Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that breaks you out of your routine and maybe prison...

I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me is: Aaron

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that prisons in Australia are really just budget Inception.

Jailbreak Jamboree

My past few stories have been pretty heavy lately so this week I wanted to break the pattern, break out of the heavy stories into something fun and a bit more ridiculous. Break out of prison maybe, yeah! Today I’m going to tell you about some of the most daring and crazy prison escapes I could find.

In Japan, the Meiji Era, which spanned from 1868 to 1912, was considered one of the harsher periods for prisoners, so escaping prison was actually more common. In 1881, a record number of convicts, 1821, were able to make successful getaways from incarceration to escape their harsh terrible sentences.

No other man in history has shown such disdain for incarceration than Yoshie Shiratori, known as the most famous escapee in Japan of all times, who was tagged as “the man that no prison could hold.” Yoshie successfully escaped the Japanese prison system 4 times!

Yoshie’s first work was in a tofu shop, he later worked as a fisherman crew that catches crabs for Russia. After changing failed businesses several times, he became known for addictive gambling and stealing.

Yoshie was initially accused of murder and robbery and was sentenced to Aomori prison. Three years later, he picked the lock of his handcuffs with a short wire he found from a wooden bathing bucket.

Police recaptured him after three days and he was sentenced to life in prison for escaping and for supposedly stealing supplies from a hospital. He was eventually transferred to Akita prison in 1942.

At Akita prison, Yoshie managed to escape by somehow climbing the impossible smooth walls of his cell to reach the air vent. He would climb up and down every night and eventually unhinged the vent to extricate himself.

Perhaps he was exhausted from all the running and hiding, he decided to go to the home of a police officer, the only person who had shown any benevolence towards him from his previous prison in Aomori. However, this officer eventually handed Yoshie over to the authorities, and he vowed to never place his trust in another police officer ever again.

Yoshie was transferred for the second time to Abashiri Prison, which was located in a remote locale in Northern Hokkaido. Abashiri was no regular penal colony. It was reserved for the worst kinds of criminals in Japan. He was transferred here because he had already escaped two times, and the police wanted him to stay put.

The man had an endless pool of ingenuity, so this time, each morning he would spit miso soup on the doorframe of his cell. The salts and moisture eventually corroded and weakened the door frame.

When the wartime blackout of August 26, 1944, occurred Yoshie dislocated his shoulders and squeezed himself out of the small space on the metal frame where the guards would slide in his food. Once again, Yoshie’s escape was publicized, and made the headlines of several newspapers.

Yoshie was caught once again and this time sentenced to death. Additionally, he was assigned six armed guards, and he was under surveillance, 24 hours per day.

At the Sapporo prison, he was incarcerated in a specially made cell that was designed to prevent him from escaping through the air vent in the ceiling. This would be the largest defect in the setup because too much attention to the ceiling meant the floor of the cell was more or less ignored.

The prison guards at Sapporo had so much faith in the newly renovated cell that they no longer bothered to handcuff their prisoner. This would be mistake number two.

Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that glows so bright you’ll have to wear ear...shades… I guess, is what I’m going with. What can I say, I’ve been sampling the vodka.

I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me are:

I'm Shea, and …

Brewing Trouble

Or, it's Miller-rad time!

The last few weeks have been pretty heavy on Interesting If True so I thought I'd bring it back down to Earth with a story that's a tight blend of quackery, stupidity, and 100-proof oh-god-why!?

We've talked about raw milk in the past—the unpasteurized cow juice that's as dangerous to drink as it is difficult to find. Seriously, you have to buy into a time-share of a cow. Unless you live in Wyoming where we passed the Freedom to Eat Patriotism and Drink Libtears Freely for Freenees Bill that gives producers of potentially unpotable products permission to pitch their paraphernalia provided they prove they've primed patrons with presentations about the potential for poor personal prosperity. My milk hook-up, for example, has the usual "we test this weekly at CU FoCo, but it might mess you up... it might also make your lactose intolerance go away*" *-statements not verified by anyone.

I use mine to make cheese, by the way, intensionally infecting with thermophilic cultures that outcompete dysentery.

We've also talked about raw water. The belief that fluoride and other water treatments are mind-control or whatever so it's "more natural", read "more healthy", to drink water as nature intended—right out of the ditch you found it in. Proponents of raw water don't worry about the stuff floating in it, because water is magic and knows what's best for you. Besides, that rainbow shimmer is a petroleum’shine, it's nature's way of telling you that it's like drinking the rainbow—no affiliation to the much safer, rainbow editable candies.

Still, knowing what you now know about water and otherwise untreated products, where is the best place to get water to make your brew the best brew?

Rocky mountains? Nope, gonna have to think more remote comrade.

That's right, the best vodka is brewed with fresh water from the Dnieper river which some listeners may know flows through the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv continuing into the Polesie State Reserve, a Russian national forest.

There, nestled in what Google Maps shows as a low-land forest, is the town of Pripyat, and their new distillery.

Some listeners might already have their shock-and-awe faces on, but for anyone whose Russian geography isn't great, there's a reason it's cheap to grow rye and collect water here—and it isn't tax breaks. The Chernobyl Spirit Company set up in the Chernobyl exclusion zone (CEZ)—you know, that 4,000 square kilometer bit of east Europe that was abandoned after the 1986 nuclear disaster—which you shouldn't go anywhere near unless you like having 23-toed babies... per foot.

Atomik Vodka from the Chernobyl Spirit Company

The Vodka, which features a rough, radiation-burned, looking bore on the label is called Atomik. A smooth Apple flavored spirit is, from the bottle:

[Atomik is] a high quality spirit drink like those traditionally made in Ukrainian villages for many centuries (as "moonshine"). This small batch distillate is made from apples grown in regions affected by the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Fruits grown in many areas are now safe to consume, but distillation reduces the radioactivity even further to almost undetectable levels. 75% of profits from ATOMIK will go to supporting local communities and wildlife conservation in Chernobyl affected areas of Ukraine.

~Atomik Vodka, AtomikVodka.com

So all in all, it could be worse. At least they're giving a portion of sales to charity... hopefully.

The original run produced some 1,

Hi All,

Enjoy this week's special patron cut. We're releasing a longer show for the long weekend! If you like the bonus content you can get more each week, and a hell of a backlog, at https://www.patreon.com/iit

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,

Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that… isn’t completely racist…

I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me are:

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that every time you feel like you’ve got a handle on how bad, pervasive, and grotesque the sexism in our society is, there’s a woman waiting to tell you her even more horrible story…

Fair warning, this week’s patron story is about women in brewing. We talk about their history then dive into stories that have rocked the craft brewing world this month. Mild content warning for the story, I avoid quoting specific accounts of abuse, but it is the undertone of the story.

Patrons this week will also get our much funnier, archived story on Great Lakes Brewing News as an outtake making this episode’s patron content nearly a full extra hour of the show!

And with that, I’ll turn it over to Shea for today’s super funny, uplifting, feel-good story…

Racist Rhetoric

Overt racism is easy to detect and has been brought to the surface for decades. It includes racial slurs like the “n” word, hate crimes, burning crosses, painting swastikas, violence against immigrants, dressing up in blackface or brownface, blatant use of stereotypes, registering as a republican, and more. It can be a jarring experience to learn a common word or phrase you’ve been using for years is actually kind of racist or sexist or homophobic. The harder you look, the more language you’ll find with problematic roots. While English certainly has its fair share of racist words and phrases, it also has a baffling number of synonyms and alternative ways of saying something. Fortunately, that makes it pretty easy to swap out the word or phrase you’ve been saying for a more innocuous one.

"Words like 'slave' and' master' are so folded into our vocabulary and almost unconsciously speak to the history of racial slavery and racism in the US," says Elizabeth Pryor, an associate professor of history at Smith College.

But America's reckoning with systemic racism is now forcing a more critical look at the language we use. And while the offensive nature of many of these words and phrases has long been documented, some institutions are only now beginning to drop them from the lexicon.

"Language works best when it brings as many people into communication with each other," she says. "If we know, by using certain language, we're disinviting certain people from that conversation, language isn't doing its job."

Here are some familiar words and phrases you might consider dropping from your vocabulary.

Off the reservation, pretty obvious that maybe this isn’t the most PC phrase. It’s meaning is to deviate from what is expected or customary, oftentimes used to describe someone acting not normal. In the 1800s, the federal government forcibly removed Native Americans from their land and sent them to live in designated reservations. The phrase “off the reservation” was used in government correspondence to report on whether Native Americans were complying with orders to stay within their designated living areas. Over time, it came to be used to describe anyone acting outside of what is expected, particularly in political situations.

Grandfathered In or Grandfather Clause is to be exempt from a law that has recently been adopted. But originally it had a much more sinister meaning. The terms “grandfathered in” and “grandfather clause” have their origin in America’s racial history. While the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited racial discrimination in voting, African Americans were kept from exercising their constitutional right due to states’ literacy tests, poll taxes and constitution quizzes. These “tests” were designed to disenfranchise Blacks. If they did not pass or pay the tax, they could not register to vote. These laws also hindered poor American whites. As a result,

Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that really sticks it to you.

I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me are:

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledore calls Voldemort by his birth name, Tom. This foreshadows the fact that J.K. Rowling does not respect people’s chosen identities.

This Week’s Beer

Simpler Times Lager from Brother-in-law

* Style: Lager - American

* Ranked #491

* ABV: 6.2%

* Score: 68

* Ranked #50,221

* Avg: 2.91 | pDev: 24.74%

* Reviews: 243

* Aaron: 0/10

* Shea: Trader No’s

NADA: Part 1

The Point of Quackery.

This is a kick-off for what will be a multi-show run. It won't be sequential so next week we'll probably be back to our regularly scheduled silliness. This is episode 53, or, the first episode of Year Two. So, I'm going to get all serious and junk. Yep, more serious than Frank Miller.

Long-time listeners to our podcasts may recall that my lovely wife, Ashley, suffers from chronic pain. As such, we're the recipients of no small amount of unwanted medical advice from friends and strangers alike, all of whom seem to think their particular brand of magic is the one to fix her up.

Those same listeners may be aware that I am made up of, approximately, 60% pure, unadulterated, anxiety. Fortunately, there is no shortage of treatments for anxiety, especially for a cis/het, white man. Still, from time to time there are checkups with doctors and check-ins with therapists that can lean... woo.

But let's get to the point—the needly point. In the Venn diagram of our afflictions, the center is full of unscrupulous purveyors of pseudo-medical nonsense. It's part of why I started podcasting and why many of my topics are medically oriented, albeit more often than not ye-oldie medicine. But occasionally…

Chronic pain and mental health issues have a few things in common that make them fertile ground for nonsense: self-reported conditions and outcomes, lack of clear research, and societal taboo to name just a few. So, it's not uncommon for well-meaning medical professionals and amateurs alike to recommend unproven and unrealistic treatments like homeopathy, chiropractic, or in the case of this series, acupuncture.

Today I want to talk about acupuncture in general. Give an overview and introduction of sorts and from there I'll do episodes on the various associated or evolutions of acupuncture.

So, what is acupuncture?

For the short answer, I'll quote Science Based Medicine

acupuncture is a pre-scientific superstition

The end.

No?

Ok.

Acupuncture is, ever so briefly, an ancient or traditional form of "medicine" from ye-oldie China, or Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) that uses tiny, hair-thin needs to treat illnesses by blocking, redirecting, or "cleaning" chi pathways in the body.

You know, magic.

Still, among traditional Chinese medicines acupuncture does hold a special place in that it's actually ancient and not just another of Mao's placative measures—though it was used that way, to which we owe much of its modern popularity.

It was first described in the Shi-chi text from around 90 B.C.E. This is notable because in 1970 texts from 168 B.C.E. in the Ma-wang-tui graves paint a pretty solid picture of Chinese medicine in the third century B.C.E. They don't mention acupuncture at all,

Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that sometimes tells you thoughtful, relevant, insightful stories… then there’s today.

I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me are:

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that you matter… Unless you multiply yourself by the speed of light, then you energy.

I'm Steve and I don't make jokes.

Dumpy Gods

As mentioned previously to patrons, I have been planning a bathroom remodel.

Turns out there's a lot that goes into a bathroom remodel, plumbing, electrical, no small amount of design, insulation, appeasing angry poo-gods, cabinetry, paint, fixtures.

You know, construction stuff.

Oh, yeah, angry toilet gods. Turns out there are a lot of them. Without poaching delightful segments like Graveyard of the Gods from friend of the show, Atheist Nomads, or How Bullshit Is It from Scathing, I'm going to dive (phrasing) into the terrible world of supernatural, Devine, and demonic creatures who will pull you down to hell, tea-bag first.

The ancient world was, it seems, fairly obsessed with the idea that where you do your business is something else's Olympus. One man's trash I guess…

Still, like most gods these are blatantly useless, except, of course, if you're willing to have a bit of a laugh while we dredge this sewer. This isn't going to be a most thoughtful show, but I promise it'll be fun.

To begin our story, we start... at the beginning! The time, way long ago. The place, Babylon! Home of a number of OG gods, demons, and myths Babylonia was rich with otherworldly creatures to appease. Like the Sulak, or just "Sulak", I'm unclear on that being a name or a kind of creature. Anyway, Sulak!

In the Diagnostic Handbook written by chief scholar Esagil-kin-apli of Borsippa, we find the Sulak. Sulak hides in dark places wherein he is likely to find victims alone and, according to the beliefs at the time... and reality... their most vulnerable. I mean, I've heard stories of people defending the castle in one direction... and defiling in the other, but I doubt they were operating at 100% eh. Half human, half Lion he would wait in the lou until some poor Babylonian sat on the wrong throne. With no regard for bathroom standards or modesty, he would strike you down with plague or worse! So common was Sulak that most diseases were referred to in some way as the "hand" of Sulak. As for how he killed you quickly, well, he can cause strokes and seizures... if you strain too hard.

Ancient Babylonian Jews called heim the “Lurker of the Latrine” or the “Demon of the Privy.” He actually comes up in the Talmud as Shed Bet Ha-Kise. The Jewish legends expand on his terrible tale and add a few new rules. You can avoid the horrible fates he inflicted through showings of respect like going to the john on your own (which, why does that need to be an exclaimer) and by keeping quiet during poopy times. No one wants to hear that anyway. Finally, just to be safe, after doing your business you must walk at least half a mile away before having sex.

Yep.

Up next is a category of spirit common in Japanese folk lore, the Kami. Specifically, Kawaya No-Kami, or the Japanese toilet god born from the excrement of Izanami—the goddess of Earth and darkness. Talk about not burring your stuff deep enough eh.

Kawaya No-Kami wasn't all bad news though, if respected Kawaya would provide protection for people using super-gross, yee-oldie, terrible toilets... and I imagine anyone using a Porta at SXSW or whatever the kids are into these days.

People would often "dine" with the god to gain his favor. Which is, basically, just having lunch on the crapper which strikes me as being a lot more about multiplying your work-breaks rather than respecting a god. Still,

Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that sometimes teaches you things

I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me is Aaron

I'm Aaron, and this week I actually learned bees actually are terrible little monsters that all need to be replaced with robots.

It turns out that, thanks the U.S. Military nuclear testing (like in episode 49) American honey is radiologically distinct. As in, it contains cesium. Bees are horrible little jerks!

The Science Fair

As an antithesis to most of our crazy stories, this week I decided to look into real science. And because I am not an engineer and my main subject of study was english I thought I would look up stuff I could easily understand, science fair projects. I was wrong. I still don't understand most of these amazing projects. I made the mistake of looking up top science fair winners and I didn’t find fun projects measuring the amount of electricity a lemon produces. I found world changing ideas and ingenuity that far too many adults have lost sight of. Today I give you a run down of some of the top young adult science fair winners from around the globe.

One of the bigger science fairs in the world was hosted by Google. Starting in 2011 the competition was open to 13- to 18-year-old students around the globe, who formulate a hypothesis, perform an experiment, and present their results. All students must have an internet connection and a free Google Account to participate, and the projects must be in English, German, Italian, Spanish, or French. The final submission must include ten sections, which are the summary, an "About Me" page, the steps of the project, and a works cited page. Entries are judged on eight core criteria, which include the student's presentation, question, hypothesis, research, experiment, data, observations, and conclusion. Prizes are awarded to three finalists. The grand prize includes a National Geographic trip to the Galapagos Islands, and a US$50,000 scholarship; finalists will also receive a US$15,000 scholarship and assorted packages from sponsoring organizations. Holy cow, I feel like I would have worked a lot harder on my leamon project had I had these incentives. Unfortunately the last competition was held in 2018 and there has been no news about continuing the competition. I’m guessing once we are all safe from covid we will hopefully see this come back, because as you will see, there have been some incredible breakthroughs and ideas coming from these kids.

Our first Project is made even cooler by it also being the first ever winner from the Google science fair. Shree Bose won Google’s first Science Fair grand prize for her novel way to treat ovarian cancer.

“On a bright, sunny day years ago, a timid, little girl walked through the doors of her elementary school gym carrying a dead, shriveled spinach plant. Blotchy stained blue from repeated, inept injections with food coloring, and withered from weeks of forgotten waterings and neglect, the plant appeared to have all the classic signs of abuse from the shy, unsuspecting perpetrator who proudly held it.The girl stood happily in front of her crudely-made, handwritten project board – eagerly explaining her original idea to anyone who would listen. Her invention, blue spinach for kids, provided an alternative for children who would not eat their green vegetables. Her ingenious solution? Turn the food blue, and, of course, children would happily eat their healthy foods.The little girl explained this excitedly to the passerbys – intently recounting the difficulty of injecting the plant with the dye. Some laughed. Others simply stared. And with that unlikely start, a still-enduring scientific interest was sparked.”

And thus starts the great life journey of Shree Bose, this comes right from her About me page on her science fair website.

Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that’s very nearly halfway to syndication but not its own micronation… yet.

I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me is Shea

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that not all German shepherds are dogs.

It’s our 50th show so we tried to do golden anniversary stuff… but don’t worry, we’re not going to talk about the boring stuff like the Disney World opening, or NPR beginning, or the first microprocessor. Or floppy disks, Willy Wonka, or Malibu Barbie. Also the Quarter Pounder, All in the Family, and Salyut 1 launch. I thought about doing a story on the Oregon Trail but the only interesting part of that story is Johnny dying of dysentery.

Instead, I present 50 years of Micronations. Popular nations like Sealandia are 50 this year, but we already talked about them so let’s talk about a few lovely new ones I’ve just discovered…

First, a small and mostly unknown Micronation: Akhzvivlad… or whoever that’s pronounced.

Like all good micronations, there’s a ton of backstory here but for today’s purposes, we don’t have to delve into the full backstory for the Arab-Israeli war because it is sufficient to say that the area between Israel and Lebanon, in the 1970s, was not an awesome place to settle. It was, to be blunt, a blown-up, burned-out, mess of an area.

Still, it didn’t stop Iranian-born Jew Eli Avivi, whose family moved to Palestine in the 1930s… which was declared the Israeli state in 1948 after the way. In 1952, Eli settled a ruined village called Akhaziv, which I’m super sure I’m mispronouncing. Anyway, this not a great place to be, much less start building illegally constructed huts and such. Still, Eli wouldn’t be swayed. Local fisherman, who he would later live with in the area, had reportedly paid him to rebuild the area.

Over the next 10 years, they would build, rebuild, and generally be unwelcome builders in the area until Club Med showed up.

The area slowly became a tourist attraction until in 1970 the Israeli government wanted to bulldoze Eli’s house to make way for more modern construction. And so, Eli decided that the village of Achziv would become the tiny nation of Akhzivland. He immediately set up a museum for the area’s rich history (which goes back to the earliest written works humanity has) and a hostel… in the former home of the fisherman, Az-Zeeb, who initially asked to restore the area.

Avivi founded Akhzivland and, wanting it to be a peaceful democratic nation, held an election which elected Avivi to be President of course because he voted for himself and the population at the time was… himself. “This way I can stay in Israel, but in my own country,” Avivi says.

According to the constitution "The president is democratically elected by his own vote". So Avivi was immediately arrested and detained by Israel. He was released 10 days later after a judge ruled that the charge of "Creation of a Country Without Permission" did not exist.

This didn’t sit right with Avivi so he sued Israel for being a bunch of dicks about it all—and he won. The Israeli court ruled to lease Avivi an area of about 10,00m2 for 99 years. Which is great, but it didn’t make them a proper nation….

The area quickly became a tourist attraction in and of itself. The nation was described by Haaretz, a local Israeli newspaper as being a “hippy microstate.” Which was more or less correct. Avivi vowed the nation would be a peaceful one during its founding.

Now with some press and popularity, the nation began seeing tourism attracting all sorts, models, writers, politicians, cultural figures, and Paul Newman. So they were pretty much set.

At this point the draw of Akhzvivilad was untenable…. Even to Isreal whose tourism board officially recognized Akhzivivland officially the same y...

Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that is made up of words.

I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me is:

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned superhero names and porn star names are basically the same thing: a bad description of whatever skills or oddities you’re famous for… Did I mention we’re doing a review of Justice League: Snyder Cut for patrons? No. Well we are… all 9000 sections of it.

Wicked words

This week when I was delving into the internet I found myself on the topic of words again. There seems to be no dearth of information on etymology and word origins and for some reason I am absolutely fascinated with it. So today I bring interesting words, and many you know, that all have roots in a person’s name. If you remember our quiz from last year and I mentioned Gerrymandering, from Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814). The shape of one of the voting districts suggested the body of a salamander, prompting a staffer at the Boston Gazette to coin the word Gerrymander. There are loads of words out there named for people, so let’s take a look at some interesting origins.

The Irish invented boycotting because of the English. This all started in 1880 when Charles Stewart Parnell, whom I had never heard of but was a pretty popular Irish member of Parliament, decided that the English Government had failed them in their time of need and that they must seize control of their own destiny. This was not long after the terrible potato famine, BTW. Parnell was the son of a Protestant landowner who organised the rural masses into agitation against the ruling Landlord class, the Brits mostly, to seek the 3 Fs: Fixity of Tenure, Freedom to Sell and Fair Rent. Something that was incredibly lacking at the time and because of the terrible conditions and the rising rent many Irish were forced out of their homes onto the streets. Before this in 1870, landlords, many of them absentee, owned 80% of all the land of Ireland, while 50% of tenants occupied holdings of less than fifteen acres; more than three quarters of all holdings were annual tenancies.

During this the “hero” or our story, Charles Cunningham Boycott comes to town. Boycott was an English land agent working for Lord Erne, a major landowner in the Lough Mask area of County Mayo who lived off the exorbitant rents he charged tenants. Boycott, you see, was a former army officer and had served in the British Army 39th Regiment, which brought him to Ireland. After retiring from the army he threw his lot in with Lord Erne and took pleasure in the many bloody evictions that were to come.

Boycott got right to work, evicting many tenants for not paying/being able to afford rent and quickly the ire for him grew. As new Irish laws were passed in hopes of lowering rent and making it easier to exist while Irish, Boycott kept working. Soon his tale of evictions would come to a head when Boycott set about evicting 11 tenants the locals had had enough. The Mayo branch of the Irish Land League urged Boycott's employees to withdraw their labor and began a campaign of isolation against Boycott in the local community. This campaign included shops in nearby Ballinrobe refusing to serve him, and the withdrawal of services. Boycott found himself a marked man, not fearing violence but even worse the scorn, silence, and disdain of simply everyone he encountered.

Furious, he made a fatal mistake by informing the all-powerful London media of his plight. The campaign against Boycott became a huge issue in the British press after he wrote the following letter to The Times.

“Sir, The following detail may be interesting to your readers as exemplifying the power of the Land League. On the 22nd September a process-server, escorted by a police force of seventeen men, retreated to my house for protection, followed by a howling mob of people,

Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that’s made of Nazi-fighting gravitational moon-ice… ice baby… music joke!

I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me are:

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that Republicans came down harder on Joe Biden for having a minor Major problem than they did for Matt Gaetz for having a major minor problem.

So, you know how everything is actually made of ice because Newton was wrong about gravity and the size of Hitler’s dick?

Yeah, neither do these people but here we go…

Cosmic Ice Ice Baby

It seems that whenever someone decides that the Earth isn't round, or the sky is actually ethereal firmament, or that we did not, in fact, evolve from filthy monkey-men, ice plays a crucial role. It walls us off from the capital "T" truth, it's unknowable, or you know, it was the wrath of god or some nonsense.

Today we're borrowing mostly from column B, but there will be some filthy monkey-men later in the show because most of what we're going to talk about were accepted out of a need to venerate stupid assholes for not being them ivory-tower thinky people. Thinky people who would have argued, wrongly of course, that the universe isn't made of magic, Cosmic, ice.

As Dr. Christina Wessely of the Institute of History at the University of Vienna explains:

"The Cosmic Ice Theory portrayed the world in a simple and vivid manner, in the form of a story. Astronomical and geological processes were paired up with spectacular stories in the vein of fantasy-laden adventure novels. And while this theory was easy to follow, conventional academic sciences seemed only to offer numbers and abstract equations, appearing incomprehensible and out of touch. As a result, the Cosmic Ice Theory seemed less esoteric to the man on the street than the conventional sciences."

A problem that we still face, both in terms of people thinking the sun is made of ice—there are still a few Comic Icers out there—and in nearly every other facet of the sciences that requires more than a third-grade education and a bottle of mountain dew to explain.

So "what is the Cosmic Ice Theory," you ask?

For that, we'll need to travel back to a simpler, stupider, time. Specifically, 1894—which started on Monday for Greg and Saturday for Julian, saw William Kennedy Dickson patent the motion picture, Coca-Cola was first bottled, and... Rudolf Hess was born... frustratingly, we'll come back to him.

In the summer of 1894 Austrian Hanns Hörbiger, we'll say "discovered" the theory of Welteislehre, or Cosmic Ice. Apparently, it was also called Glacial Cosmology or Glazial-Kosmogronie. Hanns was an inventor and engineer who didn't have any time for those "ivy leaguers" with their telescopes or math. No, he had visions to explain the universe. Check-make atheists.

By his own account, Hörbiger was observing the Moon when he suddenly had his first "recognition" upon realizing that it was so bright and rough on its surface that must be made of ice. Because truthiness is all about what you can see and never about what you "prove".

Shortly thereafter he had the second of his recognitions, or visions as they're commonly called. He had a dream-vision in which he flew through space and watched a silvery pendulum swing, getting longer and longer, until it broke. Upon awakening, he "knew that Newton had been wrong and that the sun's gravitational pull ceases to exist at three times the distance of Neptune," because... dreams I guess.

Hörbiger, date unknown

It was following this revelation that he contacted his friend Philipp Faith in 1898. Fauth, a schoolteacher, helped him publish the Glzial-Kosmogonio (Glacial Cosmology) in 1912. The 790-page tome, filled with photographs and diagrams,