It's Thanksgiving week! That means food, family, and...FOOTBALL!! If you're a fan of the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions, you'll always get to watch your team on Thanksgiving, because they always play on Thanksgiving Day. How and why did that come to be a tradition? Tune in this week to find out.

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The modernist poet TS Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. But before he got famous for The Waste Land and The Hollow Men, he wrote a bunch of silly poems for his godchildren and compiled them in a book called Old Possum's Guide to Practical Cats. An aspiring composer named Andrew Lloyd Webber got a hold of them and decided to turn TS Eliot's musings about Growltiger, Skimbleshanks, and Mr. Mistoffelees into one of the biggest megamusicals ever made. And we're talking all about it on this week's show.  

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This week, we're taking on the human body with a show about what blood is, what it's made of, and why it's so important. We also have a special cohost who calls himself Hemo the Magnificent. Hemo premiered in a 1957 educational film produced by  Frank Capra (It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) but never found work again. We're pleased to welcome him back to the world of showbiz and we assure you that he's ready for his closeup.

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Ernest Hemingway was a soldier, romantic, adventurer, and...oh yeah, something of a writer. His prose was spare and direct and spoke volumes without saying much at all. The Old Man and the Sea is perhaps the best example of that. In this novella, Hemingway talks about courage, perseverance, and struggle through the story of a fisherman's struggle with the catch of a lifetime. This week, we're talking all about it.

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Countries inside countries, cities inside cities, dogs and cats working together...what is this madness? This week, we're tackling a world shaped in odd ways by war, medieval treaties, and drunk cartographers. 

Special thanks to Aceinet for the musical contribution.

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President Abraham Lincoln commissioned the United States Secret Service to safeguard the country's financial infrastructure from the scourge of counterfeit currency. They've been protecting presidents since Theodore Roosevelt and, since Truman's time, assigning them weird nicknames like Rawhide and Searchlight. Their code name for Jimmy Carter's budget director was Dumbo. They also have aliases for buildings, aircraft, cars, actors, and even a hotel. On this week's show, we're getting to the bottom of that.

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In the concluding episode of our mini-series on WW1, we're talking about one of those rare times in history when goodwill and humanity triumphed in a place where you'd least expect to find it. In this case, the brutal trenches of the western front. On that first Christmas, men on both sides spontaneously gave up the fighting for one day.

Thanks to Gregor Quendel for the string arrangement of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and Casonika for the piano carols.

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The writer Jean Dutourd called it "the greatest event of the twentieth century." Was he talking about the moon landing? The moonwalk? Nope. In 1914, the French army urgently needed to get troops to the Marne river valley, just 30 miles away from Paris, to stop the rapidly advancing Germans from besieging the city. In desperation, they turned to the city's taxis. What followed is now known as the Miracle of the Marne. And this week, we're talking about it.

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It was called the war to end all wars, which is perhaps the dumbest thing said by anyone about anything. But then, pretty much everything about the first World War is kind of dumb. The dumb network of alliances that made it inevitable. The dumb royal who took a vacation in the one city on Earth that hated his guts. His dumb driver who took a wrong turn. The dumb anarchist who shot the dumb royal. Really, the only smart thing about World War I is this podcast that talks all about it. This is the first of a three-parter about the war that didn't end all wars, brought to you by the podcast to end all podcasts.

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Da-da-da-dum...it's probably the most famous musical opening in history. But...why? How did Beethoven's Fifth Symphony become so much more well known than the Fourth or the Sixth? On this week's show, learn about the piece of music that helped end World War 2, was covered by Chuck Berry, and is currently floating through interstellar space.

Thanks to Gregor Quendel for the piano arrangement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in C Minor featured in this episode. 

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