10ish Instances of People Doing Things Out Of Spite

24:49Even worse, even more reckless, if you ask me, they kept electricity going to this house. So there's an electrical pole in the middle of the highway to totally unmarked. It doesn't look real. No, it doesn't. It does not at all, does it? And if you want to see what we're talking about, the Atlantic has a good photo spread called the house in the middle of the street from 2012. Yeah. I mean, this is the most extreme case of something like this that I've heard. You know, it didn't take long for them to give in, obviously, because it was, well, dangerous and awful. And so they got, they did eventually give in and got a larger offer than they originally asked for.

25:28But I don't get the feeling that they thought they won. No, they definitely didn't. So I've looked into this a little further. It's a five-story house that they had just built for$95 ,000 when the provincial government said, you need to move because we're building a highway through here. And they weren't the only ones who had kind of tried to stick it out. So they were also aware that they could not leave their house. They had to stay in their house 24 hours a day because if they left, the government would come and bulldoze their house while they were gone and be like, T.S., what are you going to do?

26:01And they had no choice. But just holding out was kind of a protest and to draw attention to this generally unfair practice. Because, I mean, any government can exercise eminent domain, but typically you want to give at least market value. Yeah. I mean, it's really egregious when you look at this picture. It's nuts because they were on like their porch, like a second floor balcony, and they're looking down and you're looking down, not at a front yard, you're looking down at the road. Like it went right around this house. Yeah. Through it practically. Yeah. So that was a spiteful road. That was a spiteful road.

26:39And now we're going to talk about a spiteful statue. That's right. Because in Germany, between the towns of Bonn and Buell, there's the Old Rhine River and the Rhine River Bridge that connects the two. And so the Little Bridge Man or the Brüchenmanken, Brüchenmanken, it's kind of a mouthful, is the Little Bridge Man. And that is a sculpture of a guy sort of bent over sticking his butt out. And that became the subject of a lot of contention, eventually backfiring. Is that right? Yeah. So the story went that in the late 19th century, I think December 17th, 1898, this bridge between Bonn and Buell, which was supposed to be a joint construction project between the two, ended up being paid for entirely by Bonn because Buell was like, we'll use the bridge, but we're not going to pay for it.

27:36You go ahead and pay for it. Yeah. And so under wraps until this unveiling of the bridge was that little statue of a little man carved into the bridge with his butt sticking out, basically mooning Buell. Yeah, mooning Buell. Can you imagine just the hilarity of seeing that when it was unveiled? But like I said, it backfired because that statue became a bit of a local icon. So, you know, it was on banknotes. It was on people took pictures of it. It was on local postcards and it was a little tourist attraction. But what they did was they put attacks on the bridge, but only attacks going one way and not back into your own place.

28:22Right. So what happened was from the Buell side, they could see the statue because it was pointing, you know, their butt was pointing at them. So they got all the benefits of seeing this thing without having to pay to cross the bridge to see it. If you're on the other side and you wanted to go, like, actually see this statue, you had to pay to get across. Yeah, and you can believe that any time you had out-of-town guests visit, you had to take them to go see the little bridge man. Go see the butt man. So, yeah, they ended up, what was supposed to be a joke at the expense of Buell, ended up to be an actual expense for the city of Bonn because they had to pay this fee to get onto the bridge.

29:00But supposedly they're friendly rivals still, or they were. Now I think they're one town, kind of like Budapest. There's Buda and Pest, and it's separated by the river, but it's still one city now. Same thing. And that's what Bonneville. Interesting. That's how I understand it. So you can still see the little bridge man, but he's not the original. The original was almost destroyed in the Second World War. The bridge was, at least, but they were able to get their hands on the statue and get them out of the Rhine. They put them back on the rebuilt bridge, but then some local youths in 1960 destroyed that.

29:37So now there's a recreation of it on the bridge. Little punk rockers. Yeah. Little punks at least. So that was a little bridge man made out of spite. All right. And I think that's break number two. And we'll be back to finish up with three more right after this.

30:00Fractals. Genghis Khan. Attila the Hun. The Lizzy Board of Murders and the Cannibal Runs. Don't explain everything to your brain. Explodes. Chuck and Josh. This stuff you should know. This stuff you should know. Word up, Jerry. New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast, and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen.

30:34Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kondabolu. It's a new year, and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health. Which means being honest about what we know, what we don't know, and how messy it can all be. I like to sleep in late and sleep early. Is there a chronotype for that or am I just depressed? We talk to experts who share real experiences and insight. You just really need to find where it is that you can have an impact in your own life and just start doing that.

31:11We break down the topics you want to know more about. Sleep, stress, mental health, and how the world around us affects our overall health. We talk about all the ways to keep your body and mind inside and out healthy. We human beings, all we want is connection. We just want to connect with each other. Health stuff is about learning, laughing, and feeling a little less alone. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you.

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32:50All right, we're going to talk about, and I've seen stories sort of like this, but this one seems to take the cake. When a Christmas display goes too far, and all of a sudden people or neighbors are like, hey, this is getting out of hand. It's too bright. Or it's, you know, people are driving in to see these things now, and I can't even get down my own street. Right. Right. And this happened in the mid 2000s in Ross Township, Pennsylvania, when a dude named Bill, an electrician, named Bill Ansell, did a pretty, you know, audacious Christmas display in his front yard there in Ross Township such that people were driving in and neighbors started to get annoyed.

33:31Yeah, and actually the way that this neighborhood was arranged is a cul-de-sac, but in the center of the cul-de-sac was Bill Ansell's house. So with his light display, it was just kind of like driving through a holiday light display because you just drive past and go all the way around and come back on the other side and leave. It's kind of perfect, actually. It was perfect. And Bill Ansell definitely thought it was perfect. But like you said, the neighbors were like, man, come on, this is 100 ,000 watts of Christmas joy. it's just it's too much so can we do something about this Bill Ansell apparently was not the type to take criticism well sounds like it I think he actually was required to take down the holiday display and by the town yes I think they cited him for an out of season decoration or something like that right so he took it down but in short order he put up a new display and specifically designed it so that the neighbors regretted ever asking him to take down the original joyous display.

34:37And he did this, Chuck, out of spite. That's right. And apparently left it up year round. Santa urinating in the front yard. A choir that was beheaded. Frosty the Snowman getting run over by a car. also up in lights F Ross Township yeah just right there in string lights a sign that said this display is dedicated to Ross Township shame on you for destroying my display that brought so much joy and happiness to so many people there was also a warning a sign that said Ross Township don't touch any of this property if you do there will be bloodshed is that true Yeah. Okay. No, it totally is. And there was another one.

35:25I read an interview with 2020 with the neighbors who were like, this guy actually wrote a sign. I didn't see what he said, but he came up with the disparaging sign for the deceased wife of Tom White, one of the neighbors. The day after she died, he put up some sign disparaging her. So this guy was definitely off the chain with this thing. And I mean, like he would stay up at night and hit metal with sledgehammers to make noise. He had floodlights pointed directly in the neighbor's houses. And I mean, living like that's bad enough. But they said something that stuck out to me that I hadn't thought of that's like, this is a living nightmare.

36:05When you have a neighbor like that and you sell your house, anytime you have a showing, they're going to turn around before they even get out of their car. That's like you're trapped. They were totally trapped there. And despite the township fining him, despite court orders, like you said, he kept it up year round and he kept it up for years. Yeah. And then he built a killdozer. Yes. I thought that there was definitely a parallel between those guys, too. Yeah. Be a good neighbor, everyone. Be a good neighbor to your neighbor. That's all you got to do. You don't have to. You can go above and beyond if you want.

36:40But just be like base level good. Sure. And if your neighbors come to you with a complaint about some special thing that's special to you, rather than going off the handle, maybe say, well, let's figure out a compromise because this is really important to me. Yeah. And let's not tank everyone's property values. We're all in this together. Sure. And if they're like, no, we insist you take it down, then you do something on spite. At least give them a fighting chance. That's right. This is super spite. We want to thank not just our friends at 2020, but our friends at Mental Floss, too, for pointing that one out to us.

37:15That's right. So I think we got a couple more, right? That's right. We'll move on to Prince Rogers Nelson, a.k.a. Prince, a.k.a. for a little while, the artist formerly known as Prince. because very famously, Prince changed his name in 1993 to an unrecognizable symbol. It was sort of the symbol for man and woman, and it had some other flourishes and had kind of been tweaked and redesigned over the years. It was on different pieces. He had a guitar shape like that previously. I think it was on his motorcycle in Purple Rain maybe. Oh, yeah. But it was a symbol that had been around his world for a while.

37:59and Prince said, yep, that's my name now. And everyone just thought he was, thought he was, yeah, don't wear it out because you can't say it. So that's impossible. But I think at the time, I remember everyone just thought it was Prince being Prince and being strange and being eccentric. But it is now pretty widely accepted that he did that to spite Warner Brothers records because he was in a record contract he didn't like for numerous reasons. Yeah, and it was a very lucrative contract. A lot of people were playing like the world's smallest violin for Prince at the time. He had re-signed it too, by the way.

38:3420 years later, re-signed with the same company. And I saw. No, no, no. He re-signed before this one. This was the second version. He re-signed a third time later. I got you. Okay. Did not realize that. But this was like a$100 million contract. It was worth$215 million today. It was a big fat contract. Yeah. The thing is, is Prince, I saw like when he died, when they went into his audio archives, they're like he could release an album like every month for the next 50 years or something like that. He had that much stuff recorded. And he wanted to release music really quickly and with high turnover.

39:09And Warner Brothers is like, no, you're going to flood the market. You're going to shoot yourself in the foot. You can only release X number of albums every, say, 12 months. So like one a year maybe or something like that. Yeah. He didn't like that. And then apparently Warner Brothers owned the rights to his songs, too, which I'm quite sure he really, really didn't like. So to get out of his contract, he thought, well, OK, the contract is between Prince and Warner Brothers. I'm going to change my name and maybe the contract won't be valid any longer. I'm not sure how much he actually believed that because Prince wasn't a dumb person at all.

39:41Yeah. But at the very least, he was trying to humiliate Warner Brothers, make life harder for them. And he did all this, as you said, out of spite. That's right. He also wrote the word slave on his cheek in a lot of performances at the time. And it didn't work. He had to see the contract through, which just another few years, I think in 2000 it expired. And then he was Prince again. And like you said, you know, bygones were bygones, I guess, because he re-signed yet again 20 years later with Warner Brothers. Yeah. One of the things that Warner Brothers, too, had to do, Chuck, was they had to send out digital files to the media.

40:18And this is the 90s because there was no way to, there was no like combination of keys on a keyboard to make this symbol. So they had to send a digital image of the symbol for the like newspapers or magazines or whatever to insert into their articles about Prince. And then finally, the media was just like, we're just going to call him the artist formerly known as Prince. And Prince was like, damn it. Right. Work around. Yeah, exactly. So RIP Prince, man. He was pretty great. Yes. My friend and your friend, Scotty, got to go to his final performance, the solo Atlanta performance at the Fox Theater, just days before he died.

41:00Yeah. And it always makes me so mad because Scotty didn't even really love Prince. Yeah. No, I'm glad he got to go. He just showed up there like, how did I get here? That's one of those. We almost went and pulled the trigger to scalp tickets. And it was just like, I don't know why we didn't, because it was special enough to be a piano solo concert by Prince. I was like, man, we got to go. And we didn't. And then he died. Yeah, we were going to do the same thing. And that's actually, well, we were going to scalp. We were going to go. And I don't remember why we didn't. But that's kind of par for the course for me, because I did that with Prince.

41:35I did that with Pink Floyd. I did that with Stevie Ray Vaughan. And I did that with The Grateful Dead. I was just like I'll see him next time I saw Prince when I lived in LA in the late 90s or I'm sorry yeah I guess it was early 2000s and that was amazing just being able to see him once with a full band it was something else Yumi saw him for some tour I think musicology tour and she was like hands down the best show I've ever seen yeah boy what a loss apparently he was quite the dancer he was I also saw Tom Petty on that last tour I saw him quite a few times but I was I was really glad to be at that last one Yeah, he was cool.

42:13He was one of those guys that you appreciate the older you get. You know what I mean? One of the best. No, he's one of my faves. Great. Let's move on to the pink house, Chuck. The last of the last. You mean John Mellencamp? No, that's a little pink house. This is just the pink house. That's right. This is another image search quality or image search worthy kind of thing to look up. If you're in a place where you can do that, just type in Plum Island Pink House, and you will see a quite large pink house sitting in the middle of nothing. Just a desolate marshland. Yeah. And it's, just looking at it, it's very eerie, especially now it's abandoned, it's kind of ramshackle and run down.

42:57But it was built on Plum Island, and it's considered one of the all-time great examples of a spite house. And a spite house is basically any house, wall, structure that's built to get under someone else's skin, right? So sometimes it's built to block their view. We talked about Henry Clay Frick building a mansion that was bigger than Andrew Carnegie's. That would be considered a spite house. And in America, they go back at least until 1806. That was the earliest one I could find. But this one on Plum Island off the coast of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which, by the way, is one of the more charming towns in the entire country.

43:36Oh, I've never been there. Oh, it's wonderful. That's where this pink house is. And there's a great backstory to it that makes it a spite house. That's right. Made out of spite. A lot of times these spite houses happen when a couple gets divorced. It should come as no surprise. Or I should say probably couples with a lot of money get divorced. because what I've learned is in order to have a spite house, you have to be rich. Well, I'm just going to build that huge house to get back at someone. It's a very privileged position to be in. For sure. So, you know, I am judging. But in 2015, there was a New York Times article that talked about this thing that was built, like you said, in the middle of nowhere.

44:17It said it was overlooking a vast landscape of pristine salt marsh. And it apparently happened in 1925 when a couple got divorced. and the wife said, all right, we can get a divorce, but you have to rebuild an exact duplicate of the house we live in if you're kicking me out of it because I love it so much. And he went, no problem. And so he built it and he said, you didn't say where. And he said it just like that, I bet. Yep, he did. So he built it on Plum Island. At the time, there was no one else living there. No fresh water, no electricity. it was just the worst place you could build a house.

44:57And he said, there you go. There's your spite house. And he walked away rubbing the dust off of his hands. What do you call that? Yeah, that. Whatever you call it. Just clapping the dust off your hands. Yeah, we need to come up with a name for that, right? Yeah. A sniglet. Yeah. So, yeah, that's how it ended. And the story went that she lived there for a while and sold it. And it actually was inhabited, weirdly enough, by a succession of people up until 2011. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're a loner and you like nature, it's not the worst place to be. I just saw a sunset picture. It looked pretty nice.

45:35In that sense, yes, it did. But it's just, I mean, like the sea off of Massachusetts can be fairly unforgiving. So, you know, this is an old house from the 1920s. It's like you're, it's going to probably be kind of drafty depending on the time of year. Yeah. And I'm sure upkeep on that thing is you're probably repainting that thing every couple of years, right? Yes. But you would have to paint it pink or else everybody in Newburyport would hate you. Yeah. You would have to. Apparently that it was lived in until 2011 and then eventually was sold to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge in 2012.

46:12And as you can't get to it now, it's off limits to the public, but they're trying to make at an official like protected house. So it will stand forever. And it was made out of spite or was it, Chuck? I don't know. Well, some people say that that was just an urban legend and it was just a family who lived out there. Right. Which is a much less interesting story. So we're just going to go with spite house for that one. Agreed. All right. Well, that's it for things done out of spite. We hope you enjoyed it. And since I said we hope you enjoyed it, It's time for listener mail. So another recent one from Automat.

46:53I love this real-time stuff. You know, I mentioned some sort of episode on currency and how it affects things. And this is from Tree. Tree, okay, awesome. Not a tree, but tree. Tree. Hey, guys, Chuck. Specifically, you mentioned in the Automat episode you were trying to formulate something around how change affects things. Or currency, rather. Look into the situation in Zimbabwe. That might help. where it was too expensive to import metal coins. They had adopted the U.S. dollar. It was too expensive to import the metal because of weight. So there was a huge chain shortage. Because store owners couldn't give shoppers change, shoppers would have to purchase additional items to try and get their total purchase as close to the whole dollar amount.

47:36And he sent a New York Times article. And that, my friend, Tree, is exactly what I was talking about as something that could be a part of that episode. So I appreciate that direction. and that is specifically Tree Marchink. Great name, Tree. Tree Marchink from South Carolina. Thanks a lot. That's a good one. And I remember we talked a little bit about Zimbabwe's hyperinflation. Oh, yeah. Where people were like showing up with actual wheelbarrows of cash because it was just going nuts. That was crazy. I remember that. Great, great example. Yeah, we've got to do that episode. Yeah, there's got to be more to it.

48:16For sure. Well, if you want to be like Tree and fill us in on something we've said we want to know about, we'd love that kind of thing. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

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