What I learned this week: XXL Antlers and Liver King
The raw liver guy and the reverse aging guy have this crazy thing in common!
Welcome back to the third edition of my new little series where I share some random things I learned over the past week (or past couple weeks). It’s a real miscellany but that’s what keeps things lively! Anyway, here’s what I learned this past week.
Exonyms and endonyms
I first realized countries have different names for each other in elementary school — I went to a French immersion school — and learned that the French name for Germany is Allemagne. Of course the German name for Germany is Deutschland. I fell down some Wikipedia hole the other day and learned the terms for these are exonyms (non-native name for a place) and endonyms (native name for a place). This Wikipedia page has a robust list with all kinds of endonyms I didn't know about. Did you know that in Armenia, the country is called Hayastán? Or that the Greenlandic name for Greenland is Kalaallit Nunaat? I truly had no idea that the Greek name for Greece is Ellada.
I saw a stat recently about Wikipedia losing popularity to ChatGPT which sucks. Wikipedia forever!
Farmed deer antlers
I mentioned previously that I’ve been reading a book on deer — The Age of Deer by Erika Howsare — and some of the most fascinating parts to me are the chapters about hunting because it’s such a foreign world to me. I didn’t know anyone who hunted growing up, or even owned a gun. Only when I moved to Pennsylvania did I learn that some public schools close for the first day of hunting season. Howsare explains that because so much of deer hunting is based on a lust for antlers as trophies, there is a whole industry of deer farmed specifically for hunting, and raised to grow the biggest rack of antlers possible
.These deer live on huge, enclosed pieces of land with high fences, along with some imported species for hunting like ostrich or antelope. But because this is a rigged practice, it’s not really used by true hunters but instead tourists looking for a hunting-like experience. The deer are fed a diet to bolster their antler growth, allowing them to reach heights unattainable in the wild. Howsare describes the freakish size of the antlers as looking like "diseased trees" and "gymnastics equipment" and "sea creatures growing at the bottom of the ocean on a mound of nuclear waste." Still, when I eventually looked up the photos myself, I was shocked by how grotesque they look.
There are two Bri(y)an Johnsons
I will watch a documentary on almost anything, including and especially wellness industry grifters. Last week, I was compelled to press play on Untold: The Liver King on Netflix. Good for you if you’ve never heard of the liver king but unfortunately I had, though only in passing. The liver king is a man ripped like a cartoon body builder. He is known for eating raw meat and eggs, especially liver and bull testicles, claiming the diet cured all his family’s mysterious ailments. He’s a classic grifter type whose diet is obviously based on no science and is revealed to have been on steroids.
The documentary itself is pretty bad; at no point to they bring in a scientist, nutritionist, or doctor to debunk anything he was saying. But I was shocked in the first few minutes of the doc to learn his real name is Brian Johnson because I had previously watched a documentary about Bryan Johnson, the tech guy obsessed with reversing his age through experimental medicine. That’s two freaky Bri(y)an Johnsons! It's a common name, but it's still weird that it happened twice.
The anti-aging Bryan is obsessed with having smooth dolphin skin, eating a vegan diet, working out, not wearing a shirt, taking dozens of supplements, and passing all of these habits along to his son, Talmage. The swole-from-steroids Brian is obsessed with his "nine ancestral tenants," eating raw meat, working out, not wearing a shirt, selling liver supplements, and passing all of these habits along to his sons, Rad Ical and Stryker. Maybe they should meet in an empty pasture at dawn and battle until only one remains.