Episode 85: It’s (not the) End of the World as We Know It

Synopsis One time, Em got drunk and started texting Jesse about the bronze age collapse. This is the result. Notes 1/ Em studied abroad in Tianjin, China. It was very educational. I learned that black vinegar is good for your health, that there are mushrooms called ear mushrooms (wood ear, but I only recognized one character), and that I can explain that my stretched earlobes didn’t hurt in several languages. Also, some beer has a relatively low amount of alcohol in it, and if you put it in the freezer, it will freeze and the bottles will shatter. (Perhaps I should say I learned that my classmates didn’t know this.) 2/ Books about how the Church was awesome and saved civilization: How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahil. 3/ Spoiler: They finished the restoration of Notre Dame in time for the Olympics. (Unusually for us, we recorded this in July 2024—before Biden dropped out of the race, as you can maybe tell from the tenor of some of the commentary.) 4/ To be honest, if the fall of Rome was a simple story, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire wouldn’t be six volumes long, right? 5/ Ramses II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II 6/ The Battle of the Delta article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Delta 7/ The Sea Peoples are a famous…myth? Explanation by modern historians of something they didn’t understand? Both of these things? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples 8/ Mycenaean Greece: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece. We talked about the Mycenaeans in episode 68 note 9 Minoans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization We talked about the Minoans in Episode 2 note 9, episode 68 note 9, and episode 75 notes 12–14. Cyclades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycladic_culture We only talked about Cycladic Culture briefly in episode 2 note 9, but we have an upcoming episode on Cycladic art! 9/ We just talked about the Ever Given and the rights of truckers in episode 84 notes 1 and 3! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ever_Given (What a weird coincidence!) Also, see John Oliver talk about trucks and waiting! (Start at the 5 minute mark.) 10/ Actually, to the point about “a hundred years ago, if it rained too much, maybe they just didn’t have corn”–a hundred years ago, corn was actually such a major part of the American diet that pellagra was considered an epidemic! This is because corn does not contain vitamin B3 (niacin), and people in poor, rural areas and institutions ate a largely corn-based diet, since it was cheap compared to other things. It was in about 1926 that Dr. Joseph Goldberger established that adding brewer’s yeast to these diets would prevent pellagra. (Interestingly, the nixtamalization of maize, a traditional process that involves soaking the grain in limewater, introduces niacin!) 10/ Linear A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A Cypro-Minoan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypro-Minoan_syllabary