This is an IHeart podcast.

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

Stop me if this sounds familiar. You are sitting at school, paying attention to, or struggling to pay attention to, your teacher, not really taking notes, your hands wander

across your desk, feeling its edges, and then, without thinking, sliding

underneath the drawers. Almost immediately, you find a lump down there, hard as a rock stuck

firmly to the lacquered wood, like a barnacle on the hull of a ship. It's a piece of chewing gum

that some other student planted there after it lost its flavor.

Maybe as recently as earlier this week, or as long ago as the start of the semester,

you aren't really sure, but whatever the case, you are disgusted.

Chewing gum is just one of those things.

It's commonplace, but if you see it outside of its

wrapper, it immediately goes from being a candy to a nuisance. It sticks to the bottom of your

shoes, gets caught in the grooves of your car's tire. The fact that it inspired a whole term

of phrase, gumming up the works, says everything we need to know about chewing gum's reputation.

But if chewing gum is an annoyance to us, it has been a public menace to others.

In 1983 in Singapore, the Minister of Foreign Affairs raised this problem before their local

government. It seemed that leftover gum was everywhere they looked in the country, on mailboxes,

street signs, public restrooms, to the point where it started to take a toll on the very

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