You want payback don’t you? Sure, we all do. We all want it so bad. So bad. Sometimes people do things to get payback against someone who’s wronged them and sometimes those things they do are memorable and monumental. We commemorate some here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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No more lines, no more hassles, just affordable, fast care. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, healthcare just got less painful. Learn more at health.amazon.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is Stuff You Should Know. And this episode, Chuck just made fun of, even though I took pride in helping to assemble it.
Oh, it's fine. It's a top ten. We haven't done those in forever.
No.
It's always kind of a fun throwback, and it seems like we never do ten. With our three-act structure, nine is probably a great number, but I guess we'll see what happens, right?
Let's see what happens. So, you know, the the old saying cut off your nose to spite your face.
Yes. And I feel like we did this on an Internet roundup or something. Maybe it sounded really familiar. This story did. It did. OK. Not to you.
No. As a matter of fact, it was all new to me. But that doesn't mean we didn't do it already.
Yeah, but you would remember this one because it involves self-mutilation.
So just want to put out there that this actually has nothing to do with that phrase. And I'll explain why that phrase doesn't actually have anything to do with this. Oh, really? But I guess I should probably say that we're starting this episode out in like the worst possible way with a really downer of a story that may or may not have to do with spite. So I say we just go ahead and start that now.
Okay.
Yes, there is a book, and this is, as the story goes, the book in 1904 called A Dictionary of Saintly Women. Mm-hmm. The story is that Viking, you know, berserker raider types came pillaging southward to the British Isles at one point. Well, not at one point, in 867 CE specifically.
And while they were doing their berserkering and ravaging of the villages and things, there was obviously the kind of thing that would happen would be assaults on people physically, sexually, and otherwise. And so when they went to a monastery in Scotland, the Coldingham Monastery, the lead nun, St. A.B. the Younger, said, hey, here's what we'll do.
We want to keep our chastity and our covenant to God. It's a big deal for us nuns. We should cut off our noses to keep that from happening because they won't assault us then.
But not to spite our faces, to spite the Vikings. No.
Yeah. Not even to spite, I think. I think it's to protect themselves from sexual assault. Sure. I mean, this is all horrific.
It is horrific. Yeah. No, I'm not saying like this is a laugh riot or anything like that. I'm just saying.
No, no, no. I didn't think you were.
Anyway, back to the horrific story. Saint Aby said, and she wasn't a saint at the time, but this certainly helped her case later on. She said, come nuns, let's go sit around and talk. I have something to say to you. To prevent ourselves from losing our chastity, from being raped by these Vikings, we're going to cut off our own noses.
I'm going to cut off my lip and maybe I'll inspire you to do the same. And the rest of the sisters said, yes, let's do that. And they did. And there's actually old like wood cuttings. And there's at least one stained glass panel of this happening. And it's gory. Even as a wood cutting, it's gory.
And when the Vikings showed up, they found these nuns missing their noses, bleeding, missing their lips, just in quite a state. And they were like, we're just going to move on to the next monastery and see what we find there. The nuns, however, their lives were not spared, were they? No.
Yeah, it gets even worse because what the Vikings did was burn the place down with them inside and killed them all.
Yeah. But there's a different way of looking at this, and that is that these nuns protected their chastity, which, as you said, is like really, really important. They're known as the brides of Christ. Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why they're chaste, why they're meant to die virgins, is because they have given themselves to Christ or to God.
So as long as they're chaste and they die chaste, then they have fulfilled this covenant. Even if it's not by their own will or decision that they lose their virginity, if they lose it through force, it's still not quite the same as dying chaste. So they manage to come out on top, religiously speaking. So that's that story.
Oh, the reason why it doesn't have anything to do with cutting your nose off to spite your face is because that phrase means that you're doing something in revenge to somebody else or to harm somebody else, but you're actually harming yourself much worse than you are them.
Yeah. And they just burned them down. They didn't spite anybody.
Right. So that's a heck of a way to kick off what was supposed to be a semi lighthearted top 10 list.
Yeah. Oh, wait, but doesn't it mean to spite your own face? Right. So you're harming yourself. Yeah, I got you.
You see what I'm saying?
Yeah, I just got confused.
It's kind of like there's another saying that hating somebody is like drinking poison and expecting them to die.
I've never heard that.
It's a good one. It really gets the point across. It makes you not want to hate or steal something about someone else.
Wow, that's really good. I like that.
Thanks a lot. I just made it up. Look at you dropping nugs.
All right. Let's talk about Henry Clay Frick because he was a Gilded Age character. I don't know about Robert Barron, but he was very least a mogul. And along with Andrew Carnegie, they made quite a lot of money together as partners in the steel industry. That relationship went south and Carnegie got him out of the picture, got Frick out of the picture.
And, you know, to the point where he was, Carnegie was sued and Frick actually won a lawsuit and won compensation and everything. But it wasn't like he was like, all right, we're all even now. He hated Andrew Carnegie for the rest of his life.
Yeah, anytime like Carnegie's companies, I can't remember which steel company he owned, but anytime there was like some misstep or bad decision or business went awry, Frick would send a note like chiding him or taunting him for having made a terrible decision. Like just constantly kept it up. There was, I think Carnegie built a mansion in New York.
And Frick was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to build an even bigger one right down the street just to show you up, like would not let it go.
Yeah, for sure. Anything you can do, I can do bigger and better. And so you would think at the end of their lives, they could just let bygones be bygones. And that's what Andrew Carnegie tried to do when he was in failing health.
He said, can you get in touch with my old partner, Frick, Mr. Henry Clay Frick, and tell him he's got a great name and tell him that I'd like to meet up with him and patch this thing up before we're gone off of this earth. And so they brought the letter. He dispatched his personal secretary, James Bridge, to send this to Frick personally.
And Frick apparently balled up the letter and threw it back at him and said, tell him I'll see him in hell where we were both going.
Yeah. Great comeback.
I'll meet him in hell.
Yeah. His other thing that he was said to have said was not until he admits that I'm the Mary and you're the Rhoda. Yeah.
Oh, man, if you I know you're getting into some old TV and you always have been. But if you do you have Criterion, the Criterion channel streamer?
No.
Highly recommended, by the way. Sure. Like it's really the only great one out there as far as quality stuff. But they have old Mary Tyler Moore or maybe that was on Max. I can't remember, but anyway, Emily and I started watching old Mary Tyler Moore episodes.
Like the original where she worked at the TV station?
Yeah. And it is, I watched a little bit when I was a kid, but man, it is so good and it's so funny and charming and witty and like still great.
Yeah.
It holds up.
Those shows used to like just be written so well too and acted too.
She was so good.
I can't remember. There's one episode where... I think Ted.
Yeah. Ted Knight.
He was doing, he was doing something and it was so ridiculous and preposterous, but he was playing it straight so well that the rest of the cast just started cracking up and like they couldn't not, they did it in every take and it ended up kind of in the show. It's some classic, like well-known episode, but check that one out. Make sure you, you see that one too.
So good. Ted Knight and who's the woman who played Rhoda?
Valerie Bertinelli? No. Valerie.
Oh, it's killing me. Valerie Harper. There you go. Valerie Harper. Ed Asner. It's really a great, great show. And Mary Tyler Moore is just a gem of a human. I hope she's still good as a person.
Sure.
I watched the documentary about her. It's worthwhile.
Oh, really?
Yeah, it's excellent, in fact.
All right. I'll check it out.
Yeah, quite a woman.
Well, thanks for the recommendation.
Hey, sure. I feel like we've killed some time. Should we do a third and then take a break? I think that's a great idea, Chuck. All right, we're going to talk about Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein didn't like one George H.W. Bush, who was the guy who said his name that way because of the first Gulf War.
Yeah. He said, sure, I invaded Kuwait, but that doesn't mean you have to come over here and liberate Kuwait. And George Bush said, yes, we do. And as a result, after this war, Saddam Hussein was still in power. And he apparently was willing to use his power in all sorts of weird ways. In tacky ways, frankly.
And one of the ways he did that was he had a mosaic mural, an unflattering mosaic mural of George Bush laid into the floor of the entrance of the Al Rashid Hotel, one of the nicest hotels in Baghdad, if not the nicest. And the whole reason was it also said Bush is criminal on it, too. And the reason was that anyone coming into this well-traveled hotel would walk right over George Bush's face.
Right. And if you walked around it, you were given a bad room.
Right. Or taken out back and shot one of the two.
Did you look at a picture of this?
I did. It is an unflattering portrait, but you can totally tell who it is.
You totally tell who it is. It's big old George Bush senior right there on the floor of the hotel of the lobby. It's a very strange thing to see in a nice hotel. Yeah. But W came along later on, went back to Iraq for the, you know, the war there on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Right. And he had them smash that up.
He's like, Daddy, I'm not going to let him do that to you. here's some sledgehammers. And so they went in there and they smashed that thing up and chiseled it up and supposedly laid a portrait of Saddam. They didn't do that in mosaic tile, did they?
I don't think so. From what I saw, it looked just like a picture. I didn't see a close-up of it. I just saw a soldier standing next to it. Yeah, I couldn't find one either. Like the head was out of proportion with the body.
He's like, here's some sledgehammers and I need a good tile guy in Baghdad.
Right. The sledgehammers had don't mess with Texas engraved on them.
They probably did.
But yeah, I mean, that's spiteful, right? To make a mosaic portrait of one of your sworn enemies so that your people walk all over him.
I think so. To ruin your hotel lobby, your nicest hotel lobby. Yeah.
All right. So we have a definitive example of spite.
That's right.
Well, then I think that means we should take a break while we're ahead.
All right. We'll be right back with three more.
Want to learn about a pterosaur and call a pterodactyl? How to take a perfect poop and all about fractals? Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, the Lizzie Borden murders and the cannibal runs. Don't explain everything till your brain explodes. It's Chuck and Josh and stuff you should know.
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On Tech Stuff, we travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology.
One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians.
Like, data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality. Wow.
How is it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night?
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Listen to My Legacy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is My Legacy.
Okay, Chuck, I guess we should, at this point, decide which one we're not going to do if we're doing 3-3-3-3.
Well, I think the Beatles one has the least amount of meat on the bone.
All right. I was going to skip that one, too, or suggest we do. Great. And if you did it, I was just going to not talk. I was going to skip it either way.
Out of spite.
It's a very, very famous story. But the one that's really interesting to me is Ford vs. Ferrari because that is a terrific movie that I highly recommend.
Is it on Criterion Channel?
I doubt it, but I'm sure you can stream it somewhere. The great James Mangold directed it, and I'm always a fan of his work. He did the new Bob Dylan movie. What else? He did the last Indiana Jones movie, which was better than the one before. What else? I don't know. James Mangold's good. He sort of has a very varied resume, which I always appreciate in a director.
Yeah, I was going to say that's all over the place for sure.
Yeah.
So I guess if you've seen Ford vs. Ferrari, you're familiar with this story?
I am, and I do recommend it. He also did the Wolverine movie and the Logan movie. So yeah, he's all over the place.
Okay. So I'm going to tell this story then because I haven't seen that movie, so this was new to me.
Ooh, you'd like it.
Okay, so in the 60s, Henry Ford II, who was the successor president of the Ford Motor Company, and I guess probably a relative of Henry Ford's, he decided that he wanted Ford to get into racing just to basically, like, make Ford, just to expand the brand, basically. Rather than just giant land yachts, we also make really fast cars, too. Yeah.
Totally.
He also was like, you know, I know that there's probably easier ways to get into racing than to build race cars. And that is let's just buy Ferrari. Like they were already known around the world for building cars that were just fast as all get out.
That's right. And their very famous founder, Enzo Ferrari, pitched a deal for 18 million bucks for 90 percent interest in the company. And as the movie portrays it, this isn't in this article, but as the movie portrays it, if I'm not mistaken, and I'm not sure if it's true or not, but at least it was in the movie.
I don't see why they would make this part up, is that he was using that deal to get a better deal from Fiat. Right. So playing one against the other, which will really make someone mad in business. Sure.
Apparently, when Ford showed up to sign the paperwork, Ferrari said that, you know what, you're this Ford assembly line, this bureaucracy that you've got in this company is this is not how we do it over here. So no deal.
Right. And Ford was not very happy about this, right? Of course not. So out of spite and to get back at Ferrari, and I think also to get into racing too, Ford decided to build their own race car, which came out to be the Ford GT40. And I went and looked it up. I'm not a car dude, but I am like, this is an amazing car.
I'm the same way, man.
And in fact, it actually did best Ferrari at Le Mans in 1966. And you can buy that car, at the very least the original body, that won Le Mans in 1966 for a cool $675,000 from what looks like a private owner in Jacksonville, Florida.
Wow.
Jacksonville. It's beautiful.
So they won first, second, and third. So they really bested Ferrari. They also won in subsequent years. So they swept, or not swept, but they won in 66, 67, 68, and 69. That's a sweep. Well, I meant not sweep first, second and third place necessarily. Or they may have. I don't know.
But I think we should do one on the 24 hours of Le Mans because that's that's I'm not a car race guy, but that to me is the most interesting one.
Yeah, because they just drive around and around and around for 24 hours to see who can go the furthest, right? Yeah, I think it's pretty cool. It's an endurance race.
And it's not just like a circular NASCAR thing. They're driving through streets.
Right. And every once in a while it starts to get boring. They just push pedestrians out in there and see what happens. Exactly. So there's a little more to this story, a little separate spoke that Ferrari had going on at about the same time or a couple of years earlier. Our friends at Mental Floss pointed out that Lamborghini actually was founded out of spite to Ferrari.
Yeah. Apparently the founder of Lamborghini, John Smith... His name was Ferruccio Lamborghini. He was a tractor maker in the 60s, and he had a Ferrari. And he was like, this clutch is kind of janky.
And as the story goes, he got in touch with Enzo Ferrari and was like, hey, you know, I think I can help make your clutch better because you got this problem here with this spawn divot, and I can help make that thing better. And apparently, as the story goes, Ferrari did not receive that phone call well and was basically like, get lost.
Yeah. He said, stick to making tractors, Lamborghini. Who's ever heard of Lamborghini?
Exactly. What a weird name for a car.
Right. So Lamborghini was like, well, I'm just going to go make my own car. And in 1963, I believe, he started making Lamborghinis with the help of five workers who had recently been fired from Ferrari. That's how he established his car company. And had Enzo Ferrari not rebuffed him, we would never have that classic Garfield poster from the 80s where he's standing next to a Countach.
You and I are not car guys, but like if I see a Lamborghini on the street or something or like the old Magnum Ferrari, I'd love that stuff.
Tinkle yourself?
A little bit. I mean, you know, I'm not a sports car guy, but I just can't help but see those and think, like, what an amazing machine that is.
Gorgeous. Those Magnum Ferraris you can get for a song these days. I mean, they don't work very well. Like how much? I don't know. I'm going to guess anywhere between $10,000 and $50,000.
Yeah, I mean, considering how much they were, that is a song, you know.
It is. And they're so small, too. Like, I'm not sure either one of us could fit in one of those cars.
Yeah, I mean, I think every guy, I mean, Thomas Magna fitted him.
Yeah, I think that was a stunt double half his size.
Really? Well, when it showed him in the car, his knees were up toward his chin a bit.
Like by his ears.
Yeah, because he was a tall guy. But that Ferrari, I feel like for guys of our generation, that Ferrari and the Porsche from Risky Business are like two of the top five probably dream cars.
Was that a 944, a 911?
It was the 928.
I'm not familiar with that one.
Yeah, it had the lights that popped up. It was one of the not as lauded versions, I think. But man, it's something about that movie. It just sort of locked it in. I mean, it's like a little hatchback. It's not even that special. When you look at it now.
Yeah. For grocery shopping. Exactly. How many have we done for this thing? We just did one, right?
Oh, yeah. We got to get going.
Okay. All right. Let's get going. Because it turns out that there was a road in China made out of spite.
That's right. And I feel like I've seen this in more than one place in the world where. Oh, really? Yeah, not even necessarily a road, but like where like, well, you don't want to give up your house. So we're just going to build these skyscrapers all around it.
Right. Sure. Did you see pictures of this, though?
Oh, yeah. This is the extreme because this happened in China to this couple in 2012. The man's name was Luo Bogan. Bogan? Bogan. He and his wife refused to – they tried to come in and take their house to make a highway. And they were like, no, we're not going to do it. You didn't offer us enough money. And so we're not going anywhere. And so they built –
I mean, if you're visualizing a house literally sort of in the middle of a road and the road just goes around it, that's what they did.
Yeah, like it wasn't even a roundabout. It's just that the road widened and kind of curved in a bulge on the sides around this house, literally in the middle of a highway. Even worse, even more reckless if you ask me, they kept electricity going to this house. So there's an electrical pole in the middle of the highway too, totally unmarked. It doesn't look real. No, it doesn't.
It does not at all, does it? And if you want to see what we're talking about, The Atlantic has a good photo spread called The House in the Middle of the Street from 2012. Yeah.
I mean, this is the most extreme case of something like this that I've heard. You know, it didn't take long for them to give in, obviously, because it was, well, dangerous and awful. Yeah. And so they got they did eventually give in and got a larger offer than they originally asked for. But I don't get the feeling that they thought they won.
No, they definitely didn't. So I've looked into this a little further. It was a five-story house that they had just built for $95,000 when the provincial government said, you need to move because we're building a highway through here. And they weren't the only ones who had kind of tried to stick it out. So they were also aware that they could not leave their house.
They had to stay in their house 24 hours a day because if they left, the government would come and bulldoze their house while they were gone and be like, T.S., what are you going to do? And they had no choice, but just holding out was kind of a protest and to draw attention to this generally unfair practice.
Because, I mean, any government can exercise eminent domain, but typically you want to give at least market value. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it's really egregious when you look at this picture.
It's nuts because they were on like their porch, like a second floor balcony. And they're looking down and you're looking down, not at a front yard, you're looking down at the road. Like it went right around this house.
Yeah. Through it practically.
Yeah. So that was a spiteful road.
That was a spiteful road, and now we're going to talk about a spiteful statue.
That's right.
Because in Germany, between the towns of Bonn and Buehl, there's the old Rhine River and the Rhine River Bridge that connects the two.
Mm-hmm.
And so the Little Bridge Man or the Brückenmanken, it's kind of a mouthful, is the Little Bridge Man. And that is a sculpture of a guy sort of bent over, sticking his butt out. And that became the subject of a lot of contention, eventually backfiring. Is that right?
Yeah. So the story went that in the late 19th century, I think December 17th, 1898, this bridge between Bonn and Buell, which was supposed to be a joint construction project between the two, ended up being paid for entirely by Bonn because Buell was like, we'll use the bridge, but we're not going to pay for it. You go ahead and pay for it.
And so under wraps until this unveiling of the bridge was that little statue of a little man carved into the bridge with his butt sticking out, basically mooning Buell.
Mooning Buell.
Can you imagine just the hilarity of seeing that?
Yeah.
When it was unveiled? Yeah.
But like I said, it backfired because that statue became a bit of a local icon. So it was on banknotes. It was on people took pictures of it. It was on local postcards. It was a little tourist attraction. But what they did was they put attacks on the bridge, but only attacks going one way and not back into your own place. Right.
So what happened was from the Buell side, they could see the statue because it was pointing, you know, their butt was pointing at them. So they got all the benefits of seeing this thing without having to pay to cross the bridge to see it. If you're on the other side and you wanted to go like actually see this statue, you had to pay to get across.
Yeah, and you can believe that any time you had out-of-town guests visit, you had to take them to go see the little bridge man.
Go see the butt man.
So, yeah, they ended up what was supposed to be a joke at the expense of Buell ended up to be an actual expense for the city of Bonn because they had to pay this fee to get onto the bridge. But supposedly they're friendly rivals still, or they were. Now I think they're one town, kind of like Budapest. There's Buda and Pest, and it's separated by the river, but it's still one city now. Yeah.
Same thing.
And that's what Bonnebule.
That's how I understand it. So you can still see the little bridge man, but he's not the original. The original was almost destroyed in the Second World War. The bridge was at least, but they were able to get their hands on the statue and get them out of the Rhine. They put them back on the rebuilt bridge, but then some local youths in 1960 destroyed that.
So now there's a recreation of it on the bridge. Right.
Little punk rockers.
Yeah. Little punks at least. Yeah. So that was a little bridge man made out of spite.
All right. And I think that's break number two. And we'll be back to finish up with three more right after this.
Want to learn about a terrorist or don't call a pterodactyl? How to take a perfect poop and all about fractals? Genghis Khan. Attila the Hun. The Lizzie Borden murders and the cannibal runs. Don't explain everything to your brain.
Explosives. Chuck. And Josh. There's stuff you should know.
Explosives.
Word up, Jerry. Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Oz Veloshian, one of the new hosts of the long-running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical, but obsessively intrigued.
And I'm Cara Price, the other new host. And I'm ready to adopt early and often.
On Tech Stuff, we travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology.
One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians.
Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality.
How is it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night?
Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity. So join us.
Listen to Tech Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to My Legacy. I'm Martin Luther King III, and together with my wife, Andrea Waters King, and our dear friends, Mark and Craig Kilburger, we explore the personal journeys that shape extraordinary lives.
Each week, we'll sit down with inspiring figures like David Oyelowo, Mel Robbins, Martin Sheen, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Billy Porter, and their plus one, their ride or die, as they share stories never heard before about their remarkable journey.
Listen to My Legacy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is my legacy.
I'm so sick of hearing men talk about women's basketball. If only there were a professional WNBA player with her own podcast I could listen to. Hey, this is Lexi Brown, WNBA player and professional yapper. And this is Mariah Rose. You may know me from spilling the tea on Hoops for Hotties on TikTok. And we've got a new podcast, Full Circle.
Every Wednesday, we're catching you up on what's going on in women's basketball. And not just in the WNBA, but with Athletes Unlimited, Unrivaled, and College Basketball.
We've got you with analysis, inside stories, and a little bit of tea. I know you guys have seen a lot of former and current basketball players telling their stories from their point of view, and I just think it's time for the girlies to tap in.
We want to share all of the women's basketball stories that you won't see anywhere else. Tune in to Full Circle.
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All right, we're going to talk about, and I've seen stories sort of like this, but this one seems to take the cake. When a Christmas display goes too far and all of a sudden people or neighbors are like, hey, this is getting out of hand. It's too bright or it's, you know, people are driving in to see these things now and I can't even get down my own street. Right.
And this happened in the mid-2000s in Ross Township, Pennsylvania, when a dude named Bill, an electrician, key, named Bill Ansell did a pretty, you know, audacious Christmas display in his front yard there in Ross Township such that people were driving in and neighbors started to get annoyed.
Yeah, and actually the way that this neighborhood was arranged is a cul-de-sac, but in the center of the cul-de-sac was Bill Ansell's house. So with his light display, it was just kind of like driving through a holiday light display because you just drive past and go all the way around and come back on the other side and leave. It's kind of perfect, actually. It was perfect.
And Bill Ansell definitely thought it was perfect. But like you said, the neighbors were like, man, come on, this is... 100,000 watts of Christmas joy, it's too much. So can we do something about this? Bill Ansell apparently was not the type to take criticism well. Sounds like it. I think he actually was required to take down the holiday display.
By the town?
Yes. I think they cited him for an out-of-season decoration or something like that, right? So he took it down, but in short order, he put up a new display and specifically designed it so that the neighbors regretted ever asking him to take down the original joyous display. And he did this, Chuck, out of spite.
That's right. And apparently left it up year round. Santa urinating in the front yard. A choir that was beheaded. Frosty the Snowman getting run over by a car. Also up in lights, F. Ross Township. Yeah. Yeah. Just just right there in string lights. A sign that said this display is dedicated to Ross Township.
Shame on you for destroying my display that brought so much joy and happiness to so many people.
There was also a warning, a sign that said Ross Township, don't touch any of this property. If you do, there will be bloodshed.
Is that true?
Yeah. No, it totally is. And there was another one. I read an interview with 2020 with the neighbors who were like, this guy actually wrote a sign. I didn't see what he said, but he came up with the disparaging sign for the deceased wife of Tom White, one of the neighbors. The day after she died, he put up some sign disparaging her. Yeah. This guy was definitely off the chain with this thing.
And I mean, like he would stay up at night and hit metal with sledgehammers to make noise. He had floodlights pointed directly in the neighbor's houses. And I mean, living like that's bad enough, but they said something that stuck out to me that I hadn't thought of. That's like, this is a living nightmare.
When you have a neighbor like that and you sell your house, anytime you have a showing, they're going to turn around before they even get out of their car. That's like you're trapped. They were totally trapped there. And despite the township fining him, despite court orders, like you said, he kept it up year round and he kept it up for years.
Yeah. And then he built a kill desert.
Yes. I thought that there was definitely a parallel between those guys, too.
Yeah. Be a good neighbor, everyone. Be a good neighbor to your neighbor. That's all you got to do. You don't have to. You can go above and beyond if you want, but just be like base level good.
Sure. And if your neighbors come to you with a complaint about some special thing that's special to you, rather than going off the handle, maybe say, well, let's figure out a compromise because this is really important to me.
Yeah. And let's not tank everyone's property values. We're all in this together.
Sure. And if they're like, no, we insist you take it down, then you do something out of spite. At least give them a fighting chance.
That's right. This is super spite.
Spite plus. We want to thank not just our friends at 2020, but our friends at Mental Floss, too, for pointing that one out to us.
That's right.
So I think we got a couple more, right?
That's right. We'll move on to Prince Rogers Nelson, a.k.a. Prince, a.k.a. for a little while, the artist formerly known as Prince. Mm-hmm. Because very famously, Prince changed his name in 1993 to an unrecognizable symbol. It was sort of the symbol for man and woman. And it had some other flourishes and had kind of been tweaked and redesigned over the years. It was on different pieces.
You know, he had a guitar shaped like that previously. I think it was on his motorcycle in Purple Rain, maybe. Oh, yeah. But it was a symbol that had been around his world for a while. And Prince said, yep, that's my name now. Don't wear it out. Don't wear it out because you can't say it. So that's impossible.
But I think at the time, I remember everyone just thought it was Prince being Prince and being strange and being eccentric. But it is now pretty widely accepted that he did that to spite Warner Brothers records. Because he was in a record contract he didn't like for numerous reasons.
Yeah, and it was a very lucrative contract. A lot of people were playing like the world's smallest violin for Prince at the time.
He had re-signed it too, by the way.
20 years later, re-signed with the same company.
No, no, no. He re-signed before this one. This was the second version. He re-signed a third time later.
I got you. Okay. Did not realize that. But this was like a $100 million contract. It was worth $215 million today. It was a big, fat contract.
Yeah.
The thing is, is Prince, I saw like when he died, when they went and do his audio archives, they're like he could release an album like every month for the next 50 years or something like that. He had that much stuff recorded.
Yeah.
And he wanted to release music really fast. quickly and with high turnover. And Warner Brothers is like, no, you're going to flood the market. You're going to shoot yourself in the foot. You can only release X number of albums every, say, 12 months. So like one a year maybe or something like that. He didn't like that.
And then apparently Warner Brothers owned the rights to his songs too, which I'm quite sure he really, really didn't like. So to get out of his contract, he thought, well, okay, the contract is between Prince and Warner Brothers. I'm going to change my name and maybe the contract won't be valid any longer. I'm not sure how much he actually believed that because Prince wasn't a dumb person at all.
Yeah.
But at the very least, he was trying to humiliate Warner Brothers, make life harder for them. And he did all this, as you said, out of spite.
That's right. He also wrote the word slave on his cheek in a lot of performances at the time. And it didn't work. He had to see the contract through, which just another few years, I think in 2000, it expired. And then he was Prince again. And like you said, you know, bygones were bygones, I guess, because he re-signed yet again 20 years later with Warner Brothers.
Yeah, one of the things that Warner Brothers, too, had to do, Chuck, was they had to send out digital files to the media. And this is the 90s because there was no way to, there was no, like, combination of keys on the keyboard to make this symbol. So they had to send a digital image of the symbol for the, like, newspapers or magazines or whatever to insert into their articles about Prince.
And then finally, the media was just like, we're just going to call him the artist formerly known as Prince. And Prince was like, damn.
it right work around yeah exactly so rip prince man he was pretty great yes uh my friend and your friend scotty got to go to his final performance the solo atlanta performance at the fox theater just days before he died yeah and it always makes me so mad because scotty didn't even really love prince yeah I'm glad he got to go.
He just showed up there like, how did I get here?
So that's one of those. We almost went and pulled the trigger to scalp tickets. And it was just like, I don't know why we didn't, because it was special enough to be a piano solo concert by Prince. I was like, man, we got to go. And we didn't. And then he died.
Yeah, we were going to do the same thing. And that's actually what we were going to scalp. We were going to go. And I don't remember why we didn't. But that's kind of par for the course for me because I did that with Prince. I did that with Pink Floyd. I did that with Stevie Ray Vaughan. And I did that with the Grateful Dead. I was just like, I'll see him next time.
I saw Prince when I lived in L.A. in the late 90s or I'm sorry. Yeah, I guess it was early 2000s. And that was amazing just being able to see him once with a full band. It was something else.
Yumi saw him for some tour, I think Musicology tour, and she was like hands down the best show I've ever seen.
Yeah, boy. What a loss.
Apparently he was quite the dancer.
He was. I also saw Tom Petty on that last tour. I saw him quite a few times, but I was really glad to be at that last one.
Yeah, he was cool. He was one of those guys that you appreciate the older you get. You know what I mean?
One of the best. He's one of my faves.
Great. Let's move on to the pink house, Chuck, the last of the last.
You mean John Mellencamp?
No, that's a little pink house. This is just the pink house.
That's right. This is another image search quality or image search worthy kind of thing to look up. If you're in a place where you can do that, just type in Plum Island pink house and you will see a quite large pink house sitting in the middle of nothing.
Just a desolate marshland.
Yeah.
And it's just looking at it, it's very eerie, especially now it's abandoned. It's kind of ramshackle and run down. But it was built on Plum Island, and it's considered one of the all-time great examples of a spite house. And a spite house is basically any house, wall, structure that's built to get under someone else's skin, right? So sometimes it's built to block their view.
We talked about Henry Clay Frick building a mansion that was bigger than Andrew Carnegie's that would be considered a spite house. And in America, they go back at least until 1806. That was the earliest one I could find. Yeah. But this one on Plum Island off the coast of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which, by the way, is one of the more charming towns in the entire country.
Oh, I've never been there. Oh, it's wonderful. That's where this pink house is. And there's a great backstory to it that makes it a spite house.
Made out of spite. A lot of times these spite houses happen when a couple gets divorced. It should come as no surprise. Or I should say probably couples with a lot of money get divorced. Because what I've learned is in order to have a spite house, you have to be rich. Well, I'm just going to build that huge house to get back at someone. It's a very privileged position to be in. For sure.
So, you know, I am judging. But in 2015, there was a New York Times article that talked about this thing that was built, like you said, in the middle of nowhere. It said it was overlooking a vast landscape of pristine salt marsh. And it apparently happened in 1925 when a couple got divorced and the wife said, all right, we can get a divorce.
But you have to rebuild an exact duplicate of the house we live in if you're kicking me out of it because I love it so much. And he went, no problem. And so he built it and he said, you didn't say where. And he said it just like that, I bet.
Yep, he did. So he built it on Plum Island. At the time, there was no one else living there. No fresh water, no electricity. It was just the worst place you could build a house. And he said, there you go. There's your spite house. And he walked away rubbing the dust off of his hands. What do you call that?
Yeah, that.
Whatever you call it.
Just clapping the dust off your hands.
Yeah, we need to come up with a name for that, right?
Yeah, a sniglet.
So, yeah, that's how it ended. And the story went that she lived there for a while and sold it. And it actually was inhabited, weirdly enough, by a succession of people up until 2011. Wow.
Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're a loner and you like nature, it's not the worst place to be. I just saw a sunset picture. It looked pretty nice.
In that sense, yes, it did. But it's just, I mean, like the sea off of Massachusetts can be fairly unforgiving. So, you know, this is an old house from the 1920s. It's going to probably be kind of drafty depending on the time of year.
Yeah, and I'm sure upkeep on that thing is you're probably repainting that thing every couple of years, right?
Yes, but you would have to paint it pink or else everybody in Newburyport would hate you.
Yeah, you would have to. Apparently, it was lived in until 2011 and then eventually was sold to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge in 2012. And you can't get to it now. It's off limits to the public. But they're trying to make it an official protected house so it will stand forever. Yeah.
And it was made out of spite. Or was it, Chuck?
I don't know. Well, some people say that that was just an urban legend and it was just a family who lived out there.
Right. Which is a much less interesting story. So we're just going to go with spite house for that one. Agreed. All right. Well, that's it for things done out of spite. We hope you enjoyed it. And since I said we hope you enjoyed it, it's time for Listener Mail.
So another recent one from Automatt. I love this real-time stuff. This, you know, I mentioned some sort of episode on currency and how it affects things. And this is from Tree. Tree, okay, awesome. Not a tree, but Tree. Tree. Hey guys, Chuck. Specifically, you mentioned in the Automat episode you were trying to formulate something around how change affects things, or currency rather.
Look into the situation in Zimbabwe, that might help, where it was too expensive to import metal coins. They had adopted the US dollar. It was too expensive to import the metal because of weight. So there was a huge change shortage because store owners couldn't give shoppers change.
Shoppers would have to purchase additional items to try and get their total purchase as close to the whole dollar amount. And he sent a New York Times article. And that, my friend, Tree, is exactly what I was talking about as something that could be a part of that episode. So I appreciate that direction. And that is specifically Tree Marchink. Great name, Tree.
Tree Marchink from South Carolina. Thanks a lot. That's a good one. And I remember we talked a little bit about Zimbabwe's hyperinflation. Oh, yeah. People were like showing up with actual wheelbarrows of cash because it was just going nuts.
That was crazy. I remember that.
Great, great example. Yeah, we've got to do that episode.
Yeah, there's got to be more to it.
For sure. Well, if you want to be like Tree and fill us in on something we've said we want to know about, we'd love that kind of thing. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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