Tag: desire path

  • Episode 6: Desire Path, or There’s Nothing Magical About A Fart Cushion

    The Ride To Redacted
    The Ride To Redacted
    Episode 6: Desire Path, or There’s Nothing Magical About A Fart Cushion
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    On this ride, Steve and Mal contemplate how unfortunate patterns of behavior — including, but not limited to, the compulsive buying of novelty items — can be recalibrated. 

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    Show notes:

    Speaking of desire paths, a bit of Googling reveals that Broadway in Manhattan was originally a Lenape desire path of sorts known as the Wickquasgeck Trail.  Or so say a number of articles, such as the one at http://www.anthropologyinpractice.com/2009/11/back-in-time-walking-wickquasgeck-trail.html

    And a nice article on rewiring the brain to undo negativity bias can be found at: https://www.purplecar.net/2017/12/desire-paths-in-the-brain/

    Pivoting our show notes attention now to fart cushions: A bit of Googling reveals conflicting claims that the Whoopee Cushion was invented by: a 13 year old Roman emperor (though quite possibly not); or in the 1930s by the JEM Rubber Co. of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, by employees; or (of course) Leonardo Da Vinci.  For a relatively thoughtful New York Times (“All the news that’s fit to print”) piece about Whoopee Cushions, visit: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/who-made-that-whoopee-cushion.html?smid=url-share 

    SOOOooo tempting to insert some audio at the end of this Ep. with the sound of a fart.  Sooooo tempting.  Not gonna do it.  Your co-hosts are too classy, too class an act, for that kind of pandering.  That said, though… here’s a link you can click on if you need to hear that flatulent sound, which in the case of this vid has been made manually and not via cushion.  The artiste in this much-viewed performance (2.9 million views) refers to himself, rather euphemistically, as a manualist.  And naturally the piece he performs in this memorable vid is “Bohemian Rhapsody.”  Here you go: https://youtu.be/IOyEw9bT8yQ?si=76VtgNEfodHlqmS6

    And that is where these particular show notes must end.  For the moment, as Hamlet says at the end of the eponymous play, “the rest is silence.”