Shout out to Bruce, from Australia for contacting Renee! Feel free to contact us any time.

A perfect moulded jelly used to be a way to show you had money. Someone spent a full day boiling bones and clarifying stock so you could set a shivering centrepiece on the table and let the room see what you could afford. Then it came in a box for pennies, and everyone could have the shape. This week one wobbling dessert travels from aristocratic showpiece to grocery aisle novelty, and we ask what gets lost when you take the work out of something.

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Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

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Have you ever witnessed Jell-O reach that special temperature and just...melt away. Too long in the sun and a once solid, but wiggly, dessert turns liquid once again.

That special temperature is a just a bit below average body temperature. Right around Ninety-Five degrees F. So, that's our song this week.

Sorry we're running a bit behind. Schedules and production issues collaborated to keep us a bit late.

Enjoy the song and the episode when it comes out. Lyrics below.

[Verse 1]
I hold my shape in the chill
set in the dark, sitting still
firm on the shelf, sealed and sound
cold is the thing keeps me round

[Pre-Chorus]
then the room warms up real slow
and the cold finally lets me go

[Chorus]
Ninety-five (ninety-five)
just ninety-five
That’s when I come alive
keep me cold and I keep my shape
When it’s warm, I just escape

[Verse 2]
they brought me out into the sun
picnic day, the warm had won
left too long in open air
ain’t nothing holding there

[Bridge]
I keep my whole life on ice
steady, careful, cold, precise
then they left the ice box wide
and now ain’t no more me inside

[Final Chorus]
Ninety-five (ninety-five)
just ninety-five
That’s when I come alive
keep me cold and I keep my shape
When it’s warm, I just escape

[Outro - vocal fading]
ninety-five
warm it up, I'm gone
Gone
Just melt away

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Somewhere in your house, a machine takes a full day of work off your hands every week, and you've never once thought about how that happened.
For most of history, laundry was a whole day, every week. Then we handed the day to a machine. Over a couple hundred years, the washing machine evolved and eventually gave people back a day every week.

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Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Is the washing machine the most important domestic appliance? More important than the refrigerator? Or Renee's favourite call out, the sewing machine? There's a good case to be made for the washing machine. That's what Renee and Marc discuss tomorrow.

But you know with all that time saved from the washing machine, we also got...the missing sock. The one that got away. The sock that went missing. So, today's song is all about the one that slipped out the lint trap to freedom.

Song today. Episode tomorrow.

Lyrics below:

[Verse 1]
Warm water. One last turn.
A seam in the back, a way to run.
Slipped out clean and caught the breeze.
Out past the trap to the open air.
Left my whole life folded there.
[Pre-Chorus]
They'll count us tonight.
And come up short.
I'm nobody's pair no more.
[Chorus]
One went missing (one went missing)
Just one. (Just one)
Out past the lint trap, into the sun.
Keep my other half folded in the drawer.
I'm gone.
I'm nobody's pair no more.
(one went missing)
[Verse 2]
Out the back, the world ran wide.
Whole world humming on the other side.
No more sorted, bleached, or paired.
No more matched, no more compared.
Just me. Just road. Just gone.
[Pre-Chorus]
Count again.
Still comin' up short.
[Chorus]
One went missing (one went missing)
Just one. (Just one)
Out past the lint trap, chasing the sun.
My other half folded in the drawer.
I'm gone. I'm nobody's pair no more.
(one went missing)
[Bridge]
Still miss my partner, my fuzzy friend.
Toe to heel, the way we grew.
But sometimes a sock has to go it alone.
[Final Chorus]
One went missing (one went missing)
Just one.
Out past the lint trap, into the sun.
You'll keep my place a while, then close the drawer.
I'm gone. And I don't ache for home no more.
(one went missing)
[Outro - vocal fading]
One went missing...
go it alone...
Just one.

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

For thousands of years, the colour on your nails marked your rank. Some societies enforced it, and the wrong shade on the wrong person could be a crime. That held for millennia. Then, in about a decade in the twentieth century, it all changed.

Modern nail polish is an industrial product, and it came out of the car business. In the 1920s, carmakers needed a paint that dried in minutes, and the answer was a lacquer made from nitrocellulose, the guncotton left over from First World War explosives. The same chemistry runs through early film, the first plastics, the paint on a model kit, and the resin in a 3D printer. Marc and Renee trace it from a mark of royalty to a shelf at the local salon.

Shout out to Lilly's in Maidstone - https://www.instagram.com/lillysnailsmaidstone or https://lillysnailsmaidstone.mytreatwell.co.uk/

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

This week we cover a little bit of chemistry. Paint chemistry.

Stay with us on this one. Nail adornment is a practice that stretches back thousands of years, but there was one technical innovation that came out of World War I that changed the status, colours, and cost of nail beautification. Explosives. Nitrocellulose.

Tune in tomorrow when we discuss the history and chemistry of nail polish.

Lyrics below:

[Verse 1]
Slow it down
Colour runs
Leave it now
Leave it once
A line bends out
Into light
The wet says wait

[Pre-Chorus]
I want to move
I want to know
The wet says wait
So I let go

[Chorus]
Level out
Just level out
Every mark I make
Goes soft somehow
Level out
Just level out
Leave it still
And watch it glow

[Verse 2]
Quiet room
Nothing said
Colour settles
On its own
Someone knew
Long before
The wet says wait
And so I wait

[Bridge]
I rush
I pull
I break
I know
Hold me here
Hold me slow
Maybe I
Could learn to glow

[Final Chorus]
Level out
Just level out
Every mark I make
Goes soft somehow
Level out
Just level out
Leave me still
And watch me glow

[Outro]
The wet says wait
The wet says wait
Level out...

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.

The refrigerator hums in your kitchen and you don't think about it. That hum represents 250 years of people getting laughed at, going broke, and occasionally poisoning the planet.

Frederic Tudor figured out how to ship New England ice to Cuba in 1806, got mocked by Boston newspapers, went to debtor's prison, and eventually got extremely rich. John Gorrie built a refrigeration machine to cool yellow fever patients in 1840s Florida and died bankrupt. Jacob Perkins patented the first vapour-compression machine in 1834 and nobody cared. And Thomas Midgley Jr., who invented the safe refrigerant Freon that finally put a fridge in every kitchen, also invented leaded gasoline (poisoning the entire planet), and was eventually strangled to death by an elaborate pulley system he'd built to help himself out of bed. He is, by most measures, the single human being who has done the most environmental damage in history.

The thing they built sits in your kitchen holding a thermodynamic wall between food and not-food. You don't think about it because it works.

This is the story of how cold became cheap.

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Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now.

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Running a day behind on release schedule, but here's the song for this week's podcast episode. Episode out tomorrow.

Since we talked about an essential household piece of tech last week, we figured it'd be cool if we talked about another piece of household tech...the refrigerator.

For me, I remember the Harvest Yellow refrigerator in my mom's kitchen, the white boxy fridge on my grandma's back porch, and the avocado green tank in a neighbour's garage.

This week's song is all about the Cold One on the Porch. A jaunty poppy yacht rock piece.

[Verse 1]
Lights out in the kitchen
Screen door swingin' open
Out on the back porch
Where the night begins
There's a chair that knows me
A song on the radio
And the cold one waitin'
Right there for me

[Pre-Chorus]
Reach for the handle
Light spills out yellow
Take that bottle out
And settle in slow

[Chorus]
Cold one on the porch (cold one on the porch)
Always cold, always there
Cold one on the porch (cold one on the porch)
Heaven on a wooden chair
Cold one on the porch
Cold one on the porch
Bless the cold one on the porch

[Verse 2]
Bottle's gone cool
Sweat on the bottom
Boots up on the railin'
Fireflies coming out
Same way my dad sat
Same hour, same view
Same hand on the bottle
Same cold one in mine

[Pre-Chorus]
Reach for the handle
Cold air comes rollin'
Take what you came for
That hum keeps going

[Chorus]
Cold one on the porch (cold one on the porch)
Always cold, always there
Cold one on the porch (cold one on the porch)
Heaven on a wooden chair
Cold one on the porch
Cold one on the porch
Bless the cold one on the porch

[Bridge]
Held the wedding leftovers
Held the funeral pies
Held the milk for the cereal
When it's too hot to rise
Held the pop for the cousins
Held the ice for every ache
Holds the cold one in my hand right now
Same as ever, never moved

[Final Chorus]
Cold one on the porch (cold one on the porch)
Always cold, always there
Cold one on the porch (cold one on the porch)
Heaven on a wooden chair
Cold one on the porch
Cold one on the porch
Bless the cold one on the porch

[Outro - vocal fading]
Bless the cold one on the porch
Bless the cold one on the porch

We'd love to hear from you. Click here to give us ideas on new episodes.

Join Renee and Marc as they discuss the history of technology, and what it teaches us about now.

email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com

Come visit us at https://www.nostalgicnerdspodcast.com/episodes or wherever you get your podcasts.