One Flew Over The Kuru Nest

(0:00 – 0:11)
I almost got kicked out of George Washington’s house. For what? Chewing gum. Really? Yeah, can you believe that? I mean, it makes sense.

(0:11 – 0:38)
Yeah, he said like, Sir, Sir, this is a museum. And I appreciate that, I’m glad, but I’ve been in lots of museums and you have this like grown person who’s just quietly chewing gum, reading pamphlets. And they were gonna kick you out? For quietly chewing your gum while reading pamphlets? Yeah, so anyway, I had to do like the pretend tuck my gum away, but there’s like no trash cans around, so I just did like the fake tuck.

(0:38 – 0:46)
And I know he knew I was like fake tucking it. Just for his like satisfaction, or so he can’t get blamed, I guess. It was like a huge tour group there.

(0:47 – 1:00)
It was like 30 people all staring at me. I was like, everybody knew that I wasn’t- Everyone like stopped to look at you? Yeah. Yeah, and there’s like other people who are chewing gum, like they’re tucking, like they’re like- Everyone’s like, quickly, this one’s getting in trouble, so now we have to stop.

(1:00 – 1:10)
Yeah, so like you can see them like tucking it into their cheeks. So you guys just like all mass tucked your gum? Yes, it’s like the middle of the summer. I mean, it’s how you keep your mouth moist.

(1:11 – 1:22)
But yeah, there’s like other places I wanted to go to, but I’m like scared to now. Like Monticello, that place sounds like really nice. But you won’t go because you’re afraid you’ll have to tuck your gum? Yeah.

(1:23 – 1:33)
I’m Dr. Dustin Edwards. And I’m Faith Cox. Welcome to Germomics, where we go to, be, from, a, in the most roundabout way, a mix of microbiology and history.

(1:33 – 1:55)
In this series, we connect different aspects of modern life and society to microbes through seemingly unconnected natural events, discoveries, and inventions. So how does almost getting kicked out of George Washington’s house for chewing gum connect to cannibalism and infectious disease? Let’s find out. So you said you wanted to go to Monticello, right? Yeah, it’s a really interesting building.

(1:56 – 2:06)
To my knowledge, Thomas Jefferson spent like 40 years of his life designing and redesigning that building. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. He spent like almost all of his life doing it.

(2:06 – 2:13)
And he had a lot of it redone while he was president. I didn’t know that. How large is Monticello? I’m not sure.

(2:13 – 2:20)
I mean, it’s got the dome on top. I think there’s a room up on that top story, like a rotundra. But I obviously haven’t been there.

(2:20 – 2:30)
There’s a wing on the right and a wing on the left. And it was a plantation, of course. So there was lots of buildings from the enslaved workers there.

(2:31 – 2:38)
So it’s almost like a little village. And there were some gardens and things like that. I didn’t know that Monticello had all of that.

(2:38 – 2:51)
It makes sense. I never think about how places that were plantations had to provide a place for their slaves to sleep. Now, there was a big feature there at George Washington’s house, which was Mount Vernon.

(2:52 – 3:11)
And so there’s, of course, the large house, the main house. But then there was lots of other buildings and the barns where all the animals were at. And they did a really great job really telling the story of all the people who worked there, how they lived their lives, how their lives were quite different than that of George Washington.

(3:12 – 3:25)
Yeah, I would imagine so. So Thomas Jefferson was obviously a founding father who played a really large role in the American Revolution. He represented Virginia in the Continental Congress.

(3:25 – 3:32)
He was the second governor of Virginia. He was the US minister of France. He was the first Secretary of State.

(3:32 – 3:55)
And along with James Madison, he organized the Democratic-Republican Party to oppose the Federalists, which led to the creation of the two-party system that we currently have. He was the second vice president of the US, and then the third president of the US, during which time he organized the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition. And then he signed an act prohibiting the import of slaves in 1807.

(3:56 – 4:06)
He also wrote that little thing called the Declaration of Independence, right? Yeah, yeah. He was the main author of the Declaration of Independence. Those are really well-known things about him, though.

(4:06 – 4:22)
That was kind of the legacy he left. What a lot of people don’t know, though, is that he— Well, he also made the University of Virginia, and whenever he wrote his epitaph, he has this large, like, obelisk for his grave marker. And the epitaph is on there.

(4:22 – 4:30)
And he wrote down three of his main accomplishments. Like, what? The three he was, like, most proud of? Yes. Being president of the United States was not one.

(4:34 – 4:45)
I can’t imagine being president and then being like, you know what? We’re just gonna not include that in my top three—top three moments. Yeah, well, I mean, if you’re Thomas Jefferson, he had a lot of, like, top moments. Yeah.

(4:47 – 4:58)
Yes. So what a lot of people don’t know is he was also a fan of, like, maple sugar. And so— What’s maple sugar? Is that, like, brown sugar? No, it’s not brown sugar.

(4:58 – 5:03)
Do you even know what brown sugar is? It’s sugar that’s brown. It’s sweet. Okay, yeah.

(5:03 – 5:13)
And sticky. Brown sugar is, like, blended with molasses to give it that consistency and, like, moistness. Maple sugar is from maple trees.

(5:13 – 5:33)
It’s just like the sap, super, super, super reduced to a crystalline state. Thomas Jefferson was friends with a man named Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was a really big proponent of maple sugar. Rush actually hosted a tea party with several guests, including Alexander Hamilton, and all of the guests agreed that maple sugar was just as sweet as cane sugar.

(5:33 – 6:10)
The importance behind this is that Rush’s goal was to lessen or destroy the consumption of West Indian sugar and thus indirectly destroy Negro slavery. Supporters of Rush’s push for maple sugar claimed that the sugar made at home would taste inherently sweeter to Americans because it wasn’t tainted, and Jefferson was interested in it for, like, that reason, but also in the politics behind getting people to switch to cultivating maple sugar instead of cane sugar. So he thought that if everyone played their cards right, the U.S. could supply half of the world’s sugar needs using maple sugar.

(6:10 – 6:29)
He saw no reason that people can’t, like, have orchards of maple trees for this supply to be met. Apparently they had just, like, orchards of apple trees. I didn’t realize having your own apple orchard was, like, a thing, but it was.

(6:30 – 6:45)
Yeah, they use it to make, like, apple cider. Yeah, I, like, I knew I had heard of it, but I thought it was kind of one of those things that, like, it’s overly emphasized. But, like, the whole idea of, like, George Washington having wooden teeth, it wasn’t, like, really true, but for some reason it didn’t continue to get passed along.

(6:46 – 6:53)
I thought it was, like, one of those things. You have nothing to say to this? Most of the founding fathers were farmers. They had crops.

(6:53 – 7:10)
Well, I know that, but I didn’t realize, like, everyone had, like, apple trees specifically. I thought that was, like, an exaggeration, but apparently not. Anyways, Jefferson was, like, so obsessed with these maple trees that he had 60 of them, like, imported and planted at Monticello.

(7:10 – 7:39)
They all died, though, from my understanding on the Monticello website. It says there might be, like, one remaining, but the rest of them died. How long is a maple tree even going to live for? It’s been a couple hundred years now, right? Well, yeah, oh, yes, but, like, on the website it specified that in his lifetime all but eight died and then after that, like, two more died or they took them somewhere else and now it’s dwindled in that time since he was alive down to, like, the original one.

(7:40 – 7:45)
Just one. And even then they’re not sure about that one. It might have been imported by him.

(7:45 – 7:49)
It might have already been there. They don’t know. He didn’t, like, plot exactly where he put the trees.

(7:50 – 8:03)
Jefferson and Russia’s push for maple sugar didn’t take off in the way that they had hoped. It did take off enough, though, that people continued using it after their deaths. And people took it with them on the Oregon Trail, actually.

(8:03 – 8:10)
Like the video game. Did everybody die from dysentery on that one? No, actually, a lot more people died of cholera than dysentery. Oh.

(8:11 – 8:18)
Yeah. From my understanding, dysentery is just, like, when you have blood in your stool. So it’s kind of, there could be, like, multiple things causing that.

(8:19 – 8:27)
The other thing that would kill me in that game was you had to ford a river. Okay. And the wagon would just get swept away.

(8:28 – 8:32)
Oh. When you crossed the rivers. Yeah, yeah.

(8:33 – 8:39)
I died a lot in that game. Like, a lot, a lot. Yeah, so what about the Oregon Trail? Um, okay, yeah.

(8:39 – 8:58)
So the Oregon Trail was a 2,170-mile trail from east to west that connected the Missouri River to the valleys in Oregon. The trail was originally laid by fur traders and trappers in between 1811 and 1840. It was considered more complete, per se, in 1840, whenever it was laid.

(8:58 – 9:12)
Trampled enough that wagons could go through. About that time, several guidebooks started coming out to help people more efficiently travel to the west. So the Michelin Guide, you always hear about fancy restaurants.

(9:13 – 9:21)
Like, they have, like, you know, the two stars or one star. Oh. So that’s actually Michelin Tire Company, I think.

(9:21 – 9:37)
And they, yeah, so they made a, I think it started in Europe. And since cars were new, and they want you to buy more tires, they made this guide of all these wonderful places you could visit. So you’d wear out your tires? Yeah, yeah.

(9:38 – 9:47)
And anyway, they started, like, mapping it out, and that became the Michelin Guide to Restaurants. Now it’s like this fancy thing, but it goes back to tires. Guidebooks sound manipulative.

(9:48 – 10:15)
So just a few, like, foods that immigrants might take with them were 200 pounds of flour per adult, 60 pounds of beans, 150 pounds of bacon, 40 pounds of sugar, a whole keg of rendered beef fat to use as a butter substitute. Some immigrants would drive cattle with them instead of packing so much meat. And you might think that they were taking, like, a lot of canned foods, but canning technology was actually rather new during the time of the Oregon Trail.

(10:16 – 10:22)
And so it was more expensive to take. So maybe, like, your rich families were taking it. But for the most part, the average immigrant was not.

(10:23 – 10:38)
Immigrants would also pick currants and berries they found along the trail along the way. And that vitamin C actually helped them avoid scurvy. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know, maybe it was more common back then to, like, know your plants and, like, wildlife.

(10:39 – 10:50)
But I would be afraid of eating something that was, like, bad for you. My understanding, a lot of the people that were traveling west were not pioneer people like you would think. So they’re mostly, like, middle class people.

(10:51 – 11:00)
If my family or your family were to… Just, like, hop on a wagon and go. Yeah. I mean, how much do we really know? I know what poison ivy looks like.

(11:00 – 11:06)
I know not to eat that. I don’t know what it looks like. Some berries, I know what they look like.

(11:06 – 11:21)
You know, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries. Yeah, but aren’t there sometimes, like, poisonous versions of things that look the same? I don’t know, but there’s tons of berries that are poisonous and tons of mushrooms. My mom told me when she was a teenager they used to eat mushrooms they found in the woods.

(11:22 – 11:25)
Oh, God. Well, they knew what they were looking for. I have no clue.

(11:26 – 11:36)
My best is just, like, to stay out of the woods. If I were to get trapped in the woods or have to, like, travel along a trail and, like, forage to survive, I would just die. I’m the same with hunting.

(11:36 – 11:50)
I can’t hunt. If I were to have to survive on, like, hunting or fishing or any kind of, like, acquiring my food from the environment, I’d just be left to die. So there was a famous group that used the Oregon Trail called the Donner Party.

(11:50 – 12:23)
You familiar with them? A little bit. I just know it’s a tragic tale of improper planning and not starting soon enough. Yeah, so what they did was they left from Missouri on the Oregon Trail and were headed to California, and they chose to take this newly formed shortcut called Hastings Cut-Off, and doing that, along with a series of mistakes, caused them to become behind on, like, their planned trip, and they left at a time that had everything gone perfectly.

(12:23 – 12:50)
It would have ended just in time, but since they made that mistake, it caused them to get lost for a whole month, and they had to leave a bunch of their supplies behind on the trail, and they ended up getting trapped at a lake during the winter and almost starving to death. Those who survived survived by resorting to cannibalism. And they were almost all the way there, correct? Like, they had made it 90% of the way? Yeah, they had made it through, like, a good chunk.

(12:50 – 13:04)
They had made it through the majority of their trip by the time this happened. It still took rescue workers, like, two months to get to them because the snowfall, like, winter was so bad. Oh, yeah, I’ve seen pictures of their area.

(13:04 – 13:36)
They had made cabins or had modified some cabins, and they had chopped some trees down, and this picture was taken well after the fact, and these tree stumps were about 12 feet high. And it’s not that they were, you know, climbing up the trees and cutting them down, just the snow was so high at the time that, you know, they cut the tree down, so it was probably, like, a one or two foot stump. So they became so, like, emaciated and close to death that eventually they, like, stopped moving.

(13:37 – 13:49)
And so the rescue workers had to, like, dig them out of the snow even though they were still alive. They were just being, like, buried alive by snow towards the end. So as a whole, there were 87 people who originally went on the trip.

(13:49 – 14:06)
Only 48 survived. And you said there was cannibalism? How many were eaten? Um, roughly 18 people were eaten, ranging in the ages between 3 to 60 or 62. They didn’t eat everyone because some people die on their own before it got to that point.

(14:06 – 14:20)
But once they got trapped at the lake is when they started eating people. So there are several different types of cannibalism that, like, exist in the world. There is exocannibalism, which is when you’re eating someone from, like, outside of your village or community or group.

(14:20 – 14:32)
So that may be, like, what a serial killer would do, like Jeffrey Dahmer. Well, with the Donner Party, there’s 80-something people. Were they all related to each other? They, yes and no.

(14:32 – 14:46)
So there were several large families that were there, but there are also, like, smaller groups of families. It was like if a community went. So would that count as an exo? I don’t know because some of them met on the trail.

(14:47 – 14:57)
So I don’t know. Endocannibalism, though, is when you’re eating from within, like, your own community or family or tribe. And so that may have been what the Donner Party did.

(14:58 – 15:22)
But more so, it’s really common for people to do, like, ritual cannibalism that way or funerary cannibalism. On the topic of ceremonial cannibalism, I always think about the Foray people on Papua New Guinea who would have a ritualistic ceremony and consumption of their dead. Yeah.

(15:22 – 15:41)
So they would eat their dead because they considered that by eating, like, the corpse, they were returning the life force back to their community. So I guess they would bury their relatives for extended periods of time until there was actually maggots. Yeah.

(15:42 – 15:55)
That would appear. And then they would dig them up and then they would boil the remains and then would eat them. And it was generally the children and the women who would eat these body parts.

(15:56 – 16:16)
That’s what I read, that it was the women and children for the most part. I’ve read conflicting reports, though, on how exactly the meat was being divided. However, what is known is that they did bury their dead and that they did do preparations of their corpses, including maybe cleaning the skull.

(16:17 – 16:34)
In some manner, they were coming into pretty direct contact with brain tissue, which is part of the central nervous system. So something happened with the Foray people. The women and children villages were starting to die in the thousands.

(16:34 – 16:50)
And it was a mysterious disease. And so researchers eventually came to the island to study the Foray and to figure out what was going on. To cut to the end of the story, what was going on in the community was that there was a prion disease being spread.

(16:51 – 17:04)
A prion is a proteinaceous infectious particle. They are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein. It’s unknown exactly like the mechanism they use to do this.

(17:05 – 17:29)
They can take a normal protein and then cause it to misfold into the wrong variant of the protein. In textbooks, when you look at figures of prions, you can think of the regular protein as being like a circle and the prion as being a square. And what the prion does is that it can interact somehow with the regular protein, the circle, and turn it into a square like itself.

(17:29 – 17:41)
So now that regular protein is misfolded and has a different shape. PRP has a normal form, and that’s what’s expressed in a normal person. That is PRPC.

(17:42 – 17:56)
The C stands for cellular. Whenever it’s in the prion disease form, though, that is PRPSC, which stands for scrapy. Which was the first disease that was recognized as eventually being a prion disease.

(17:56 – 18:06)
It occurred in sheep. And they called it scrapy because the sheep would kind of scrape their bodies up against things. So there was these abrasions all over.

(18:06 – 18:15)
PRPC is a normal protein found on the membranes of cells. It mainly has an alpha helical structure. So it’s like a finger or a cylinder.

(18:16 – 18:42)
But PRPSC causes these alpha helices to fold into beta pleated sheets, which would give them more of the structure that’s flat like a palm rather than a finger. Once misfolded, the prions cause neurodegenerative disease by aggregating extracellularly in the central nervous system to form plaques, which are areas of cell death, specifically called amyloids. These can disrupt the normal tissue structure and cause a spongy appearance.

(18:43 – 18:56)
And that’s why these transmissible prion diseases are called transmissible spongiform encephalopathy because the brain starts to get this spongy appearance when you look at it on the slide. Under a microscope. Under a microscope.

(18:56 – 19:21)
And so for the Foray, during that process, their funerary process, the women and the children were either consuming brain matter or they were at least cleaning the skull and perhaps acquiring the agent that way. The prion was definitely concentrated in the brain tissue. The disease that the Foray people had ended up being Kuru disease.

(19:21 – 19:45)
The name Kuru comes from the New Guinea word for trembling due to the body tremors that are a classic symptom of the disease as a result of cerebral ataxia. Ataxia is the loss of muscle control and coordination. When you look at video of the Foray that had been afflicted by the disease, so when you watch them stand or try to walk, it was very unsteady.

(19:45 – 20:17)
It looks like they would start to take a step forward and maybe not be able to support themselves on that leg or they’ll kind of go from one foot to the other foot. Other footage that I saw in which they would try to have the afflicted persons try to touch their fingertips together and they were unable to do so, so they would end up missing their fingertips. So kind of like a loss of hand-eye coordination, but they were trying to get it together, but I guess just from the trembling or just inability to control their movements.

(20:18 – 20:46)
Yeah, so Kuru and prion diseases in general are really scary because they can have long incubation periods. So Kuru averaged 10 to 13 years, but it could be as short as 5 and as long as 50 years or more after the initial exposure. There were three main stages of disease progression, but there was kind of a prodromal symptom or a period in some people where they just started having headaches and joint pain, but not everyone exhibited that.

(20:47 – 21:10)
The first or ambulance stage was what Dr. Edwards is talking about with the unsteady stance and gait. They had decreased muscle control, tremors, difficulty pronouncing words, intubation, which is just like repeated, almost rhythmic like muscle spasms. It was called the ambulance stage because at that point the individual could still walk around despite their symptoms.

(21:10 – 21:28)
The secondary or sedentary stage, the person became incapable of walking without support. The ataxia developed to the point of severe tremors. They begin exhibiting emotional instability and depression and also kind of uncontrolled and sporadic laughter.

(21:28 – 21:38)
So their facial muscles would contract in a manner where it appeared they were smiling. And some people say they were laughing. Some people say they weren’t because of the emotional instability.

(21:38 – 21:59)
You can’t really determine whether they were laughing or smiling along with their muscle spasms. So the third, final, or terminal stage, their ataxia would progress to the point where the individuals could no longer sit without support. They would develop a difficulty swallowing, which would lead to severe malnutrition.

(21:59 – 22:25)
They may become incontinent and they may lose the ability or will to speak and become unresponsive to their environment despite still being conscious. Towards the end of the third stage, patients would often develop chronic ulcerated wounds that could become easily infected. And then roughly three months to two years after those terminal symptoms started to appear, the patient would die, often due to pneumonia or infection from those wounds.

(22:26 – 22:37)
So something that’s really scary about Kuru and prion diseases in general is that there’s no cure or treatment. So once you start exhibiting symptoms, there’s nothing anyone can do for you. That’s correct.

(22:37 – 22:51)
The disease has been 100% fatal. Historical research suggests that the epidemic started around 1900 from an individual who developed sporadic Crutchfield-Jakob disease and then was subsequently eaten. After that, the disease spread.

(22:52 – 23:10)
Prion diseases can be inherited or they can just form spontaneously. You could also accidentally contract one through cannibalism. What’s interesting is that there is a mutation that has occurred among the 4A people that prevent them from having misfolded proteins.

(23:10 – 23:15)
Yeah, I read that. So it’s a glimpse at human evolution. Yeah.

(23:16 – 23:32)
In 1957, Daniel Carlton Gajdacek began studying Kuru. He actually went to go live among the 4A people to study the disease. And then after that, he returned to the U.S., where he established the first experimental tests on chimpanzees for Kuru at the National Institutes of Health.

(23:33 – 23:57)
He did this by drilling holes into the chimpanzee’s head and then placing pureed brain matter from a patient who had died of Kuru disease into the cerebellum of the monkeys. Gajdacek had tried in other animal models as well, but was completely unsuccessful with those. What was different about the chimpanzees was that he actually went for a longer amount of time with them.

(23:57 – 24:15)
And so by delaying the experiment, remember with prions, it has a long incubation period. And so up to this point, they didn’t know if it was really a transmissible disease or not because they couldn’t move it from one host to another host. And they also couldn’t find any genetic material.

(24:15 – 24:36)
So there wasn’t any DNA or RNA to indicate that it was a virus. So he just called it kind of like a typical virus, even though in reality, prions are not a virus. By inoculating the monkeys with this pureed brain matter, he was able to prove that it was indeed transmissible, even though, like you said, he wasn’t able to isolate or identify the protein that was causing it.

(24:37 – 25:03)
In 1976, Gajdacek went on to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine regarding his work with Kuru disease. I think a science and society message from what we talked about today is how looking at the 4A people and their traditions, that we do things in our own cultures that are also unhealthy for us. And so we can look at sugar.

(25:03 – 25:15)
We go to a gas station, there’s a 44-ounce Coca-Cola. That’s like 380 calories and several grams of sugar. And it leads to obesity.

(25:15 – 25:36)
It leads to diabetes or something else in the news recently with religious practices. Spreading herpes. And so whenever you’re looking at these the primitive 4A people and thinking, well, they did this to themselves, we have to think about what some of our behaviors do to ourselves where we’re harming ourselves.

(25:36 – 26:01)
Yeah, I think that’s a reasonable takeaway. After we had the whole thing of people smoking cigarettes and people continuing to smoke cigarettes despite knowing they’re bad for them or how we understand enough about lung diseases and smoking to know that we shouldn’t really be like inhaling much of anything, but people continue to vape and jewel. Thank you for listening to episode four, One Flew Over the Kuru’s Nest.

(26:02 – 26:18)
Show notes, transcripts, citations, and social media links are available on our website at germomics.com. I had a cat that would wake up in the middle of the night and come watch me eat toaster strudels. Toaster strudels but not Pop-Tarts? Not Pop-Tarts. Pop-Tarts are banned.

(26:19 – 26:27)
Pop-Tarts are banned? Yes. What do you mean? I had a bad incident with a Pop-Tart once. Like what? It’s a Pop-Tart.

(26:27 – 26:31)
How bad could it be? Okay. So they usually put them on a toaster. Yeah.

(26:31 – 26:41)
And when I was in grad school, I had a toaster and it broke. I had a cheap toaster. And so when it was time to get something else, I decided to try one of these toaster ovens.

(26:41 – 26:51)
Okay. Yeah, I made the big time. And so these toaster ovens have either a time setting or a temperature setting.

(26:52 – 27:05)
And so whenever I was doing the Pop-Tarts, I would do the time setting just like with a toaster, except for one time. I didn’t. I accidentally hit the temperature setting and it was like all the way up.

(27:05 – 27:22)
And so I’m cooking my Pop-Tart and I realize a lot of time has gone by and it hasn’t clicked yet. So I go into the kitchen and I open up the door, pull out the tray, and molten sugar just like pours out over my hand and like hardens. And so it’s like burned.

(27:22 – 27:25)
Ow. Ow. It just like seared onto your skin? Yeah.

(27:26 – 27:33)
It’s like just went solid and I can’t like pick it off. And like, oh, it was awful. So awful that Pop-Tarts are now banned.

(27:33 – 27:42)
Did you go to the doctor? No, I mean, it wasn’t like the skin was coming off, off. It was just like, I guess a second degree burn. Ow.

(27:43 – 27:53)
I, I, yeah, I probably stopped eating Pop-Tarts after that too. Right. So then I switched to toaster strudels and I would do it around midnight, right before like bed.

(27:53 – 27:54)
Yeah. Yeah. Like the right time.

(27:54 – 27:57)
Right. Yeah. I like to watch, you know, a TV show and do that.

(27:58 – 28:13)
And we had a cat that would come running in from the other room and would sit and watch me eat this toaster strudel. And I would like offer portions of the toaster strudel to the cat and would have none of it. It just wanted to like watch.

(28:13 – 28:25)
It was like a, like a food voyeur. Was it like, do you think it was like attracted to like the sound of eating flaky foods? I don’t know. Well, it was triggered by the sound of a toaster.

(28:25 – 28:29)
Yeah. That’s the other thing too. I threw up, I threw up that toaster oven.

(28:29 – 28:34)
In fact, I like dragged it down the apartment stairs by its. Cord. By its power cord.

(28:35 – 28:37)
Yeah. I’m throwing the dumpster. So yeah, those are also banned.

(28:38 – 28:43)
Toaster ovens are banned. Yes. Toaster ovens and pop tarts are banned from my house.

(28:44 – 28:50)
What about if your kids want to try them? They’re banned. Like they can. Are you going to hide like the existence of pop tarts? Yeah, they can go.

(28:50 – 28:57)
They can go hide behind the shed and eat the pop tarts. Shamefully. All right.

Written and performed by Dr. Dustin Edwards and Faith Cox

Music from https://filmmusic.io
“Crinoline Dreams” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com);
license CC BY 4.0

Images from
Cerebellum from Kuru-infected Fore © Daniel Carleton Gajdusek; license CC BY 3.0
Truckee River © Bruce Cooper; license CC BY-SA 3.0