainly over in England and in Ireland. Because of I don't want to say number of reasons arise because of a number of reasons coronavirus cases are fucking mad and then we're all going back into lockdown. And people are kind of scared again, so for this week's podcast, podcasting, going to try and give you a nice bit of escapism, which is which I think is always the best thing to do in that situation.

Before I continue, I'm in a bit of a quiet scenario, so I'm actually on well, at the moment, I'm I'm on antibiotics. Right. Now, I'm not too bad, I'm not too bad, I don't I'm a bit under the weather. No, it's not it's not coronavirus. I'm after getting that the most. Strange and specific illness that only I could get. So I have an aggressive infection in my left eye. OK, and I've had it for about two weeks, but it got really bad this week and it's like I've got lots of studies on my eyelid and it's very painful.

And it got so bad that, like, I started to get a little bit of a fever. So I had to ring my doctor and go, what's the crack? And the doctor goes, You're not allowed. Come to the GP. You can't come to my office because of coronavirus restrictions. We're not doing any face to face. Describe what's wrong to me over the phone. So I said, look, here's the crack at my eyes and he goes, I'll grant, OK, give me a prescription for antibiotics.

So anyway, I'm I'm there wondering, like like one of the benefits of quarantine and coronavirus for me for the past year has been, well, at least I'm not going to get sick because I'm not going to see anyone. So not only am I not getting coronavirus, I'm not going to get any sore throats. I won't get a chest infection. I won't catch a cold or a flu. That was a bonus for me. So I'm like, how the fuck, how the fuck did I get an eye infection, how did they end up with an infection on my eye that needs antibiotics if I'm absolutely socially distancing and not contacting other people?

Well, here's here's how I did it. I managed to get myself an infection on my fucking eye from live streaming too much so when I live stream on Twitch, I wear I don't wear my plastic bag. When I'm on Twitch, I wear a silent fabric bag on my head. OK, and basically what happened is that this fabric bag that I was wearing on my head every so often, the corner of the fabric of the eyehole was tipping off my eyelid.

OK, and this procedure, when I was livestream of my fabric bag tipping off my eyelid, it managed to cause bacteria that belongs on my face to migrate to my eyelid and then infect my eyelid. So I'm after getting a fucking eye infection from wearing a fabric bag on my head, livestream in songs, and now I'm on fucking antibiotics. And the mad thing is, I've been wearing a plastic bag on my head for almost 13 years now. And I've never I've had no complications.

The only a wasp flew into my bag once at a festival that says at a fest when I'm at festivals, this is where I don't like festivals. When I'm at festivals, I've got a plastic bag on my head. If I'm drinking a tin of cider or a tin of beer that the beer and cider doesn't fully wipe away from the plastic around my mouth. And I get chased by wasps, right? Non-stop, non-stop, chased by wasps. And it's one of my least favorite things about the festivals because the wasps are interested in my mouth.

So then one day a fucking wasp.

I don't know what I think it was a picnic. A wasp flew into my mouth hole and got trapped between my bag and my skin and I had to punch myself in the face to kill the wasp before he stung me. So that's the that's the worst out of 13 years of wearing a bag in my head. That's the worst that happened until now, when I now have an eye infection that needs to be treated with antibiotics because I was screaming with a fabric bag.

And I wear the fabric bag for obviously, so when I'm live streaming, it's more comfortable. The bag is made out of satin, so it's more comfortable to wear a satin bag if I'm streaming for like three or four hours. Secondly, fuckin assholes on the Internet dies, angry grown men age 28 and over any time I speak about climate change. And speak about climate action, there was always this cohort of of men, men who are furious, furious that they have one great job and like they would go your fucking asshole blind by.

Talking about climate change and climate action and you're wearing a plastic bag, where's your reusable bag for your head, and they wouldn't shut up. And no matter how much I told them, you know what, my fucking plastic bag AYMOND my plastic bag is actually I reuse it. And this is a single use plastic bag. So when I reuse it, that's actually an environmentally friendly way to use a plastic bag. But the dyes wouldn't listen. They'd go cross-eyed instead.

So I finally just said, fuck it. All right. So I'm going to get a reusable a custom-made fabric bag to shut the fuck up. And now I've got an eye infection. So that's how my week is going, so it's it's very hard to ignore the pain when it's in your eye and because every time I blink, I'm just reminded of a sharp, stinging pain. And you know what else is annoying about January 20, 21 Briggs's, we are seeing the the real impact of Brexit Brexit.

It's been around for four years now. And you're kind of like I fox, but like, no, no, no, it's not what actually happened and it's inconveniencing my life. Because this I'm recording this podcast now and the computer and recording it is really gone to shit. It's completely full up and it's about five years old. And I desperately need a brand new computer to record this podcast because it crashes in the middle when I'm recording it, which is no crack crashing Midhat heartache.

So I bought myself no computer. Thank you very much to my patrons. Promise myself a new computer to record this. Ordered it from Germany before Christmas. It should be here by now. It's not. Do you know why? Because of Briggs's. So shit that comes from Europe to get to Ireland has to go through England to get here, and now that the Brits decided that they wanted freedom and independence from the oppression of the EU and now anything that we are from Germany goes into England fast and is subject to customs checks.

So I'm waiting extra time for my computer, basically. Hopefully I'll have it by next week. So I hope they sort that shit out so we're back into quarantine, proper quarantine like we had last March. We've done it before. That's all right. We'd be grand. Don't take the piss. Don't take the piss. Wash your hands, don't touch your face, sneeze into your elbow, you know that crack where your fuckin mask, where your mask, when if you must go to the shop, wear your mask.

I don't see people. The best way to not get coronavirus is, if at all possible, don't spend time talking to another person if it can be avoided. Like when you go to the shop, when you're in, if you're in Donz or Aldi and you're wearing your mask and everyone else is wearing their mask and you're kind of pottering around and you're not talking to people, that's kind of low, low risk. But as soon as you start chatting to someone speaking loudly, then that's the dodgy stuff.

You just stay away from it'll be grand rewash watch Mad Men. You know what I mean? I'm watching. I'm on Netflix watching an early 90s Australian teen drama called Heartbreak High. Because when I was a kid, when I was a kid in the 90s, this is what was on television, heartbreak high, I would have been a child and I used to look at it going, wow, look at those teenagers. They're so cold. And now I'm now I'm watching this to try and relive feelings of childhood nostalgia.

And it's not even that good as a TV show, but it doesn't matter. Because that's not why I'm watching it, I'm watching it because. I don't know, somewhere in the depths of my unconscious like this was this was it was on a channel called Trouble, which was like the teenage version of the children's channel in the early 90s. And they used to play it four times a day. So I would watch it as a child. Happy as Larry, comfortable.

And when I really watch it now, certain feelings of comfort and certainty, things that we don't have right now, comfort and certainty, certain feelings of comfort and certainty that I had as a child in the naivety of childhood, I can extrapolate them unconsciously from the process of watching something I watched in my childhood because the memories. They hook into your brain in a certain way, you consolidate emotional consolidation. It's lovely when it happens. Smells can do it as well.

But that's the purpose of nostalgia, like if you ever wonder what the fuck you know, what the fuck is nostalgia, it's it's not the longing for something that we enjoyed when we were younger. What it is, is you're trying to unconsciously visit a pleasant emotion from when you were younger. And it's usually something like there's a naivete to childhood and a naivete to being younger. It's it's a comfort for me. It's comfort. I do remember because I had a happy childhood.

I do remember being a child watching TV and didn't have any bills to pay, had no stress or pressure on me whatsoever, not knowing what to expect and not. And I was taken that feeling for granted. And when I watch TV from my childhood, I can momentarily revisit those feelings like a type of visual opium that comes from a screen and it's good to be aware of it because. You know, sometimes I get I get Ladds, I get lads in their 30s, right?

Grown men in their 30s and I'd be on Facebook and I'll post something like check out this week's podcast. It's it's about Charles Manson and the CIA. And most people are like, thanks for that blind boy.

I listen to the podcast about Charles Manson and the CIA, but then you'll get some lad called Darren, who's 32, and Darren will say, I don't like your podcasts. I prefer things like Hahs outside. Why aren't you doing songs like Hahs Outside anymore instead of making podcasts? And I don't reply to us, but I use in my head, I kind of go, you know what Darren Haas outside was 10 years ago, and you're 32 now, according to your Facebook profile.

So when Haas outside came out, you were 22, right. OK, you know what, Darren? I don't think you actually want me to still be making songs like Hearts Outside. I don't think that's what you actually want. I think what you want, Darren, is to be 22 again, because if I actually did release a song now like Cars Outside in my thirties, you wouldn't even like it. Nobody would, because it would be fucking ridiculous because heart outside is about finger and then shifting.

That was grand when I was in my 20s, but not now. So, Darren, you want me to magically make you feel 22 again? I can't do it. You can listen to cars outside and you can feel nostalgia, but I can't make it 22. And then then other times I go maybe I should to prove a point. I'll I'll release 10 years later hasso outside for the benefit of Darren. Fuck your Honda Civic I get today hangover's now.

Fuck your Honda Civic. I grow Tates, if I eat too many Mars Bears, Focker Honda Civic. My knees are always sore. Forker, Honda Civic. Should I start thinking about a pension, is that what you want, Daryn? Is this is that the song you want out of me in my 30s? You don't you want to feel 22 again and I can't do it for you. So the theme I want to focus on for this week's podcast is nostalgia.

Right. I want to speak about some nostalgic things from our childhood, and I want to elicit some heartaches around them because it's a tough week. It's stressful. I didn't want to come at you with a mental health podcast. I want to come at you with some fucking escapism, some soothing escapism that will allow you to revisit some lovely childhood feelings of comfort. Why the fuck not who doesn't like nostalgia? And I don't talk about nostalgia that much really as a subject.

Also, what I'm interested in is. The the kind of the majority of the listener listenership to this podcasts is age is 24 and up. OK, I do have people who listen to this podcast who are in their teens and early 20s, but mostly it's people 24 and up. So if you're 24 and up, I think what's the cutoff for Millennial? I think the youngest millennials right now are 25 and the oldest are 40. So if you're between 25 and 40 right now in 2021, you're a millennial.

If you're older and 40, your generation X, I believe under 24, your generation Z. Now, you know what these things mean, not much, it just means when you were born, I do have a I have a theory and I could be wrong. I have a theory. That millennials are the last generation to truly experience nostalgia, right, like I remember life before the Internet. OK. I remember 2006 when YouTube became a thing, all right?

And in 2006, YouTube and Bieber were around at the same time, social media became a thing around 2006.

What I remember most about 2006 was people applauding the team tunes to old cartoons. And it was phenomenal, the feeling of it was phenomenal. Like when I was a child, there was no Internet. You just watched the TV, you watched cartoons, Garfield's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Transformers, care, bears, whatever the fuck. Right. But in 2006. When YouTube came around, one of the first things people were uploading was 90's cartoon theme tune compilation and.

The feed and I got in 2006 was incredible, it's like, oh, my God, hears these team tunes that I completely forgotten about because it's from when I was a child and I moved on with my life and I'm now able to revisit all these wonderful, comfortable feelings of childhood.

And it really encapsulated for me the purpose of nostalgia. Like, even when culture becomes nostalgic, like in in the 90s, hip hop used to sample fuckin 70s funk indie music used to reference 70s music. In the 2010s, music used to reference the 1980s. Nostalgia tends to be dominated by when people in their 20s are expressing the popular culture of what they heard or saw when they were children. And I think it exists because being 20 is a scary age 19.

20 is a terrifying age. You society tells you you are now an adult. That's scary. So we find comfort by revisiting things that remind us of our childhoods. And that's what nostalgia does. I wonder how Generation Z are going to do it because they grew up with the Internet. So how does Generation Z do nostalgia when from the age of five they can just re watch everything on their iPad like they don't have distant memories of things they'll never hear again because they can hear it all again whenever they want.

But then a strategic theme of nostalgia that I want to investigate for this podcast, because I have a bit of a heartache around it is quicksand.

If you grew up watching cartoons in the 90s. Quicksand and video games and films quicksand. Was this a really important thing? In in cartoons now, what I mean is like quicksand is this terrifying swirling pool of sand that as soon as you go near it, it'll suck you in. Right. Every single fucking cartoon that I watched as a kid, the turtles, the care bears, fucking Ulysses, Hatcliffe, whatever the fuck it was. At one point in one episode, quicksand appears and someone gets swallowed into it, and it really was.

Presented to me as this terrifying thing in nature and as a child, I used to be terrified of quicksand. Like, I'd go out, there's this place called the Woods near Limerick, which is just a wooded area, and I was scared to go near anything, anything muddy looking in case it was quicksand. I used to get this deep, terrifying feeling in my belly of don't go near that patch of mud, don't go near that patch of sand because you'd be drawn towards the center of it like a magnet and sucked into the ground through the quicksand.

I was terrified of quicksand because every single cartoon I was watching told me that quicksand is everywhere and it's going to suck you in. But even the games I'd play as a kid, like if I was bored and I was jumping from the couch to the armchair, the ground was quicksand. And I can't if I fall on the ground, I fall into the quicksand. Same if I was playing at my friend's quicksand was a big feature of my childhood.

It was it was a real thing that I was told to watch out for. It's almost a cliche to say it now, but as an adult, I've never seen quicksand in my fucking life. Quicksand is not important. I don't think about quicksand. I don't think I'm ever going to come across it. So why was every cartoon when we were a kid point that they are feature quicksand like? The Turtles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Usually this is how it would work.

Like quick quicksand was used. As a kind of an if so 80s cartoons, cartoons in the 80s and 90s, they always followed a real simple narrative of good versus bad, all of them. So even the care bears fucking. What was your son's name? Jan in The Misfits. JAMAN The Misfits. I used to watch that. He used to love it. I don't even remember the boat. But it was Jaman, the fucking holograms. It was called jazmín the holograms and it was about a group of girls who were starting a band.

And then there was a rival band called The Misfits, and they used to make there was music in it. I fucking love this. All right. I think they made a shit film of it in 2015, but there was all these cartoons when we were kids. They all featured quicksand. And because they were they weren't. Listen to cartoons we grew up with. They weren't cartoons. There were giant advertisements for toys in the 1980s, in particular, companies like Mattel and these toy makers, they started to fund cartoons that were being made really animated really cheaply in Korea.

And they were just stuck together, mad quickly and sold to us as cartoons like Transformers is another example. They were just giant ads for toys. That's all they were. And that's why they were so shaped and why they were so similar and why they were so lazy. But the laziness of this righton. It's why we arrive at something like quicksand in every single episode, because it serves a purpose. So all these cartoons care Bears, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Scooby Doo, Hatcliffe, Ghostbusters, Inspector Gadget, thunderclouds, you've got goodies versus baddies.

And at the end of every cartoon, about three quarters of the way through, there's some type of battle. A battle happens and it's a battle between good and bad. And in every single one of these cartoons, in some episode, Quix Quicksand Quicksand is an important part of this battle. I write these cheap cartoons that are effectively just giant advertisements to sell toys in the 80s. Oh, let's just use the tartlets for the example. You're watching the turtles.

It's three quarters of the way through in the second half, shredder is the body he shows up. Now the turtles and shredder have to have a battle. Then at the start of the battle, Michelangelo are Donatello says, watch out, there's quicksand. And the camera pans and shows you a swirling pool of quicksand. Watch out, there's quicksand. We come away from the quicksand. Now we're back to the battle to shoot and shoot and fight. And now it looks like Shredder's going to fucking win.

Ah, fuck. The music is getting scary. Shredder is winning. Oh, no. Here comes the quick send now shredder has fallen into the quicksand, you think he was going to win, but he hasn't won because now he's in the fuckin quicksand. The quicksand has sucked him in. This force of chaos has come in and no UTA Treader was going to lose, but he got sucked into the quicksand and now the turtles are winning and everything is OK.

And that's how quicksand is used in everything, even all of those fucking cartoons, thunderclouds, Jem, and the holograms, even if it's in space, they'll end up on a planet and the planet has quicksand. And if they can't find it and worst case scenario, it's a wormhole or a tractor beam, but quicksand, that's always how it's used. Halo quicksand, forget about it. And then it comes back to save the day as a force of chaos.

And what's happening there is quicksand is being used as a really simple writing device, a paint by numbers writing device, where if you've got a mad story and you want it to seem like it's making sense, you use this exact writing device. I don't know why they've chosen quicksand as the device, but here it is. That's known as planting a gun or it's known as Chekhov's Gun, because there was a short story writer called Anton Chekhov, who is seen as one of the best short story writers of all time, and his style has influenced theater and has influenced filmmaking and TV.

Chekhov's gone basically is I think Chekhov had a quote that said. If you show a gun in the first scene of your play or if you mention a gun, then that gun has to come back at the very end and shoot someone important. And that's what Chekhov's Gun is. You introduce a random object, our thing, our character at the very start of something, then you never mention it again. And at the end it comes back and it complete your story.

And it's nice because it makes us feel like detectives could write an. It never fully tells you the story, it presents you with questions so that you're also solving the story in your own head. So when you see treader drowning in the quicksand, you get a little buzz because you go on the quicksand. I remember that and you feel as if you solved that little mystery like the absolute originator of Chekhov's Gun in American cartoons for me, Scooby Doo, because every episode of Scooby Doo are right there trying to solve a mystery.

And at the end they reveal someone's identity. And then you go, Ah, it was the groundskeeper all along. So they introduce a character at the very start. You see them for two seconds, you forget about them, and then at the end they take off the mask and it was them all along. That's Chekhov's gone. Scooby Doo really abused that for children's cartoons, but then it became quicksand for fucking everything. And The Chekhov's Gone is not to be confused with another writing device called a Magoffin.

I would say that Chekhov's gone, is modernised and the MacGuffin is postmodernist. So The Magoffin is when you introduce an object into a story and it has no purpose whatsoever other than to drive that story. So it's kind of cynical. With a Chekhov's gone, you're kind of gone are the Gone at the start. And now it's after shooting him at the end. That's got meaning because it's gone. But a MacGuffin, it doesn't have any meaning. A good example of that would be the Briefcase and Pulp Fiction in Pulp Fiction.

Pulp Fiction is a film that's made of three or four unconnected stories. And the thing that connects them all is this briefcase full of light. So. Fuckin John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are two gangsters and they have a briefcase and we don't know what's in the briefcase and they won't tell us what's in the briefcase. All we know is that when it's opened, the presents a glowing light. So it's very important whatever is in the briefcase. We don't know what it is.

But the whole point of the Briefcase and Pulp Fiction is that it's meaningless, Tarantino wants us to know it's meaningless all the briefcase does. Is it connects all the stories together, and that's known as a Magoffin, which is a really cynical Chekhov's gone, but quicksand in cartoons as kids was used as a checkoffs gun, you see, is you forget about it and then it saves the day. So I'm asking, why the fuck quicksand what? Who told who told the people making cartoons that quicksand was a thing?

Why quakes and where to come from, Juarez fucking quakes and why, as an adult do I feel lied to? Because in the world of cartoons, quicksand was a very, very big deal. It was a big obstacle that people had to face all the time. And I never saw no, I don't see quicksand where, ladies and gentlemen, I have a roaring hot take as that. Why and how quicksand became so important in films and cartoons before we get into that, it is time for the ocarina pause, right?

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Patrie on dot com forward. Slash the blind by podcast. OK, quick quicksand.

Why Why do I think quicksand became so culturally significant in the cartoons of our childhood? Why, when I've got a bit of a royal story, because I've been obsessing about this and researching this and thinking about it so most of us know the excessive use of quicksand from 80s and 90s cartoons. But from the research that I've been doing, quicksand was a huge part of American kind of trash cinema, one not even trash America, American cinema and TV. From the 1920s onwards Peacon in the 1950s, quicksand was a huge feature in a lot of films and it was used in the exact same way.

It was used as a Chekhov's gun. Quicksand was introduced in these battles of good and evil as a force of chaos to resolve conflict. And the cartoons that we were watching that were being made in the 80s and 90s, the writers of those were simply being nostalgic for the 50s and 60s because when they were looking at films in the 50s and 60s, quicksand was being used quite a lot. And then the people in the 50s and 60s who were using a lot of quicksand as a Chekov's Gone device in their films, they were being nostalgic for the films of their youth in the 20s and 30s.

So quicksand has existed as as a nostalgic circle.

Going all the way back to the 1920s to the earliest, earliest days of Hollywood. So what's going on there? Here's my personal theory, here's my personal theory because. Again, like I said, quick, quick sand is is is not a big deal in real life. Quicksand isn't a fucking big deal. I mean, let's look at what quicksand is in real life away from fuckin films or cartoons. What is quicksand in real life? The closest thing to quicksand in real life is clustered right.

Quicksand is what's called a non Newtonian fluid. It's a strange it's both a solid and a liquid. At the same time, if you want to make some quicksand right now, get yourself a cereal bowl. Fill it halfway with water and then fill it halfway with flour or custard powder. OK, and when the corn flour and custard powder mixed mixes together equally in your little bowl, put your hand on it, you'll be able to slap the corn flour or the custard as if it's solid.

But if you let your hand rest, your hand will sink and it gets stuck. So a non Newtonian fluid, I don't know what the fuck it is because I don't know anything about physics, but basically it's both a solid and liquid at the same time. So you could you can walk across quicksand or you could walk across the swimming pool for a custard. But once you stop, you sink and as soon as you sink, it becomes almost impossible to pull yourself out and quicksand in the wild.

It can happen more than it can happen with sand. Usually something like an underground spring of water finds itself mixing with sand so that you could be walking along a sandy area, are on a beach or on a coast, and you think you're on solid ground. But then as soon as you stop, you sink. And the more you sink, the harder it is to get out and the harder you pull to get out, the more you get stuck.

And this is a real thing. That's quicksand and it exists. Does it kill that many people? Not really. It's you know, it's a bit of a freak accident if you get caught in quicksand. So how did quicksand end up in Hollywood as the go to terrible thing that can happen? And this is what's been racking my brains and then that got me thinking about California. And quicksand was actually quite a bit of a deal, quite of a big deal and something that was dangerous to people in California.

In the late eighteen hundreds. OK, so California, Los Angeles, that's only like like California only became a place where a lot of people live in their own 1849 because of the gold rush. So California was this giant empty space of land where indigenous people, indigenous Native American people lived there, but not in gigantic numbers. They were there was indigenous people living there quite a lot, but not like the millions of people that eventually came to live in California.

So California, the Spanish colonized this. Then the Mexicans had it, and then the Americans and Mexicans had a war. And I believe in 1849, California became part of America. And also what happened in 1849 is somebody discovered gold in California. And when that happened, there was this massive influx of people from all over America traveling. As far west as possible, this is American frontier ism, though, in 1849, America wasn't America as a young country was just states over on the East Coast, but the West was this vast expanse where.

Colonizers hadn't colonized yet as such, so when gold was struck in 1849, hundreds of thousands of people immediately headed to California to go to the mountains and try and strike it rich and find gold. And it became known as obviously the California gold rush, but also the California dream. It was the ultimate realization of the American dream that California in 1880, 1890 is where you go to to find gold in the mountains and to have your life changed overnight, to become an absolute millionaire overnight if you find gold.

And lots of people tried it and it was horrendous for the indigenous people of California. There was many genocides. The indigenous people of California were completely wiped out for the capitalistic greed of the California dream and the gold rush. So if you're a prospector, a poor prospector who goes to California in, say, 1860 or 1850 and you're determined to find gold to like the thing is to with the land in California. Yet prospectors literally went there and they staked the claim it was so big.

They just said this here is mine. And they didn't have to ask anyone. They just said, this bit of land is mine. Mistake to claim. And if you were determined on finding gold and looking over at a mountain. And so much of this was desert, looking over the mountain and deciding, I'm going over there to look for gold or I'm going over to this riverbed here and I'm going to pan for gold on this river. If you were someone like that in 1850, quicksand was actually a real threat.

Like where people were panning for gold and like there's areas of the of California where suddenly you'd get you get a big shitload of rain, right. So you'll be at the bottom of a mountain up around Sierra Nevada and it would rain. And then all of a sudden the rain would cause there'd be ravines that are only rivers when it rains. So when it rains, this ravine becomes a river. And what it does is it washes all the sediment down from the mountain, down the river.

So if you're panning for gold, you're like, fucking fantastic. It's raining. I'm going to pan for gold. But the rain used to also disturb the earth in the sand and used to create pockets of quicksand. So for the average person out on their own or in a small team trying to pan for gold in California, quicksand was an unknown, terrifying thing that could suck you into the ground. And if you were there with your partner and all of a sudden they start sinking into the ground and some unknown force and you don't know what it is.

And all you know is your you know, your your greed for gold and your California dream. You're looking for this gold.

And then all of a sudden someone starts sinking into the ground and you're like, what the fuck is happening? It looks solid. The ground looks solid, but he's sinking. What's happening? And you watch your friend die and get sucked into the arts. And you've never seen anything like this before in your life because you're not from California. You've just arrived there this year to pan for gold and you just watched your friend get swallowed into the art of what you thought was was flat ground.

So then you run back to the nearest mining town and you tell everybody, you say we were panning for gold and the art just sucked him up. And it becomes this terrifying urban myth and this urban legend. You can't trust the hills where the gold where the gold is, because when you pan for gold, you'll get sucked into the art. And this is a real thing that's happening. So then the myth of the quicksand of the mountains starts to become part of folklore.

It starts to become something that people speak about, but they're not quite sure of. But they know what happens, but they don't at the same time. But it's also intertwined with this pursuit of gold and greed. So this. And a lot of these people, these could have been Presbyterian's, they could have been Calvinists. They would be aware that this search for greed isn't good. They are watching as like my miners used to perform acts of genocide on indigenous people.

If they came across an indigenous tribe, they would shoot and murder all these people just to lay stake to the land that they were on for the gold. So they were doing really bad, evil shit. This was the Wild West. So what I'm trying to get at is that. I'm guessing that within the folklore of California and the gold rush and you have to remember this, this is 1850, 1860, Opta up to nineteen hundreds. So not that far away.

Within the folklore of the California gold rush comes this this uniquely American terror, which is. Yes, you can become rich overnight, but up in the mountains, you get sucked into the art, your pursuit for greed can suck you into the art. No one knows what the fuck this is. And then at the. At the end, near the end of the California gold rush, right, so go the gold rush started off with people panning for gold, which is, like I said, the gold is in the sand up in the mountains.

And when the rain happens, it washes the gold down via these ravines and then you're ready to pan for the gold as it comes down. Miners started to figure out a more aggressive way to get the gold out of the soil and out of the sand and out of the mountains. They started to develop a technique known as hydraulic mining. So now they're not waiting for rain to wash into the ravines. What they're doing is they're creating culverts and they're finding lakes and pools and they're diverting massive gallons and gallons, thousands of gallons of water down towards areas where they think there's gold or if they see a mountain or a hill that they think there's gold in.

What they do is they get these these big, long hoses. And like the way you'd put a garden hose into the ground or put a garden hose into, you know, you'd shove your holes in the garden as a kid for the laugh.

So you decide to put the hose into the grass and then everything around you fills up water. They started to do this thing called hydraulic mining for gold, what they would shove gallons and gallons of water, an incredibly high pressure into mountains and into hills, and it would basically cause the whole thing to crumble with water. So everything around you is flowing mud and flowing sand. And a consequence of that then obviously is fok tons of quicksand, because what you've done is you have all these dry darte of California and these dry sand, and now you've injected the whole landscape with water to find gold.

So you can't trust where you walk. You don't know. Is this solid ground or am I going to get into quicksand and if I'm on my own, will I drown in the quicksand on my own? So within the culture of the California gold rush. Quicksand was a genuine, real thing that was killing people and it was killing them while they pursue insane amounts of gold and wealth. And then what happens in California when the gold rush ends, you end up with the next thing after gold was oil.

All around Los Angeles, there was tar pits. Tar pits are also things that suck you in as you you try and pursue your fucking oil in California, you can go into a tar pit. So everything about the landscape of California punishes you by dragging you into the art. If you are too greedy in the in the late eighteen hundreds, whether it be looking for gold, are looking for oil and getting sucked into a tar pit and you know what's underneath the ground.

Hell. So these prospectors wouldn't have had science, so if you're a prospector who those family comes from fucking Scotland, then you're a Presbyterian, Rocanville, Calvinist or whatever the fuck you're probably going to assume that's. Your quest for wealth, that some people are getting so greedy that they're being sucked into hell, why wouldn't you think that? So this uniquely American California dream, irrational fear starts to develop around quicksand and the pursuit of greed and wealth and then after the oil in California in the early 1910s.

Gold isn't a thing anymore. Oil is still a thing, but the new gold in the 1910s becomes fame because what happens in the hills of California, Hollywood starts to set up around 1910. Now, this is only 30 years after the gold rush. So the folklore of pursuing wealth and being sucked into the arts still exists in the folklore of California. So now. In all the early Hollywood films, for some reason, it's like putting some quicksand.

What what's the bad thing that can happen in this scene or put in some quicksand, have them sucked into the art and they don't know why they're doing it? It's part of Californian folklore which goes back to the hydraulic mining or goes back to panning for gold. For quicksand is a real terror and a real threat. Now, it's found its way into the folklore of Hollywood filmmaking, and it never really leaves, but it always exists whenever there is.

A tantalizing resource that's there to be exploited and with Hollywood, that resource is the riches that come with fame. So any time within California culture where you can earn a lot of money or a lot of something overnight, quicksand pops up as the thing that drags you down to fucking hell. And that's that's why I think quicksand became a trope in Hollywood films, it's the fucking gold rush 30 years previously. And then then I found when I was doing this research, I found out this other fact and it's not connected, but I think.

It's ironically beautiful. So by the 1950s, which was peak quicksand in American films, in particular the film Tarzan, the Tarzan films around the 50s, they all had a scene involving quicksand and someone being pulled out of quicksand using a vine. Hollywood used to portray quicksand and. On films, they wouldn't use actual sand, so they wouldn't get sand. That's kind of suspended in water because sand didn't look like sand on camera. So instead to make Hollywood quicksand in the 50s, they used to use this substance called vermiculite.

And vermiculite is like it's like a type of volcanic mineral that you find down in mines. It's like a volcanic mineral that's really puffy and shiny. And they used to mix vermiculite with water and that's how they would create with a quicksand in the films in the 50s. But Vermiculite, the mineral was also fool's gold.

Which I find really intriguing, Lietzau, when lads were panning for gold. In the 18 60s. Up in the California mountains, and if they thought they found gold but got it wrong, it was always one of two things. It was either this thing called perlite, which was like a shiny rock, are not perlite. Sorry, Pyrates. They either found pyrite, which was a shiny rock known as fool's gold, or they found this stuff vermiculite, which has got a shiny gold color and.

Remember when I was saying that when they were shoving their hoses into the mountains, they'd make the mountain explode and they referred to all this soil as pay dirt? It meant here's a bunch of dirt that I can gather around, but there's probably enough gold in there to pay my wage. So sometimes they'd take what they thought was gold, but it was actually this vermiculite stuff, the shiny gold and volcanic material that came out of the mines and they'd think that was gold.

But this is what they use to make quick sand out of in the fucking films, it's not connected, but I just think it's really ironic. It's an ironic connection. In the 50s, then in films, Quicksand took on a strange sexual so there's actually Ladds in America now who now there are all the lads. They be in their 50s, a very small community of people who are into quicksand, pornography, because when they were kids watching films like Tarzan, quicksand was used as a sexual thing.

In the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism and censorship in America, you couldn't show sex in the movies, so quicksand wasn't being used as a Chekov's gone. It was being used in Tarzan where a sex scene should be. So what would happen is that Jane would get trapped in the quicksand. And while she's trapped inside there, she's moaning and groaning and her sound of trying to break free sounds almost sexual. And then Tarzan would jump in and try and rescue her.

And they're both moaning and groaning in the mud. And in the 1950s, to an audience who had no access to anything remotely sexual, this was highly sexualized. And as a result, you now have quicksand fetishists. But my overarching heartache, I suppose, is. My theory on quicksand is that. It exists, it's an exclusively. It exists exclusively in the American psyche as a counterbalance to greed. Quicksand occupies a space in the American Californian psyche, which.

Are the puritanical dangers of what happens when when you go to Grady, when a natural resource presents itself, whether it's gold, oil or fame, quicksand is present as the reminder of something that will drag you into hell. If you search for too much gold, you'll be dragged into the soil. If there's too much fame, too much sex, you'll be dragged down to the ground. And then in the 1980s, white as a present itself in children's cartoons, because in the 80s, children's cartoons weren't children's cartoons.

They were giant advertisements to sell toys. It was a gold rush. Everything we grew up with, the turtles, the transformers, he man all that shit, that was a gold rush. Corporations were making huge amounts of money. We thought we cared about the cartoons. The cartoons were shit. They had paint by numbers, scripts. They were all the exact same. But we went and bought the toys we all wanted to play with Hamen. We all want the turtles and transformers and quicksand needed to exist in there as as a as this force of a moral balance.

Almost to exist there in the American psyche to go. Don't dig for too much gold or you'll drown in the hills and no one will find you. You'll drown in the tar pit if you look for oil. You know what I mean? It's like these kids, you're sat in them all these toys. But effectively what you're doing is is ultimately dishonest because you're not making good cartoons. They're secretly adverts for toys and you're just involved in a new gold rush.

You're flooding the market with these cartoons. The way 100 years previously in the 18th 80s, the fuckin prospectors were flooding hills with water and quicksand is the consequence. Quicksand is what can happen. Quicksand is drugs. It's cocaine, it's addiction. It's too much sex. It's vice. It's all the bad things that can happen if you're too greedy. And that's what quicksand is. It's a unique American paranoia. So that's my hot take this week, that's my hot take.

I was going to talk about. All the watershed in Fokin, but I don't have heartaches about electric eels. I do listen, I could do a hot take on electric guitars and Peronists Puranas and electric eels also exist in these cartoons. I've got a separate heartache about them that involves colonialism, which I don't have time to go into. I mean, what have we got in Ireland? White dog shit. We never made any cartoons. We've got a white dog shit, that's it, when we were children, when you were out in the field in the early 90s pretending that the ground was quicksand, chances are what you fell into was white dog shit, which was the shade of it, of a dog that was white.

And it doesn't exist anymore. I know. I no, I can't tell you why. I have a few theories. No. One, the EU introduced laws into dog food, which meant that dogs stopped shedding white shirts. No two wheelie bins start to become popular. Therefore, dogs stopped eating rubbish bins and maybe eaten rubbish from bins in the 80s and 90s is what caused them to shit. White sheets. Number three. As adults who participate in society, we no longer spend enough time on our hands and knees on the ground to see white dog shit, but I don't know what children they are going out there playing with iPads unless they're Google and photos of white dog shit.

So that's what we had in Ireland. Worrying about quicksand and what you needed to be worrying about was white dog shit, because I've placed my hand in a few fucking white dog shit in my time as a child. All right, I I thoroughly enjoyed that Hatake, I really enjoyed that. Might a bit a bit mad, something about that was fun. I'm going to catch you next week and see what I don't know what crack is next week.

All right. God bless y'all. Have a lovely day. Yes, it's not all about him. What does that mean? Sorry, came over 300 reality TV shows are now on. Hey you with complete seasons of your faves, including Below Deck and The Real Housewives. Thank you. Stream loads of episodes, same day. So, you know, I'm just saying to hey, you dotcom to start your free trial.