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This episode of the Memory palace is brought to you by Express VPN. Using the Internet without ExpressVPN is like.
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Taking every phone call on speaker.
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Do you want everyone to hear everything.
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When your doctor or your bank or the co worker with whom you have.
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Been plotting to take down your manager is on the other line? No, you do not. Express VPN keeps what you do on the Internet private. Everywhere you go online, it is run through some server that is owned by someone who is legally obligated to sell.
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That information about where you go and.
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What you're doing there to advertisers. And who wants that? I do not. That's why I use ExpressVPN. And when you use ExpressVPN, 100% of what you are doing gets rerouted to go through their secure, encrypted servers. Real Internet privacy that is easy to achieve. Just fire up the app and click a single button and you are in the clear. And now you can do this at their lowest price ever. With plans Starting at just $3.49 a month, I'm about to head overseas. And who knows what sort of shoddy Internet security I am going to encounter? Well, actually, I do know none thanks to ExpressVPN, which works in 105 countries, including where I'm going, just like it does at home in the U.S. secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com memory that's E X P R E S S V P N.com memory to find out how you can get up to four extra months. Expressvpn.com memory.
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This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DiMeo. This episode was recorded on April 2nd, 2020 in my home in Los Angeles while sheltering in place per the order of state and local officials. I mention that for the benefit of those listening to this in the future, whether that is decades from now, somehow, or merely next week, when things may very well be very different than they are right now. As of this date, the Centers for Disease Control recommend that everyone wash their hands frequently and do so for at least 20 seconds. What follows are 20 stories each 20 seconds long to assist you in that task. 1. In Chicago, in the teens in the nightclubs, when there was nothing sexier, nothing that said more about status and power, about the thrill of being alive right then and there, than the automobile, the dancers and the call girls dabbed a new perfume behind their ears and the napes of their necks straight gasoline. Two. The poet was sure he was dying a heart attack. And then several strokes in staring oblivion in the face. He had to confess. So William Carlos Williams told his wife everything about the affairs, about how he had done her so wrong, so often, confessed all of it. And then he lived for another 14 years. 3 the Civil War came to Wilmer MacLean's house when Union soldiers came and took over his kitchen before the Battle of Bull Run at the beginning of the war and he was forced to move. He found a lovely new home in Appomattox, Virginia, where five years later, soldiers came and kicked him out of that house so Lee could surrender to Grant in his living room. Four When Roger Payne heard this, the first recording of the song of a humpback whale, he was sure it was the thing that would save him. If only the world could hear these creatures, it would stop the slaughter that had put most whale species to the brink of extinction. He released an album of whale songs which directly inspired the Save the Whales movement. A decade later, the International Whaling Commission banned deep water whaling. 5 if the first film version of Titanic, released just a month after the sinking, weren't lost, we could see Dorothy Gibson in the same white dress and same white cardigan she wore on the night the ship struck an iceberg and she was put into a lifeboat. But we couldn't know how it felt to be in those same clothes, pretending to be in that same lifeboat watching the Titanic sink below the cold waves. 6 There used to be three legged races at every track meet. Think of the skill, the intimacy, the rhythmic genius of two sprinters as they set the still unbroken world record in April 1909 of jointly running 100 yards in the time between the closing bell and right now. Seven After Lincoln was killed and his successor was impeached, north and south had shifted their conflicts to Congress. No one in government had an appetite for a powerful executive and the presidency was pointedly diminished. The staff budget was cut so much and so often that if you rang the front doorbell at the White House during the presidency of Grover Cleveland, the man himself would often have to get up from his desk and go downstairs to open the doctor. 8 A friend of mine once found a customs form from 1845 which provides all we know of this story. An American sailor named James Stirling died of unknown causes while at sea. When his ship arrived in Brazil, the colonial government refused to bury him, so he arrived home after months and months at sea spent floating in a barrel of rum. Nine in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev fell in love with Pepsi Cola, which started a decades long illicit affair between the elites of the Soviet state and sorry to editorialize here. The worst SODA in the 80s, the USSR wanted Pepsi. Trade restrictions meant that they couldn't pay cash, so they gave PepsiCo $3 billion worth of decommissioned military equipment, which the company then sold off to scrap metal companies. But until they did, Pepsi had the sixth largest military in the world. 10 the red of the redcoats that projected British power as they patrolled the cobblestone streets of the American colonies that Washington's men could see dotting the snow row after row as they marched to the battlefields of Trenton came from dye made by the subjects of another colonial power, Mexican Tinteros, in the desert sun, crushing the insects that live on the no Pal cactus for the profit of their Spanish masters. 11 the room was too small, and so many of the women had to sit on the floor. Two days after her husband's first presidential inauguration, Eleanor Roosevelt called the first of what would be 348 press conferences open only to female writers. It was the height of the Depression, newspapers were cutting staffs, and often the first reporters to go were women, so the first lady gave them exclusive access to information to help keep them employed. 12 in the 1920s, before radio was dominated by major broadcasters and big corporations, there were smaller players with their own visions of what radio should be.
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This program is designed to try to help you with your dental problems in the home, to give you such advice and assistance, such information as we will believe will be conducive to better teeth and better health.
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13. In Oregon during the Great Depression, destitute men having wandered west for work and finding none waiting, set forest fires in the desperate hope that they would be paid to help put them out. 14 more than a year after Lewis and Clark set out from St. Louis, having lost men, having navigated treacherous falls, having nearly starved to death in the snow, they reached the end of the Missouri river, stared up at a wall of mountains, and knew they had failed. There was no Northwest Passage. They abandoned their boats and set out toward the mountains. 15 in July of 1960, in a marsh beside Cape Canaveral, as the nation's first weather satellite launched, not long before circled unseen somewhere above, two naturalists made this recording of a dusky seaside sparrow. This species went extinct in 1980. 16 having lost the race to launch a satellite into space, the United States wanted to demonstrate to the world just what they were capable of. So they launched a plan that would send a rocket to the moon armed with a nuclear warhead, the explosion of which would be bright enough to be visible from Earth. With the naked eye. They spent a year working on it before scrapping the idea, afraid that it was a bad look for America and could cause problems for the Moon Colonists, they were sure, would be living there by the 1970s. 17 in 1786, hopped up on the hole, defeating the British and starting their own country thing, Thomas Jefferson, Madison and John Adams are in England, taking meetings and just basically feeling themselves, and one day they're given a formal tour of Shakespeare's house at Stratford upon Avon. Those two jackasses are goofing around like teenage bros on a field trip, and while their guide isn't looking, Adams chips off a piece of Shakespeare's chair for a souvenir. 18 it took nearly a hundred years until one of his fellow magicians figured out how David Devin did his greatest trick. So can we at least hold the wonder for the seconds we have left of a magician on a darkened stage holding a candle? A beautiful woman dressed as a moth with flowing wings, entering as if drawn to him, drawn to the flame and embracing him, enfolding him in her silken wings and vanishing. 19 he had given the parrot to his wife Rachel as a present, a companion in her illness, and when she died, Andrew Jackson kept the parrot, taught him to swear like a sailor. He thought it was funny. And when Jackson died, having outlived his wife but not her parrot, the President's funeral was stopped when a cursing parrot had to be escorted from the chapel. 2030 million people lost power on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States on November 9, 1965. More than 800,000 New Yorkers learned this when their subway cars went dark, screeched to a halt in pitch black tunnels. Untold thousands walked home to the boroughs, to New Jersey, over Manhattan's five bridges as night fell. And who knows how many people looked up at who knows how many stars visible for the first time that night? And who knows how? Sam. This episode of the Memory palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMaio, with engineering assistance from Elizabeth Auber. The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw. The memory palace is a proud, proud member of Radiotopia from prx, a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts kept strong by our mutual support and from financial support of listeners like you. I have a couple of recommendations for you that might help you through these strange days. First, there is a new season of one of my favorite shows. It is called this Is Love. The perfect side project from Phoebe and Lauren from the show Criminal. It is a show with stories about love in all its forms. This season I feel like Just In Time is all about animals and you're gonna love it. Go to Radiotopia FM to learn more about it and all the other Radiotopia shows. And one more thing. I'm excited to tell you that I have just released a new podcast with my friend Karina Longworth of the show. You must remember this. It is a movie club for the stuck at home. It's called it's the Pictures that Got Small. And each week, for as long as it feels right, we are going to be reaching out from our respective shelters to a friend and we'll watch one of those big screen classics we've never found the time to see and watch it now that we have nothing but time. The first episode is up. Now. Karina and I are joined by Rian Johnson, the writer director of Knives out, the Last Jedi and Brick and Looper and the Brothers of Bloom talking about the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks. Play some trivia games and we recommend some movies that you might want to watch as you wait this whole thing out. We are also going to be raising money to support independent theaters and movie societies during this very difficult time for them. Again, it is called it's the Pictures that Got Small. You can search for it and subscribe and rate and review in all the regular places you find podcasts or you can go to smallpictureshow.com as always, there will be a new memory palace in a couple of weeks and in the meantime, please be well. Please be safe and take care of each other. I promise I'll do the same. Talk to you again. Radiotopia.
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From prx.