You break it, you buy it. This week's episode that is. It's glass blowing!

• The first, and maybe only, name you need to know in glass blowing is Dale Chiluly, check out how crazy his pieces are!
• He had to be the inspiration for J.K. Rowling's Mad Eye Moody from Harry Potter, right?
• The word Tim was looking for, twice, was referendum.

Music by: | Kaz Mirblouk | BLAMMOS |

Bounce around a random selection of lights and sounds in a vaguely game-like fashion with us this week as we talk about pinball! Respond to us in each of our social media lanes to activate a multiball!*

*Multiball is just where we tell you to listen to three episodes at once

Music by: | Elvis Herod | BLAMMOS |

Hey there lumberjack listeners, it's time to load up on another hearty podcast to get you ready for your big day of work! This week we talk about pancakes!

Music by: | The Underscore Orkestra | BLAMMOS |

This week, we kick off our U.S. Cities series with a look at San Francisco. The bay! The pride! the bridges! The epic struggle of man versus nature! It's all here!

We got pretty in depth, so this is Part 1, with Part 2 coming up later this week.

In the meantime, look at all these great pictures, graphs, and supplemental sources!

Really great map of the city. Source:mapsof.net

San Francisco Bay Area. Source:SFGate.com

Some population graphs:

This graph starts after the gold rush, but you can see that population increase is already in full swing. There's also a big jump right around World War II because of the military and the support economy that followed it. Why does the population more or less level off from there? My guess is that the city just ran out of space.

It's easy to forget that Los Angeles didn't become a major city until less than 100 years ago. Here we see that San Francisco was the major city in California until right around 1920, at which point Los Angeles pretty much exploded.

By the way, I love Wolfram Alpha. Easy data gathering? Automatic graph generation? Indefinite integral solving? Yes, please.

Here are a few nice historical pictures:

The 1906 earthquake and fire. This was no good for anyone. Except maybe the water company.

San Francisco in 1851, shortly after the gold rush began. Source: learnnc.org

Here are some more modern pictures:

We didn't have a chance to talk about this in the podcast, but Sutro Tower is a giant, three-pronged broadcast antenna situated at one of the highest points in the city. Before the tower went in, the city's hills made television reception spotty at best. Because it was designed to broadcast clearly with no blind spots, it can be seen from almost anywhere within city. It's awesome. Picture from bayareapilot.com

The Sunset neighborhood, with the Richmond neighborhood in the distance and Golden Gate Park in between them. Yup, it sure is a lot of houses.

Yes, these are the houses from Full House.Yes, the Full House theme plays in my head every time I see them. Yes, I should be over that show by now.

The Bay Bridge, from the Ferry Building Here are some other pretty cool topics:

• Emperor Norton, the self-styled "Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico". He may have been crazy, but everyone in San Francisco circa 1860 loved him!
• Census Data! Note the correlation between the altitude (near the center of the city) and income.

Here are some other pretty cool sources:

• FoundSF - community-driven personal histories related to San Francisco
• Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin - Author Gary A. Brechin paints the city as far more exploitative than it usually is. It comes off pretty negative, but it's nice to read a perspective besides "Wow! What a city!"
• Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas - A really cool book full of maps viewing the city in all different ways. There's one showing the density of coffee houses in the city, and another juxtaposing the numbers of murders in different areas in the city with number of trees planted. Oh how I love interesting maps!

Music for this episode by: Gosprom, Kathryn's bad impression of the Doctor Who theme song

Music by: | Gosprom | Doctor Who theme song |

Join us this week for a journey... TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH!
Well, ok, a journey to at best a few miles towards the center of the Earth, representing a miniscule percentage of the entire trip. But hey that's still pretty far!

• Those reciprocating pumps Kathryn mentioned are called pumpjacks. They help get remaining oil out of the ground once natural pressure in the well is no longer enough.
  
• 
  The Kola Superdeep Borehole is 12,262 meters deep and the bottom of it is the deepest artificial point on Earth.
  

Music by: | BLAMMOS | The Fucked Up Beat |

Go get the wifi password, because this episode sounds even better when you don't blow up your data plan to listen to it! This week we talk about everyone's favorite brand-name communications protocol, WiFi.

Music by: | Nick Bean | BLAMMOS |

You'll be finding snippets of this week's episode everywhere around your house for months after listening - we're talking about glitter!

Music by: | BLAMMOS |

This week we take a stroll down memory lane to review all the dad jokes, playground jokes and knock-knock jokes from our childhoods. Can we punch them up, or will the jokes beat us, driving us mad and forcing us to question the very existence of humor?

Listen to find out!

Music by: | Friends or Whatever | BLAMMOS |

There is no diagram.  Tim lied.  Just enjoy the ride into our second cycle of our Ancient Robot series, about the robots you could find in Asia, both fictional and non-fictional.

• Dr. Daniel Jackson, for those who don't know, was the official eye candy of the Stargate, SG-1 series.  In Stargate, he was the first to theorize that Egyptian pyramids were UFO landing sites.
• Cartoon History of the Universe Check it out.  It's downright adorable.
• Backflip Karakuri
• Arrow Shooting Karakuri
• Christopher McGuire's New Book: Out of Oz

Music by: | Some Jazzy Elevator Tunes | Comfort Fit | Jianhong He - Yu Wang Tan Ming |

This week we reaffirm humanity's commitment to valuing arbitrary things very highly - especially when they're kinda gross! We talk about ambergris.

Music by: | BLAMMOS | Yellow Ostrich |

This week, it's back to the city.  Minneapolis Specifically.  Sorry St. Paul.  We still love you anyway. This is another longer one!  Stay with us.

• In case you live under a radio land rock, don't feel bad!  Most of us do.  RadioLab. This American Life.
• Kathryn retracts her statement about General Mills & Pillsburry.  Croissants/Cheerios forever.
• Tim was right.  There was nothing out west way back in the day. Nothing at all. (Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountains, Yosemite, Sequoias)
• Kathryn has committed the logical fallacy of ignoratio elenchi in her appeal to the natural wonders of the Western US as a means of disproving Tim's objectively true point that the population and economic centers of the US resided east of the Mississippi in the 1800s. Please note.
• Tim has committed the social faux pas of Doubebagi Correctingsi.  Please note.
• Kathryn stinks. Write it down.
• In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater
• Fringe Festival
• "What's the skywalk?" you say?
• A descriptive editorial discussing the Somali population in Minneapolis
• Minneapolis was ranked the gayest city in America by Advocate.com. How about that?
• Do you want to compare loads of employment and labor data from Minneapolis / St. Paul with loads of employment and labor data from various other metros around the US? Yes, you do. Of course you do.
• This is also where we learned that Minneapolis is the third most literate city in the US (based on a number of factors, including libraries, bookstores, and newspaper readership).
• An awesome New York Times article from 1890: "Fighting Over The Census - St. Paul Jealous of Minneapolis and Charges Fraud". Those were the days...
• A report filed for the Minnesota Historical Society, Archeology of the Central Minneapolis Riverfront. Way more interesting than it sounds! Also, how could you ever get enough Scott F. Anfinson?
• A graph of flour production, lumber productionand population from the Scott F. Anfinson report. Lumber drops off really sharply on 1920, but we just can't figure out why!

Leon Theremin and his Theremin.

• Leon Theremin demonstrates
• Randy George brings the Theremin to pop
• Correction:  Pitch on a harp is determined by a lever or pedal that the player controls
• Stephen Hobley
• Laser Harp How-To: pt 1, pt 2
• Theremin Hero, it's a real event!

Music By: IBM 7094, Leon Theremin, Randy George, Jean Michele Jarre, Tetris Theme via the Laser Harp

Music by: | Tetris Theme via the Laser Harp | Leon Theremin | IBM 7094 | Randy George | Jean Michele Jarre |

Hey cool cats, pop on your sunglasses and listen to our cooooool episode on sunglasses!

Music by: | Scott Holmes | BLAMMOS |

Heron of Alexandria... Alexandria of Heron... Poe-tay-toe, Poe-tah-toe. What really matters is that he made some very impressive robots.

Music by: | Pierlo |

Hey everybody, it's autumn! You know what that means - time to process our fear of death via old creaky shacks and teens with prop chainsaws! This week we discuss haunted house attractions.

Music by: | Derek and Brandon Fiechter | BLAMMOS |

This week we spend a few minutes making our hair look nice so we can have a nice family photo for once. How better to do that than with some hairbrush talk?

• The lady with the hairbrush phobia at the beginning of the show is this lady. Her video was pretty fun!

Music by: | Eyeliner | BLAMMOS |

On this week's short episode we decode the mystery of blue raspberry flavor. Is it a real thing? If so, why? All this and more, this week!

Music by: | BLAMMOS |

Is it time for you to finally get up off that couch, get a job, and start dressing like an adult? Then listen to this episode all about neckties to get yourself started!
Is it not time for all that? Then relax on the couch, enjoy the cool breeze on your naked neck, and listen to this episode about neckties!

Music by: | Jazzy Elevator Tunes | BLAMMOS |