Episode Eight: The Mummy's Curse

 Episode summary: Say Akhenaten one more time, I dare you 

Bike summary: 2.2 miles, 112 calories 

We're back with the weirdness.

This episode opens with two women chanting "Akhenaten" in unison (and boy did I get tired of hearing it quickly) and saying things like "We call out the name, Akhenaten" before Nimoy tells us in voice over about the women were in a play and before opening night they had identical dreams, except that one was struck across the face and other across the chest. The next morning the first went partially blind and the second was suffering from life-threatening internal bleeding . . . so the legend says (I wonder if this was told to the actresses in the recreation?)

Having established the idea that Akhenaten was cursed by the priests of Amun-Re for his heresy, they then cut to a shot of the mask of Tutankhamun, a pharoh who is famous for not being Akhenaten. This isn't the last time that the pharoh who is cursed or cursing changes, either. 

Then, in a jump cut that can cause whiplash, we get b-roll of Downtown Abbey: Highclere Castle, where Henry Herbert, the Sixth Earl of Carnarvon, looks and sounds very much the part of the British lord: he's in tweed, he smokes a pipe and he speaks with that clipped Received Pronounciation accent you never hear any more. He talks about his father, the Fifth Earl, who financed the excavation of Tutankhamun's tomb and died shortly thereafter. Lord Carnarvon could tell a good story and he talks about how when his father died, all the electricity in Cairo went out and when he returned to Highclere, he was told how the exact moment the fifth Earl died his dog started howling and died. 

(I have Lone Star-ish relationship to the Earls of Carnarvon, by coincidence. One of my earliest ancestors in what's now the United States was Major Simon Willard, a soldier, explorer, politician, trader and land speculator who was born in Kent and immigrated to Massachusetts in 1634 and died in 1676. He had three wives and 18 children, of whom quite a few lived to adulthood and sired children themselves. One of his descendents was Joseph Clapp Willard, co-founder of what's now the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, DC. His son was Joseph E. Willard, a Democratic politician in Virginia who served as United States Ambassador to Spain. He had two daughters, Belle Wyatt Willard, who married Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt, and Mary Elizabeth Willard, who married Mervyn Herbert, half brother of the fifth Earl. Mervyn's full brother, Aubrey Herbert, who was the mother of Laura Herbert, wife of Evelyn Waugh. Geneaology: it's like a boring game of Five Degrees of Kevin Bacon sometimes.)

According to Nimoy, a tablet was found in Tutankhamun's tomb, which has now disappeared, that said "Death will slay with his wings all who enter here." I think this has been traced to a 19th century novel called The Mummy. It's odd to worry about curses when excavating tombs, since virtually all Egyptian pharaonic tombs were robbed in Antiquity. In a gothic-sounding recitation, Nimoy quickly lists off the names of the people who died soon after opening Tutankhamun's tomb -- Carnarvon, Jay Gould (whom I thought was the "robber baron" involved in the Erie War and Black Friday, but it was his son) and a few others. 

Then, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, we get back to the story of the play from the opening narration, by a man Nimoy introduces as an historian: Henry Lincoln. I was completely blindsided by this appearance (and another great RP accent). Lincoln was a script-writer, who if not for one other thing, would be best known for the three Doctor Who scripts he wrote in the 60s that featured Yetis, the Great Intelligence and introduced long-running, beloved character Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart (played by the late Nicholas Courtney from 1968 until 2008). The other thing, unfortunately, was Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which is Chariots of the Gods for people who think the Templars built the Pyramids. 

After yet more "Akhenaten Akhenaten" (Let's face it, you can't akhenaten anything), there's a mostly accurate description of the Aten heresy and how the priest of Amun-Re recovered their power after Akhenaten's death, explaining why they might want to curse him. Except we haven't been talking about the curse of Akhenaten, but of Tutankhamun, and the curse has been about vengeance for disturbing the king's tomb and the things inside he needs for the afterlife, not the revenge of reempowered clerics. 

Immediately, after that Nimoy starts talking about how the mummy of Ramesses II was flown to Paris to be examined (he was given an Egyptian passport with "Former King" written on the "Occupation" form, which considering that Fuad II was in exile and the other mummies on international tours, must have meant that Egypt was a net exporter of kings), even though not only was Ramesses not part of the same dynasty as Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, but his tomb was looted in antiquity and his mummy transferred out of the Valley of the Kings to Deir el-Bahri before being discovered in 1881 and put on display -- 1976 is a little late for that curse to manifest. 

Finally Nimoy casts doubt on the whole thing by pointing out that Howard Carter lived a long and happy life. He doesn't say it, but Lady Evelyn Beauchamp, the fifth earl's daughter and one of the first people in the tomb, was still alive when the episode broadcast. Stephen Fry said on QI that one of the excavators died in the 1970s in his 90s and the New York Times headline was "Mummy's curse strikes again".

All I know is that the word Akhenaten has lost all meaning for me.

Podcast summary:

Jeb said very early on what he thought of the whole thing: "A lot of this is crazy white people."

He explained that many French and British people involved in colonialism were seeking to validate the imperial project. They also had anxiety about their own civilization succombing to decadence and superstition like the ones they were busy subjugating. I get his point, but I guess I don't understand how civilizational anxiety leads to believing in curses. Jokes about how the United States' current political dysfunction is due to being built on an Indian burial ground aside, although it might not be too dissimilar, come to think of it -- Jay Anson claimed the house in The Amityville Horror was built on a field where the local Native American abandoned their elderly and mentally ill to die (spoiler: he was making it up). I guess believing in ghosts and curses (or ethnic or religious minorities) is easier than actually reading about political science. Or confronting political issues. 

A lot of the curse mythos, they note, seems to come from newspapers, most of which were locked out of the tomb opening and spread stories of a curse to make up for the fact that they didn't have an actual story. "I'm not saying the Titanic was cursed," Blake notes. "But everyone involved with her is now dead."

They talk a bit about the play, comparing it to the films of Kenneth Anger. It was written by Arthur Weigall, a journalist and archeologist who had a professional rivalry of sorts with Howard Carter. He helped introduce Akhenaten to a popular audience. They say Weigall "made Akehenaten famous", although I think Sigismund Freud is more deserving of that "honor". 

 

Episode Seven: Earthquakes

 Episode summary: Back in the 70s, only the Earth itself was trying to kill California. Now it's all the elements. 

Bike summary: 2.6 miles, 131.6 calories 

Another largely fact-based episode that really takes advantage being based in California. There's lots of footage of the San Francisco earthquake from 1906, the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, images of then-contemporary San Francisco and the Good Friday earthquake in Alaska in 1964. (Supposedly, many of the fires from the San Fransisco earthquake, which really devastated the city, were set deliberately because people had fire insurance but not earthquake insurance.) 

Nimoy says that 28,000 buildings were destroyed in San Francisco. If it happened today, the NIMBYs there would not let it be rebuilt. (Another thing that's never talked about, but which I suddenly wonder: how local were the effects? The Bay Area was, of course, not nearly as developed back then, but no one ever talks about the effects on Oakland or Marin County.)

Earthquakes seem to have been in the zeritgeist somehow. Two major movies, 1978's Superman and the last James Bond film with Roger Moore, A View to a Kill in 1985, featured villains who wanted to destroy California by setting off the San Andreas Fault. 

A lot of the episode is, however, taken up by speculation -- or Nimoy was pitching a screenplay. He says two British scientists predicted that the combined gravitational field of all the planets lining up on one side of the Sun in 1982 would play havoc with the Sun's magnetic field, causing lots of solar flares and this would somehow result in devastating earthquakes breaking out across the world.

In SF this would cause the Golden Gate Bridge to fail, the Embarcadero to collapse full of cars, huge firestorms would result from downed powerlines sparking ruptured gas mains, etc, until everyone was dead (except for one, gravelly voiced geologist-hero, played by Nimoy, who would lead survivors out of the burning city and find love at the same time). It's incredibly over the top. 

There's also a bit about studying animals' activity to see if they predict earthquakes, especially cockroaches. I know that dogs and horses have been reported acting strangely before earthquakes, but I can't imagine most insects care that much about them. They're pretty hardy. 

Podcast summary.

Jeb and Blake were joined by geologist Sharon Hill, who was amused there was an add for Rice-a-roni in the 1906 footage. 

She said that the 1964 Alaska eartthquake was signifigant because geologists from the United States Geological Survey were able to get on the scene very quickly and it was also the first earthquake understood in terms of plate tectonics, which was a very new theory then.

As far as the animals predicting earthquakes, she said that she wants it to be true and despite there being a large number of anecdotes, there's no good data. Similarly, she said that one technique geologists are looking at to predict earthquakes are emissions of electrons from the earth, but they only happen sometimes. 

Blake mentioned a Japanese legend that earthquakes are caused by a giant catfish trapped in the earth and its attempts to break free. He said earthquakes will continue "Unless we find that catfish and kill it."

I think we're gonna need a bigger pot of gumbo. (And now I'm sad that the Border Cafe in Harvard Square, that served great Tex-Mex and Cajun food, shut down.)

Episode Six: Killer Bees

 Episode Summary: The killer bees are coming. Can they be stopped?

Bike Summary: 2.6 miles, 134 calories

An excellent episode capitalizing on the popular panic about Africanized honey bees being super-aggressive and deadly -- as well as LIVE BEE INSEMINATION.

Despite clearly being built on the panic, the episode was factual and even tried to downplay the bees, to the point where it sounded like bee propaganda. Nimoy says "Killer bees deserve our respect" in a way that sounds almost ingratiating, eg, "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords."

This follows a number of shots of a man in a beekeeper suit deliberately aggravating a hive, which result in him and the camera man being chased for some time and even traditional tools like smoke don't calm them down. 

We also get our first look at bee biology, as Nimoy voices over the life of the hive, with fertile queens, specialized drones and how eggs are stored in special cells and emerge as fully formed adults, which I did not know. 

He then described how the bees were created. European honey bees were dandy and benign, having been brought to the New World deliberately for their honey and wax production. But African honey bees fascinated apiologists, because although bigger and more aggressive and territorial, they were also much more productive. "A harsh, nomadic race," Nimoy called them.

Anyways, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, researchers wanted to see if they could breed a better bee, combining the productivity of the African bee with the tranquility of the European. In other words, as all great b movies start, "They tampered in God's domain."

The show then goes back to being a straight documentary as Nimoy discusses further breeding to try to dilute the bees' aggression. As a result, we see a scientist squeeze a bee to extract semen and then artificially insemenate a queen. There are also scenes of a scientist performing what I believe is a vivisection on a bee because that was the only way to tell the different bees apart. 

Then we go back to the beekeeper, Dr Norman Gary, who talks about and then demonstrates the different ways to make the bees angry. According to In Search Of, killing just one can bring out a swarm bent on removing the threat, but they also show how motorized farm equipment angers them, or how they'll build a hive in a rotted log or hollow stump, which a farmer then chains saws through in preparation of removing it, setting them off. In his beekeeper's vail, Gary also showed how the bees fiercely attack things colored black, in Gary's case a patch of leather attached to his suit, which quickly had dozens of stings in it. Goths will also therefore be at high risk. 

Finally Nimoy discusses how the bees are on their way, expected to arrive in the US in 1990 and how some plans to stop them include building a net across the Panama Canal -- "We'll build a hive and make the bees pay for it."

Podcast summary:

Jeb and Blake described this as "Kind of almost not an episode of In Search Of" because of its factual nature. Jeb talked about how the whole idea of the "Killer bees are coming" is partially a real thing and a partially a cultural anxiety. They mention of a bunch of "killer insect" films, including "The Swarm" from 1974 and two MST3K films, The Beginning of the End and The Deadly Mantis (they also did 1967's The Deadly Bees). Jeb said that, since he does archeological work in Central America, he has met people who have been stung by Africanized bees and if you're not allergic to bees, you can develop an allergy if you're stung enough times. (Some people even think beestings or bee venom can be therapeutic.)

He also talked about how people in Central America have been keeping bees -- and there are native American stingless bees -- for about 2,000 years, using traditional methods where the bees are kept in logs. This method is dying out because the American bee doesn't produce as much honey as either the European or Africanized bees (interestingly, I was looking up stuff on Wikipedia related to this episode and according to it, the African bee that was used in the hybridization attempts was the East African Lowland Honey Bee. This bee itself is under threat in southern Africa, by the Cape Honey Bee. Basically, the Cape Honey Bee has female workers capable of reproducing parthenogenetically and when they come across colonies of the East African Lowland Bees, they resemble queens so much they don't get recognized as invaders, so they get to eat the colonies' food without contributing to it and eventually the host colony queen starves to death and the colony dies).

They discussed what podcasting would be like if they had to dance to communicate the way bees do and Norman Gary's film career -- he's now who Hollywood turns to when they need bees.

Jeb also says "Do not want" to radioactive wasps from the Hanford, Washington nuclear site. Blake, who is from the South, says that because of climate change hornets and yellow jacket nests aren't dying during the winter, but are forming huge multi-year nests. Yellow jackets are bad news, but hopefully the kudzu will take care of things. 

Whole moral of this episode might be that humans mess up accidentally bringing new plants and animals across continents, but deliberately doing that is somehow even worse.