Tonight, on “It’s the Mind”, we examine the phenomenon of déja vu, that strange sensation when it feels like Nathan and Ben have already talked about the possibility of last minute edits, Scottish “racism”, the hilarity of explosions, and the world record for balancing eggs before.

Sources and References

The Official William McGonagall website is an excellent resource for anyone interested in details and perspective on “the worst poet in the English language”. Specifically, his letter in response to the Sunlight Soap company can be found here, as well as the poem he wrote for the two guinea reward for which he was thanking them.

This interview by Andrew Dickson about McKellan in Richard II links to a gallery of images from the 1968 Edinburgh production. They don’t look explicitly like Eric Idle’s dramatist reading “Can I Have £50 To Mend The Shed?”, but combined with the write-ups of his production of Edward II, which had an explicitly gay text, may have provided a gestalt mise-en-scène for the design of the character and costume.

The Radiolab podcast segment about Kristen Schaal and Kurt Brauholer driving a joke into the ground can be found in the episode “Loops“. By contrast, the collected series of violent interactions between Peter Griffin and “Ernie the Giant Chicken” has been catalogued on the Family Guy wiki at Fandom.

The PubMed article on serial sectioning that was consulted for the quiz can be found here. The fourth paragraph in the Wikipedia entry on “jamais vu” contains links to both “deja vu” — the Alec Baldwin of the French collection of psychological phenomena — and “presque vu”. In terms of the records for egg balancing and egg-stacking, Brian Spotts cleverly secured himself the web-address of www.eggbalancer.com to preserve his record of balancing 900 eggs in 26 hours, and Mohammed Muqbel is officially recorded by Guinness for stacking three eggs end-to-end.

The CNN article that Ben consulted about skyjacking is here, interviewing Brendan Koerner about his book The Skies Belong To Us.