Transcript
A (0:00)
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway is Stock up savings time now through March 31st. Spring in for storewide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible items from Hunts, Nerds, Pillsbury, Lowry's, Breyers, Quaker and Culture Pop. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy drive up and go pickup or delivery restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions.
B (0:39)
Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Stop me if this sounds familiar. You are sitting at school, paying attention to or struggling to pay attention to your teacher. Not really taking notes. Your hands wander across your desk, feeling its edges and then, without thinking, sliding underneath the drawers. Almost immediately you find a lump down there, hard as a rock, stuck firmly to the lacquered wood like a barnacle on the hull of a ship. It's a piece of chewing gum that some other student planted there after it lost its flavor. Maybe as recently as earlier this week, or as long ago as the start of the semester, you aren't really sure, but whatever the case, you are disgusted. Chewing gum is just one of those things. It's commonplace, but if you see it outside of its wrapper, it immediately goes from being a candy to a nuisance. It sticks to the bottom of your shoes, gets caught in the grooves of your car's tire. The fact that it inspired a whole term of phrase gumming up the works says everything we need to know about chewing gum's reputation. But if chewing gum is an annoyance to us, it has been a public menace to others. In 1983 in Singapore, the Minister of Foreign affairs raised this problem before their local government. It seemed that leftover gum was everywhere they looked in the country, on mailboxes, street signs, public restrooms, to the point where it started to take a toll on the very infrastructure of Singapore itself. The largest problem occurred in Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit, or mrt. Occasionally, chewing gum stuck to the door sensors of MRT trains would cause the doors to fail to close, and the whole train would be stuck at the station until someone removed it and even after it was removed, the residue would cause problems of its own. Beyond that, chewing gum on elevator buttons in public buildings also became a smaller version of the same problem in it prevented people from going to their destination unless they were willing to endure the indignity of touching someone else's used gum. Throughout the 1980s, the government of Singapore started to take measures to control the literal and figurative spread of chewing gum. The Singapore Broadcasting Corporation largely stopped showing advertisements for gum. Shops near schools were instructed not to sell gum to students anymore. But that was not enough. Which is why on January 3rd of 1992, almost a decade after the foreign affairs minister's proposal, chewing gum was officially banned in Singapore. Anyone caught with it would be fine, and those who manufactured or sold it could face jail time. Convenience store owners had to get rid of all of their remaining stock. And you probably don't need me to tell you that. This legislation provoked an immediate backlash. The public understandably felt like this was an overreaction. Many people suggested that there should just be harsher fines, but no ban. But the law remained on the books in spite of the controversy, though, the law does seem to have worked. In a year, average reported cases of chewing gum vandalism went down from 525 each day to just two. And because of this, the ban held firm from 1992 until 2004, where it underwent a sudden revision. As part of a new trade agreement with the United States, the government of Singapore agreed to relax the chewing gum ban. Now there were carve outs for gum that had medicinal benefits. This included a wide range of gums, anything between sugar free dental hygiene gum and nicotine gum. But any approved gum had to be approved by a doctor or a dentist. And the chewing gum law remains in place to this day in its revised form. Now it only really affects sellers of the product rather than those who just happen to be possessing chewing gum or bubble gum. Tourists coming to the country with a small amount of gum won't face any prosecution so long as they dispose of it safely and not in a public space. So if you're planning to go to Southeast Asia anytime soon, just keep this in mind. What you may think of as a harmless candy might change legal status on the plane over transforming from a treat to a public sanitation menace in waiting. Just a little something for you to chew on.