Ridiculous Stuff We Didn't Get To in 2026, Part Two: Apple Trees, Ice Cream Wars and Weird Nuclear Gadgets

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you, as always, so much for tuning in. Look, this is our super producer, Mr. Max Williams. That's Noel Brown. They call me Ben Bullen. And we figured out a few years ago a concept of a clip show because, Noel, as you know, there's a ton of stuff that we research and can't quite fit into an episode.

Yeah, you know, I like the clip show concept.

I did point out last time that it's a little different than your, you know, clearly run of the mill 90s sitcom and Simpsons-esque clip shows where you are literally seeing some frame story surrounding the repetition of clips of episodes you've already seen. These are things that may have could have been featured in episodes you've already heard. But you've never heard these bits before. So we do set ourselves apart in that respect. I would maybe posit more of a listicle show.

There we go.

It's a modular approach. And essentially what you're hearing here, folks, is various examples of times that we got super obsessed with rabbit holes. We've been going through kind of an Americana folklore phase this year, and we recently had an episode about the legendary Johnny Appleseed, or as we decided to call him in the episode, Johnny Apps.

Johnny Apps, like Willie Shatz.

Yes.

Before him, well, after him, yes.

So the last known survivor, we'll call it, of Johnny Apps... Reign of positivity.

I could say. Yeah, is a tree, as you can imagine.

An ancient apple tree that lives on to this day in a farm in a place, a very cool sounding place called Nova in Ohio.

Yes, Nova, Ohio. This is where Johnny Appleseed, the actual guy, Johnny actual Appleseed, is believed to have planted a whole orchard. of what are called Rambo apple trees in 1830, and I had no idea there was such a thing as Rambo apple trees.

Do you think John Rambo was named after the trees or were the trees named after?

No, no, I wouldn't make it. John Rambo, of course, the fictional Sylvester Stallone, problematically Americana, a bit of an American folk hero in his own way. First blood. Yeah. Like I love kill Brown people. Oh, geez.

Well, that aside, the apple trees that Johnny apparently planted, still do produce fruit. You can learn more about this by going to nurserymag.com, where you'll see the news about the last living Johnny Appleseed tree.

Now, Ben, I seem to recall there was an issue with the way he planted. It kind of caused like mealy, kind of gross apples that you wouldn't want to nosh on, but you could definitely mash them up and make them into a bit of a mash, an alcoholic concoction.

Is that true of these legacy trees as well?

Yeah, we talked a little bit about this in our previous exploration. The issue is that every time you make an apple from a seed.

An angel gets its wings?

An angel gets its wings and plays a genetic lottery because apples don't do what we call breeding true to seed.

Ben, if I win the genetic lottery, I won't say anything, but there will be signs.

There will be signs, yeah. Think about it this way. You know, if we... plant a tomato, we are going to get a plant pretty much identical to.

The parent plant, but apples are built different, homies. Because of the grafting, right?

Well, you have to graft because of their love of mutation. The apple genome has, and this is true, more genes than the human genome. Their heterozygous, meaning that their genetic makeup is a mix of somewhat unpredictable DNA from two different parents.

I'm guessing, Ben, this is not the case with oranges. Otherwise, people wouldn't, you know, use that as a thing for two things that are completely different. That's right.

That's right.

I'm on a dad joke tear today, guys. We're having some big Friday energy on Thursday.

Yeah, you're on fire.

And it is Thursday.

I forgot.

We have to talk about nominative determinism, one of our favorite inside jokes today. because we found an explanation about how apple mutations occur from a guy named napton cidery yeah.

Yeah i mean jonathan apple seed as if that weren't enough you know that was a was a nickname yes that's right uh napton cidery which if he didn't start a cidery That was called the Napton cider.

It already sounds like it should be a thing.

I don't want to drink a cider from some guy named Napton. I don't know why.

Why not? You drink a wine from Napa.

Yeah, I should finally learn about wine at some point.

You know what's really big these days, Ben? What's that? Natural wine. Natural wine. What's the difference? Natural wine. It's natural, man. I don't know. Oh, my God. I mean, I guess most wines, it's a subgenre of wine. What's his face? Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric fame. Oh, yeah.

He has a winery called Las Charas. He wrote a great cookbook, too, by the way. He's a smart dude and an interesting guy and a real bon vivant. And he loves food and wine. And he has this natural wine company called Las Charas. And they have one called Glue Glue, which is fun because when you pour a wine, what sound does it make?

Oh, yeah.

Pretty, pretty cute.

The most popular ones, you'll start to see them at like, you know, nice restaurants. Really popular ones right now are orange and they are naturally fizzy. Just a little bit. Something to do with the process of how they're made. And they have these kind of floaty little bits in them.

Sulfides, I think they're called. And they just have a vibe, man. They're really nice. They're really refreshing.

And I'm a huge fan of natural wines.

Yeah, natural wine is pure grape juice that's fermented without anything else. There's no sulfites, artificial coloring, sugar, yeast.

Tannins?

Where are we at with tannins?

That's what the floaty bits are. They're not sulfites.

Sulfites you will find in more traditionally fermented wines. But the floaty bits in this, it's a feature, not a bug. It just shows you that it was really done correctly.

And there's also stuff about how the best practices you'd have to do with them and stuff like that. I'm getting this from Dry Farm Wines, by the way.

Oh, OK. Dry farm wines. Also, I'm grateful to you guys for teaching me the stuff that cool kids know. You know, I would just be walking to a winery and saying the one thing I know about wine, which is that red wine has tannins.

It does have tannins.

And just to correct myself, the bits floating in the natural wines. are sediments that are made up from leftover grape solids, dead yeast particles, or natural crystals that derive from the process. But we are not talking about natural wine, but that was a delightfully refreshing aside.

And speaking of asideries, Napton Sidery writes in regard to apple mutation, think of it like human children. You and your partner might have a child, but that child is not a clone of you. They are a unique remix of your DNA. So imagine if you have 50 children, they're all going to look different, some taller, some shorter, some with blue eyes, some with brown. And Sidery, I think, makes an excellent analogy here about how apples work.

Is that what they mean when they say the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree?

You know, I was thinking about that, and that's a really weird one because the apple does genetically seem to fall pretty far from its parent.

That's true. An apple fruit is the ovary of the tree, and the seeds inside are, to stick with the comparison, the children. So the mother would be the tree that the fruit grew on. The father would be the unknown tree that a particular bee visited. Before landing on the mother's seductive blossom. Yeah.

So every single seed in every single apple is genetically unique. So this is a problem Johnny Appleseed had. If you plant 10 seeds from one apple, you will get 10 totally different trees. And most of these, to our earlier point, most of these wild apples were that are called pippins, by the way, they make small bitter fruit. You can mash it down for cider, but you wouldn't want to pull one off a tree and eat it. It tastes pretty gross.

And that's why the grafting is the move, because that gives you predictable genetic results.

A hundred percent. And while we are on the subject of food, we have to return to another recent obsession of ours, which is the iced creams.

Ah, yes, the iced creams, the soft-served iced creams, Ben.

This was a little bit that I was kind of sad we didn't get to in that history of soft-serve ice cream episode because it introduces, much like in our discussion of Atlanta streets earlier, a bit of a true crime story.

Which, you know, it's okay every now and then. It happens. It does happen. So you'll recall Tom Carvell, the creator of Fudgy the Whale and other delicious ice cream-based characters, including, there was another weird one, Sugar Puss. What? Cookie Puss.

Is that real?

Yeah, Cookie Puss.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Is it like an octopus that's a cookie and also ice cream?

I think he must be if we're sticking with the nautical theme.

Let's see.

Cookie. I don't know. I don't think we talked about Cookie Puss. No. No, we did. Cookie Puss is not an octopus at all. He's just a face because that's what they used to call a face, your puss. Your puss, yeah. Which doesn't really stand.

Up to modern scrutiny. Well, you know, the English language is a living document.

So, nope.

I remember from your research in our history of soft serve episodes that Tom Carvell passed away, unfortunately, in 1990.

Yeah, and it was maybe less of a true crime story at the end of the day than just sort of like a succession kerfuffle, right? So Tom Carvell, like I mentioned before, I got derailed by Cookie Puss, passed.

Away in 1990. And when he did, a really gnarly feud exploded between his and his widow, Agnes Carvell's fortune. as well as their charitable trusts.

The trustees, Mildred Arcadapain and Robert Davis, were essentially emboldened by mutual wills. They limited Agnes' access to the funds and were later sued by the New York Attorney General for mismanagement of the funds, prompting the trustees to resign in 1996. However, Tom's niece, Tom Carvell, Pamela Carvel escalated the whole gnarly affair with some pretty intense accusations, unsuccessfully claiming in 2007 in a bid to exhume Tom Carvel's body, alleging that he was murdered by the trustees in order to hide embezzlement.

Well, first off, I am so excited. for all of us to one day get our own charitable trust.

I can't wait.

But also, yeah, this does feel like true crime, Noel, because Pamela Carvel is saying that her uncle was murdered because of financial crimes. And as you found in your research, Courts repeatedly rejected her suits. She brought this to the courts at multiple instances.

Well, $ 28 million worth of instances, Ben. I mean, we're talking gnarly court costs and fees that ultimately led to a big fat nothing.

Oh, yeah, because they're trying to control charitable entities and they're burning through their nest egg.

So it does seem that it's very unlikely that Mr. Carvel was the victim of foul play and that his heir was barking up the wrong tree. And, you know, in doing and in pursuing these allegations burned up quite a bit of her inheritance.

Yeah. Yeah.

And. There is definitely a tale to be told there. Let's see if we can pitch it to our friends over at Ridiculous Crime.

Good call. Yeah.

While we're on the subject of ice cream crimes, Noel, you and I mentioned this either on Stuff They Don't Want You To Know or here on this show. We have to give a shout out to another recent ice cream movement, the Free Ben and Jerry's movement.

Yeah, man, we were in a green room doing this little speaking event for ad week thing here in Atlanta, and there's this kindly older gentleman in the back. I kind of walked in late, and I was just introduced to him as another fellow Ben, and I missed the detail that he was Ben of Ben and Jerry's fame.

Yes, and I've got to admit, Noel, you know this well. When Bens meet each other, we typically– tend to grow up instantly. And we should probably ask more questions because a name doesn't mean you are immediately someone's soul brother. But in general, Ben's tend to get along. So we later learned this guy was actually the ice cream man.

And not only that, he has since 2021 been fighting a corporate takeover, a big baddie named Unilever. which owns another ice cream brand called Magnum, has apparently compromised the values of Ben & Jerry's. Now, how would we describe Ben & Jerry's ice cream to anybody who's never heard of it?

Well, it's delicious.

You may know some of their more popular flavors, such as Chunky Monkey, Cherry Garcia.

They love a pun, dude.

They love a pun, and they love a hippie.

They never met a hippie they didn't like.

The pair were based in Vermont, and they look it in their images, as did Mr.

Bennett, by the way, short for Bennett.

You know, I swear in my mind he was wearing a puffy jacket, but he may not have actually been. But as you can imagine, that part of the country here in the United States is well known for its activism.

Yes, yeah.

And Ben & Jerry's as a brand has always kind of leaned into that in the writings on the back of their pints, some special one-off kind of drops that they will do that benefit certain charitable organizations. And that's Still the case today, at least in theory, but they, at least Mr. Ben, does not feel that the Magnum Unilever brand have honored the spirit of their agreement when they acquired the Ben & Jerry's brand in continuing in that legacy of charitable activities.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that's an excellent summation. We were surprised to learn that Mr. Cohen has done something Old school protesting, old school activism with Magnum. He gate crashed the Magnum Capital Market Day in London and his got arrested.

Right.

I think he did get in trouble. And I can't wait for us to have him on the show to tell us about the ice cream wars.

Fingers crossed. He gave us his assistance info. And I think whether he's on. This show or stuff they don't want you to know, honestly, it fits both bills. We'll figure that out off mic. But it seems pretty likely that we'll get to have a chat with Mr.

Bennett Cohen. Yes, yeah.

And if you want to sign the petitions they have to Free Ben & Jerry's, you can go to FreeBenAndJerrys.com.

Oh, and lest we bury the lead a little bit, literally they just are trying to wrest control of this once independent brand from their customers.

Now corporate overlords.

And I don't know exactly all of the mechanisms that they're employing other than just, you know, good old fashioned protests. But the goal, and this is from Ben himself, is to become an independently owned company with socially aligned investors. And once again, be free to honor its social mission and live by its brand values without compromise.

What a cool guy.

Pretty cool guy.

Pretty cool guy. Obviously, I'm biased, and I guess you're biased too, but what a cool guy. And they're trying to do all of this before the world— I.

Like the cut of his cookie puss. There it is. Bring back cookie puss. He's back. He can get a cookie puss ice cream cake to this day. Oh, my gosh.

I wish we didn't have to work after this because it would be a perfect time to have a cookie cake party, especially if we could do it before the world collapses. into nuclear Armageddon. No, remember when we figured out that the boffins of World War II didn't just want to make nuclear weapons really big. They wanted to make them really small.

Yeah, they wanted them to fit in little knapsacks or backpacks, believe it or not. These weren't the only, however, crazy nuclear power weapons of the Cold War.

We got a couple more. One in particular with the intriguing name, the Davy Crockett nuclear rifle, which, again, seems like it should be a weapon in the Fallout universe.

Yeah, it feels like Fallout. It feels like John Carter novels or something. It feels old school, 1950s sci-fi. And it very much is. It's a nuclear recoilless rifle that you could pack on a Jeep. And you can move it around.

What a great detail. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's got to be a Jeep, though. It can't be a sedan.

Yeah, Jeep lobbyists got to it hard. And the idea is that you could fire this thing and launch a nuclear round, a small nuclear device, up to two and a half miles away. And if you read the research documents on this, the U.S. Army did something really ominous. In every document, they say, look, if we use Davy Crockett correctly, this rifle is not going to automatically kill the crew.

Thank God for that. It probably will, but it's not a foregone conclusion.

It's so Florida man style. They said, just put the thing on a hilt. activate it, and then run away. Run like mad.

You may or may not have to die on that hill. Right. Exactly.

Yeah. Cover your neck and your head and duck. The Davy Crockett was manufactured. It was even put in the field, as far as we could tell. It was never used in combat because it was probably not as good of an idea as chicken-powered nuclear landmines.

What's not to like about that? Big chicken, little chicken. There we go. Yeah. After World War II, the Brits learned that their precious island was in a bit of a precarious position. The best defense, as you say, Ben, and I agree, is– I think you coined this phrase, actually. It's a good offense. Oh, not me. That was a football coach somewhere. Maybe so.

But you're absolutely right. So the British are in a tight spot, and they say, we're going to place these landmines we call blue peacocks– Sounds like some sort of pretty firework.

It sure does.

Yeah.

And we're going to put them across the plain of North Germany. And this way, they say, if the Soviets come rushing into Europe. Oh, Soviets come rushing in.

All right. We'll keep it.

That was my fault. The opposing forces are going to run into these nuclear landmines. But the British will figure out there's a big problem. That part of the world gets really cold. And if it gets too cold, their landmines won't work.

Yeah. I mean, if I'm not mistaken, Ben, peacocks like it pretty warm.

Yes. Yes. That's my understanding as well.

I've only ever seen them down California way.

Is that true? It is true. They're actually peacocks that roam the grounds of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. And you know my position on exotic birds. I steer clear, but it is cool that they exist. Yeah, yeah.

You can see peacocks roaming around in the strangest places. Birds are quite adaptable, and that is what brought them into the conversation at the British Boffin Drawing Board of Ideas. They said, how do we keep these landmines warm enough to work And they said, what if we just like put chickens inside the mines and we'll give them food and water and they'll stay alive and their body heat will keep the landmines warm. So this whole idea, which does sound like peak ridiculous history, was so hard to grok to comprehend that once the project got declassified, the British public, thought it was malarkey. They thought it was an April Fool's Day joke, like that famous spaghetti trees piece from BBC.

100%, which if you haven't seen, it is available as a video for you. You can watch it online.

And we'll blow through a couple of other ones quickly here. There's Atomic Annie. This was a nuclear field cannon. It could fire a nuclear shell up to 20 miles. It was fired once in 1953 at a test in Nevada in And you can see it in a video. One fun fact, they also paraded this atomic Annie in the inaugural parade of President Dwight D.

Eisenhower.

Presumably, it wasn't looted with, you know, nuclear munition. But remember back when our presidential parades used to be good?

Yeah. Oh, man.

Speaking of which, not to clown the man exactly as much as is warranted.

Did you see President Xi Jinping is in town?

Yes.

And there's a really great clip where he and Trump are standing side by side with Trump holding a salute and then cringing visibly when a military flyover happens.

Like he looks genuinely spooked.

We've got some genuinely spooked. strange stuff to get to with weird nuclear experiments. Noel, I think we may have mentioned it previously, but the Trinity test was super top secret. There are some great pieces of fiction or what will we call Oppenheimer? Will we call it an adaptation?

Yeah, a blockbuster, you know, but weird one, too.

I mean, I think the thing there is Christopher Nolan really just has become one of the only truly, you know, sure thing box office names in directing.

And in the story of Oppenheimer, you're going to learn a lot about the U.S. 's mad secret rush, a true conspiracy to create nuclear weapons and We don't know how history would have gone if Kodak went public with their knowledge. This is so crazy. Kodak, the camera company, almost blew the whistle on nuclear arms. And it's all because they had to use cardboard that is not contaminated with any radioactive substance because of the way camera film works, right?

And so in August of 1945, one of their scientists says, hang on. Why is all our camera stock, why is all our film fogging up?

Yeah, real canary in the coal mine there. I'm taking a look into that phenomenon.

One of the scientists working for the Kodak company determined that there must have been some sort of nuclear event near enough that it would have caused this phenomenon.

I mean, it literally is.

If it had been really near, it would have blacked out the film entirely, but what we're talking about is just enough of a little bit of fogging a lens, that's I think what it would look like, that they could tell a nuclear explosion took place. And since the Trinity test was set up as top secret, this was a big deal.

Yeah, and this scientist goes to his bosses and he says, okay, definitely someone is letting a lot of radiation into the environment. And his bosses say, shh. So he doesn't talk about this until 1949. And instead of going public, Kodak is putting air filters on their film factories to keep the radiation out.

Pretty neat.

Pretty neat. Something to crack a nuclear brew to, right?

Hey, look at that. Ben, you are really, there are segues today. We're on fire today, man. You're killing it with the dad jokes. You know, thanks, Bob.

I'm a walking dad joke, and I come by it honestly because I am an actual dad. But you teased the idea of a nuclear brew, like a Nuka-Cola type situation.

Yeah, yeah. So picture this. We're hanging out, minding our own business, and then a nuclear bomb goes off. You see that mushroom cloud in the distant horizon. You get the shockwave. There are fires everywhere, chaos, pandemonium, dogs and cats sleeping together, and you have survived, and you think, I'm kind of thirsty. What do we do, Noel, in that situation?

Well, Ben, there's no running water, at least not where you are, but there is a little bit of a bodega nearby, a convenience store. Sadly, it's been crushed by the shockwave, but as in any post-apocalyptic scenario.

Shout out, Fallout. Well, that's where you go, man, to find your canned goods, to find your bottles and cans. Just clap your hands. So you got to wonder... What's okay and what's not okay? How much radiation, you know, how much rat away am I going to have to take?

There we go.

I love that reference. Could I grab one of these sodas or one of these beers and will I survive drinking it? Also, how's it going to taste? This is a true story, folks. In 1957, the U.S. government was so worried about this that they paid for a study called, quote, the effect of nuclear explosions on commercially packaged beverages.

You know, the more you know. Written by three executives from the Can Manufacturers Institute. That's so shady.

And the Glass Container Manufacturers Institute for the Federal Civil Defense Administration. The study says that after placing cans and bottles of soda and beer next to an actual atomic explosion, after measuring subsequent radiation... and actual taste tests. Which one is the most radiated? You know, it's the Pepsi challenge.

You can grab a can, pop the top, and drink away. It turns out it's mainly okay.

Yeah, that's good news. We always like to end on good news. So this study, we said it comes out in 1957. It's based on research from 1956. They exploded two nuclear bombs. One had the equivalent of 20 kilobytes, kilotons of TNT and the other had 30 kilotons. This was at, of course, a test site in Nevada. They put these cans and bottles of beer and soda and carbonated water at various measured distances away from ground zero.

They would bury them, they would place them on top of wooden boxes, or they would just chuck them over to the ground. The closest can was about a thousand feet away from the blast site.

Well, Ben, I think any of us who read like the, the road or any of these post-apocalyptic books where people are, you know, stockpiling canned goods and bottled, you know, goods.

Okay.

Maybe they're safe. Maybe they won't kill you, but are they going to taste like radiation-y?

That's the big question.

Yeah.

And luckily, our pals at NPR came through with that question. They said, radiation aside, will this stuff actually taste good? And what they found is, first off, the blast actually didn't destroy all the cans and bottles. A bunch of them would be, you know, cracked open or they would be crushed by falling debris. They might be shattered completely.

But even the ones closest to detonation, which were radioactive, were judged safe for emergency use. And they immediately, as you said, they went into a round of taste test. You got to wonder, like, who gets that job? Is that a volunteer or are you in trouble?

Maybe someone's just really into it. You know what it reminds me of, Ben?

There's a think it's a local brand um monday night brewery oh they have emergency beer emergency drinking beer that's what it's called i love the name i love the name yeah and so how i think in case of emergency right.

And however these uh these folks these brave uh scientists got hired to taste uh these irradiated beverages they said look it's not that bad but there is a slight flavor change, and one of our favorite lines from the study says the beers that were closest to the explosion were, quote, definitely off.

The most blasted. Yeah, I think that's how they put it. But still, apparently, not that bad.

Yeah, so the question is... Still so good you could drink with your mouth.

Yes, there it is.

If you find yourself near an atomic blast and you run short of potable water, yes, You can chug a Coke, you can sip a beer, just don't expect it to taste awesome.

Well, and let's remember that the earliest, you know, beers and fermented drinks were in large part because None of the water was potable. So they had to ferment it so they could actually get liquid sustenance.

Yeah, that's a great point, actually. And maybe it's a story for another day because we have so much more stuff we want to get to. But I say we call it here on Nuclear Beer, you guys.

Oh, I think so. Before we end, though, I think Max has something to say.

What's on your mind?

Yeah. I just want to shout out Monday Night Brewery. Their main location is in West Midtown of Atlanta. I want to shout them out, though, because as a bartender and bar manager, the people at Monday Night are super cool.

There's some real cool breweries here in Atlanta and in the region. In Athens, we've got Creature Comforts. Here in Atlanta, we've got Orpheus. And there's a lot of cool... You know, like what do you call those places?

Microbreweries? Where you can go and have a meal.

Oh, yeah.

Gastropubs. Yeah. Or no, just like the actual, there is a Monday night garage, I think is what it's called.

Taproom.

There it is.

And folks, there we are. There you are. Thank you so much for joining us on this continuing mission to explore all things ridiculous about history. Big shout out to Max Monday Night Williams. Big, big shout out to A.J. Bahamas Jacobs, the puzzler, who is going by Bermuda these days, at least through October.

Indeed.

Huge thanks to Christopher Asiotis and Yves Jeffcoats here in spirit.

Jonathan Strickland, the quizster. A.J. Bahamas Jacobs, the puzzler.

And big thanks to you, fellow ridiculous historians.

We'll see you next time, folks.

For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Ridiculous Stuff We Didn't Get To in 2026, Part Two: Apple Trees, Ice Cream Wars and Weird Nuclear Gadgets

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