Hi All,

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Enjoy the show!

In This Week’s Show, episode 55, we get hysterically involved in French DDR! Or something like that.

I'm your host this week, Aaron, and w

This week I learned that when smart kids share random facts adults tell them how smart they are. But when adults share random facts people tell them they are weird and annoying…

Jenn’s Actual Lesson

Did you know that in his guise as Nataraja, Shiva is both creating and destroying the world, all at once, crushing a demon underneath his feet as he does so...

But before we get to all that, let’s have a beer!

Today I have yet another installment of Weird...History...ree...ree...ree.

For a change, we are not in Russia, Germany, or the US and there is nary a Nazi to be found.

Now, if you are anything like me, you may have spent some time considering some of the more...unusual ways to die. And sometimes, by unusual, I mean both humiliating, weird, and awful. So today I’d like to discuss one of these ways in a story I have titled:

Dirty Dancing 2: The First French New Wave

* https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-dancing-plague-of-1518

* https://www.britannica.com/event/dancing-plague-of-1518

* http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/258521

* https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mary-magdalene-feminism-metoo-jesus-disciples-apostle-christianity-judaism-pope-francis-vatican-a8281731.html

* http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161028-the-town-the-nearly-danced-itself-to-death

* https://variety.com/1968/film/reviews/they-shoot-horses-don-t-they-1200421765/

* https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-431/ergot

We’re going to be traveling a good way back in time, 501 years back to be exact. That’s right, it’s 1518 and we are in the village of Strasbourg (it wasn’t technically in France at that time because it was then part of the Holy Roman Empire bc Catholicism and that surely didn’t help this particular situation, but it’s in modern-day France so my title stands).

It was mid-July and a week before the feast day of Mary Magdalene. Magdalene, you may recall, was a follower of Jesus and supposedly one of the first individuals to discover Jesus had checked out of his tomb a little early. Or a few days late, depending on your view. She’s also the apparently upstanding lady about whom Pope Gregory wildly misconstrued the ‘infallible scripture’ in a 591 sermon declaring her a prostitute.

Now I mention this because women are the literal WORST and this story, as many do, starts with a woman intent on humanity’s downfall. Or at least some peasants in the pre-France midlands.

So it was this week before Mary ‘Jerusalem’s Bicycle” Magdalene’s festival that a woman known only as Frau Troffea stepped out of her house (first mistake, hussy). Unlike most normal day trips to the butcher, baker or candlestick-maker,