Ned tells Meg about the once-fabulous, then not fabulous, and now once-again-fabulous Mechanical Turk, a fraudy machine from the late 1700s that beat famous people at chess, sometimes. The best things about this machine are the weird number of insanely famous people who interacted with it. Meg applauds Edgar Allan Poe’s well-placed skepticism of it. This machine was created for marketing purposes back in the day and was never actually functional as described, but it nonetheless made a big splash and went on tour and everything. As Rubin Farr once said, you can be famous and a fraud; a famous fraud. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don’t be a dick, maybe learn how to play chess for real!

Ned and Meg chat around ISO 216, the paper standard that dictates sizes and scaling for papers not used in the United States. Here we use letter size and other measurements that don’t scale and don’t work as great as the ISO 216 standards! Anyway, we will tell you all about it if’n you give it a listen, plus discussion of paper weights and US stationery sizes, plus aspect ratios and paper sizing. Oh, and Meg’s frequent dream-based panic attacks. OK super! Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don’t be a dick.

Ned and Meg wander through the landscape of lagniappes, describing what we see as we go. In this episode we discuss the etymology of the word “lagniappe” and where the whole idea of them originated. We chat about creole food too, and our seafood preferences before we discuss some of our favorite lagniappes like the ones that kids get at the dentist, in happy meals, at the Sanrio store, at grocery stores, Archie McPhee’s, and our favorite, the Hobonichi lagniappes. Thanks for listening, give someone in your life a lagniappe! Wash your hands, don't be a dick.