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Lice

Gavin Pitts joins Kevin, Toren, and Joe again via Skype to talk head lice, body lice, public lice, Strigiphilus Garylarsoni,  Aristotle’s “spontaneous generation” theory, the lice-spread typhus outbreak in the first World War, perukes, Archbishop Thomas Becket, German WWII de-lousing stations, Japanese Unit 731,  as well as South Park’s “Lice Capades” episode.

Correction: Joe stated there are four countries not using the metric system. It’s actually just three: USA, Liberia, and Burma. Get with the times, America.

Music: “The Kwellada Kid” by SNFU

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11 Responses

  2. Great show as always, and I second the comment about constantly scratching myself while listening to this one.

    That said (and apologies for nitpicking, appropriate though it may be), I have to call Joe out on getting “Incredible Journey” confused with “Fantastic Voyage” near the beginning of the show. One is a Disney movie about two dogs and a cat making their way across the countryside, whereas the other is a classic sci-fi movie about shrunken scientists navigating through a human body in a special submarine.

    Picking further nits, Kevin had a bit of difficulty later in the show converting between pounds and kilograms—accidentally multiplying when he should’ve divided. Nevertheless, 150 lbs is still a revolting quantity of lice, so his point stands.

    I think Unit 731 probably merits an entire Caustic Soda episode in its own right. I started watching the experimental-form docudrama “Philosophy of a Knife” back when it was on Netflix and only made it through about half an hour of the 250 minute running time before I just had to turn it off (though that might’ve been because it was an awful movie rather than because of the awful subject matter).

  4. Good episode 🙂 I didn’t have many suggestions for Gavin prior to this one ( I didn’t have much lice trivia to hand ), but when you started on remedies I facepalmed, because I’d forgotten one particularly tragic example. Google “lice gasoline fire”

  5. I’m going to pick nits from Toren. Typhus is not caused by a virus, but by a bacteria, Rickettsia. It also is an obligate parasite.

    Otherwise, great show guys!

  8. Anyone know if the little bugs hallucinated by some poor bugger on drugs in Philip K. Dick’s “Through A Scanner Darkly” were lice? I guess they were just generic bugs, but I was reminded of the opening scene of the film they made of it during the episode. I’ll have to chase down the South Park episode, too.

    Nice icky ep, guys, and it’s great to hear such great accents too. 😉 Kevin’s was nearly not Scottish and I loved Gavin’s.

  9. Invader Zim had an episode about lice as well where the already disturbing ‘skool’ in the show had been turned into an concentration camp run by a maniacal autocratic matron who most definitely did not say ‘iz good, jah?’

  10. i just listened to this, and i can tell you, i got lice a few years ago. i’ve got dredds down to my ass. first i boiled my dredds, then soaked them in 91% isopropanol, and wrapped my dredds up close to my head with saran wrap for 3 days, then repeated the whole process, leaving my head wrapped for another 3 days. i never saw another louse. so maybe simply washing your head with isopropanol doesn’t work, but making it an inescapable ocean of isopropanol for a time will. i had heard to do the same but with olive oil to get rid of lice on dredds, but i figured the alcohol would be a safer bet. so i can’t say if oil works or not with the head wrap. the guys seem to have mixed up their anecdotal evidence, it’s not simply washing with isopropanol, i know from experience.