Pardon Me While I Have a Strange Interlude

1. Doctor finds anecdotal evidence that people are passing kidney stones after riding on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disney World

2. Doctor makes 3-D model of kidney, complete with stones and urine (his own), takes it on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad 60 times

3. “The stones passed 63.89 percent of the time while the kidneys were in the back of the car. When they were in the front, the passage rate was only 16.67 percent. That’s based on only 60 rides on a single coaster, and Wartinger guards his excitement in the journal article: ‘Preliminary study findings support the anecdotal evidence that a ride on a moderate-intensity roller coaster could benefit some patients with small kidney stones.’”

4. “Some rides are going to be more advantageous for some patients than other rides. So I wouldn’t say that the only ride that helps you pass stones is Big Thunder Mountain. That’s grossly inaccurate.”

5. “His advice for now: If you know you have a stone that’s smaller than five millimeters, riding a series of roller coasters could help you pass that stone before it gets to an obstructive size and either causes debilitating colic or requires a $10,000 procedure to try and break it up. And even once a stone is broken up using shock waves, tiny fragments and “dust” remain that need to be passed. The coaster could help with that, too.”

“In all, we used 174 kidney stones of varying shapes, sizes and weights to see if each model worked on the same ride and on two other roller coasters,” Wartinger said. “Big Thunder Mountain was the only one that worked. We tried Space Mountain and Aerosmith’s Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster and both failed.”Wartinger went on to explain that these other rides are too fast and too violent with a G-force that pins the stone into the kidney and doesn’t allow it to pass.“The ideal coaster is rough and quick with some twists and turns, but no upside down or inverted movements,” he said.

1. Hypothesis

2. Experiment

3. Results

4. Discussion 

5. Conclusions

If our good friend Jonathan Harker had sent us some photos along with his lovely email, here's what he might have included. All photos are as close to contemporary as I could find.

Left Munich at 8:35 P. M.:

arriving at Vienna early next morning:

Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets:

We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh:

All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals:

sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods:

The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course there were petticoats under them:

(on the left: the Romanian royal family in peasant cosplay in the early 1900s; on the right, a photoshoot of Romanian national dress in 1868)

It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a very interesting old place:

Bonus: a postcard Jonathan might have picked up for Mina.

i’ve seen a couple people ask this question on my posts about it, so i thought i’d go ahead and clear it up here!

ok so, the classic horror novel “dracula” is an epistolary novel - that means it’s told via letters, diary entries, ship logs, and news articles. (technically the term “epistolary novel” refers to works told solely through letters or emails, but many have expanded it to mean any work that is told via in-universe documents, hence why diaries and logs often get included as well. “frankenstein” is another classic example; the whole framing device is robert walton is recounting the story he heard from victor to his sister via letter. a modern example would be “several people are typing,” which is told via slack messages, or “the perks of being a wallflower,” which is told via letters from charlie to his anonymous pen pal, which is functionally more like you’re reading his diary.)

because of the nature of the narrative, we actually know the exact day nearly everything in dracula happens - the letters, news articles, diary entries, etc. are all dated.

“dracula daily” is a substack project where the novel is broken up into parts, with people who are subscribed to the project getting emails every day something in dracula happens - for example, the novel opens with jonathan harker’s journal entry on may 3, so on may 3, subscribers are emailed that entry. the action of dracula takes place from may 3 - november 6, plus an epilogue set some years later. the project started in 2021 (i think), but fucking BLEW UP in 2022, and they’re doing it again this year! lots of us are very excited - especially people like me who fell behind last time.

why not just read the book?

valid! due to some parts of dracula being told out of chronological order, dracula daily does reorder some things. for example, the first section of dracula is told entirely from jonathan harker’s pov, then the second section switches the pov to mina murray. their sections have some overlap in the timeline, so dracula daily jumps back and forth between their perspectives.

if you want to read the book as bram stoker intended, dracula daily may not be for you. but for a lot of people (myself included!), it breaks up a very long text into easily digestible chunks (….mostly. there is one entry that is 10k words), and the fact that it’s a big project means there are a lot of people reading along with you.

i think there’s also something valuable about experience the slow revelation of wtf is going on along with the characters. the book which you might otherwise get through in a few days is stretched out into months of suspense and agony as you wait for the other shoe to drop, and it’s great.

plus, the whiplash between “jonathan harker’s neverending horror” vs “lucy is basically on the bachelorette” that you get in dracula daily is very very funny.

how do i sign up?

right here! and if you sign up and fall behind in the emails, no worries - the dracula daily website posts past entries so you can catch up.

what if i prefer audiobooks?

have i got great news for you!

like i mentioned before, i couldn’t keep up with the emails last year. part of it is that it is much easier for me to focus on an audiobook or keep up with a podcast than it is for me to sit down and read, especially with longer entries.

this year, there is going to be a podcast titled “re: dracula” that was inspired by dracula daily. every episode will be a dracula daily entry, with a full voice cast! (seriously, if you listen to british podcasts, you will recognize some of these names. the magnus archives and wooden overcoats girlies are WINNING.) you can find that here.

there is also a podcast called “cryptic canticles” that has an already-completed audiodrama of dracula that i’m told is also extremely good, and was also broken up by date. you can find that here.

why do i keep hearing about paprika/the boyfriend squad/lizard fashion/cowboys?

you’ll see.

oh god am i gonna hear about this nerd shit for the rest of the year

A warm welcome

Again, if Headless doesn’t become a success for us, I don’t know how we keep making stuff like this. We have to find a way for it to become sustainable for us. And we need to reach more people for it to be sustainable.

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

I decided to do some research into what a portable traveller's typewriter like the one Quincey got for Mina might look like, and here is a photograph of a Blickensderfer No. 6 from 1896, which was constructed from lightweight aluminum; this would have been sold for $70 US back in the day, and according to this inflation calculator, that would be the equivalent of $2473.40 US in 2022 today; even the more affordable No. 5 that was released in 1893 - one of the most popular theoretical years for the novel's setting - as the first commercial model would have been $35 US back then, and $1154.25 US in today's money after inflation.

is it the memes? the art, the serious and gorgeous and silly and charming art? the new designs and reimaginings of characters in ways that challenge both historical and modern adaptations? the thoughtful analysis of the story, the historical notes being shared? the critical lens being cast over it alongside context for why and how stoker made his choices? the redemption of lucy and jonathan in pop culture? the complete embracing of the polycula? the entirety of the sexyman (gender neutral) bracket? the fact that the entire book is in the public domain but people still tag spoilers and refuse to read ahead? the reminder that people can get together and enjoy a serialized text, making jokes and discussing themes and coming up with theories that enhance and expand upon the text, even when that text is a famous 125-year-old novel that has never been adapted properly?

that, in the era of streaming and bingeing and assault on all our senses by advertising and stories carefully constructed to be sold to everyone, we all collectively said "fuck that let's get dracula delivered to our emails and read it together"?

Japanese-American taiko drumming brings a lot of the rhythms of jazz into the traditional Japanese art, so Benny Goodman + taiko is actually not that big of a stretch.

See Also: Irish Proverb: