In this episode, the Brain Bubblegum crew look at 10 times the Olympics were insane, hilarious or downright stupid.
From the Ancient Olympics, to Paris 2024, we pick over some of the weirder events that have happened at or around the Olympics.
Fair warning - there will be olive oil, sweat, blood, hormones, and lots of feathers - some of them a little bit burnt.
In this episode, the Brain Bubblegum crew chews over the fascinating origins of pineapples. From an object of wealth and extravagance, to a symbol of hospitality, to an… erm, symbol of your willingness to share… well, everything, the humble pineapple is truly anything but.
Just… don’t put that pineapple in your shopping trolley’s top basket.
Ah, Iceland - the land of fire and ice. And expensive beer, disgusting food, rampant elves, books galore, and babies sleeping outside in sub-zero temperatures. And where there’s a very real danger you might find yourself getting intimate with a relative if you’re not careful. In this episode Scott, Craig and Simone share the 10 coolest facts they learned about Iceland. Despite the weird, it’s still at the top of our list of places to visit.
You might regularly choose to dine at the Golden Arches, but how much do you really know about your favourite fast food restaurant? Simone, Scott and Craig deep fry 10 crispy truth nuggets about McDonalds that will blow your mind! And maybe even make you laugh like a certain corporate clown mascot!
Where do we get our days of the week from? Who named them and who decided their order in the week? And just why did we go with seven days rather than the far more rounded 10 day week?
Who doesn’t love a good prank? In this episode Simone, Scott and Craig rank the top 10 epic pranks of all time, based on level of commitment, originality, brazenness, humour, whimsicality and lasting impact on culture. How scientific! Or not…
One of New York’s honoured New Year’s Eve traditions is the Times Square ‘ball drop’ which starts at 11:59pm on December 31 and ends at precisely 0:00 on New Year’s Day. The ‘time ball’ was originally a visual way to signal time to ships in harbours so they could synchronise their ship clocks - accurate time being a critical way to know your longitude at sea.
Don’t even think about calling your Swedish friend between 3-5pm on Christmas Eve, because like most of the country they’ll be watching Donald Duck cartoons. In 1959 at 3pm, TV station TV1 showed the Disney special “From All of Us to All of You” or, “Kalle Anka och hans vanner onskar God Jul” (“Donald Duck and his friends wish you a Merry Christmas”), and the station has been repeating the show each year since.
In this special Christmas-themed gumdrop, Craig chews over the origin and history of the Christmas tree. The Bible never mentions anything about a tree, right? So just how did a decorated conifer tree become associated with the birth of Jesus?
Carp. We know them as overgrown goldfish that live in ponds. But many Central and Eastern Europeans know them as Christmas dinner. Parents usually buy living carp a few days before Christmas, with the lucky carp’s temporary new home becoming the family bathtub. Just before dinner, the carp leaves the bathtub for an untimely and brutal meeting with a mallet. Holy carp! As a result many families have found their Christmas dinner plans spoiled, because what happens when you mix live animals with children? The carp quickly stops becoming a Christmas meal and instead gets a name and the protection of a loving child.
In Catalonia, Spain, a 200-year-old Christmas tradition involves hiding a 'caganer' - a man, umm... having a poo - in the Nativity scene. It's usually hidden at the back, and Catalonian children play a game to 'find the caganer'. Nobody knows exactly how the tradition started.
What to do when you’ve gots to get your cola but you’ve got no hard currency? In 1989, the Soviet Union paid for a whopping $3b worth of Pepsi with 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate and a destroyer. Had Pepsi chosen to re-operationalise their newly acquired military hardware, they’d have been the 6th largest military power in the world and the 4th largest submarine power.
Whether it's a dramatic police shootout, saving a life on the operating table, or the action hero proving that it'll take more than a few bullet wounds to stop justice, Hollywood drama is thrilling to say the least. But if you followed all the medical advice on TV and in movies, you might not live very long. In this episode we bust down 10 of Hollywood's favourite medical plot points which are... well... not such a great idea in reality.
Why do we use ‘o’clock’ when telling the time? When mechanical clocks were first introduced in the 14th Century, the most common way to tell time was using a sundial - which often showed a different time than the mechanical clock. Saying ‘of the clock’ (later shortened to ‘o’clock’) let someone know which time you meant.
As a native German speaker, it's natural that Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to lend his voice to the German language version of The Terminator. However, the studio refused. Germans and Austrians consider Arnold's native accent very ‘rural’. So it'd be difficult to suspend disbelief to hear an all-powerful death machine from the future who sounds like a hillbilly.
In this episode, the Brain Bubblegum crew share some of the finest examples of crime not paying for these special criminals, who were ‘hoist by their own petard’. So lean back, grab a six pack of your cheapest beer and embrace the dumb.
In this Gumdrop, we’re talking pants. So where do our various types of pants come from? Well, hold on to your jeans, chinos, jodhpurs, corduroys, dungarees and Capri pants, we’ll stitch you up real good.
In this episode, we chew over 'Mondegreens' - or misheard song lyrics. Why do we mishear song lyrics, what's going on inside our heads, and what are some of the funniest examples we've stumbled across? And can we blame it all on Lorraine? We finish off with a seriously interesting listener fact from Dave.
