Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that vies to be your new national pastime now that the nation, and baseball, are dumpster fires.

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

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that blowing on the wine in your coffee mug will help convince the rest of the Zoom people that your tea is hot.

Baseball!

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Lawson

* https://www.wired.com/2014/10/fantastically-wrong-lawsonomy/

* http://www.lawsonomy.org

* https://onmilwaukee.com/articles/lawson

* https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lawsonomy

* https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/29967/11-notes-alfred-w-lawson-founder-weirdest-university-ever

* https://www.wuwm.com/post/manlife-documentary-explores-lawsonomy-its-last-crusader

* https://www.manlifethemovie.com

This week I learned about a sports.

The world is on fire so I thought I'd pass the time with America's great pass-time — not letting your own object stupidity get in your way. So I "got into the game" as they say and I started early — late 1800's early.

You know, when it was about the sport!

Before the league and its helmet rules made everything lame. When manly-men played a manly game then went home to do other, also probably manly, things like build airplanes that don't fly, starting magazines no one wants, or opining on the nature of reality and how much like Jesus you are. Just baseball stuff.

And so our story begins with Alfred William Lawson being born on March 24, 1869. An amazing event he described as “...the most momentous occurrence since the birth of mankind.” He died November 29th, 1954, about which he said nothing. ‘Cause he was dead.

He was a professional baseball player, aviator, and utopian philosopher... it was before players had twitter. Iono. Of himself Lawson wrote, in the 3rd person because he's a nutcase,

“his mind responds to every question, and the problems that stagger the so-called wise men are as kindergarten stuff to him. To try to write a sketch of the life and works of Alfred W. Lawson in a few pages is like trying to restrict space itself. It cannot be done.”

And he's not wrong. It took me nearly three pages to chronicle his various failures.

His baseball career was from 1888 to 1907 when he played... the... ball... position... I guess, perhaps one of the base positions... but, definitely one of the two.

He played for the most appropriately named team ever, the Boston Beaneaters until 1895 when he transitioned to management.

In 1908 he founded the Union Professional League to rival that other league, the... "M", "L", something... but it went under a year later because he was broke, baseball is expensive, and no one wanted to play with his weird beans.

Aside from a short, beanie, baseball career Alfred fancied himself an aviator. And by aviator I mean magazine publisher. He started Fly, later renamed Aircraft, and printed interesting articles about the new and exciting world of disobeying gravity until 1914 when the magazine, like his Union league, folded.

He was one of the first people to envision commercial air travel,

Welcome to Interesting If True’s very special Halloween edition. Where the scariest thing ISN’T the fact that we have microphones.

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

I'm Aaron, and I’ve learned that married life and coupled life isn’t really all that much different… except the paperwork. So. Much. Paperwork.

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that every Sarah is descended from a single trisarahtops dinosaur. If we go off air, it’s because ancestry.com doesn’t want you to know this and they are trying to shut us down.

The 70s were a different time... and let’s not visit the Isle of Wight.

* https://obscurban-legend.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sandown_Clown

* https://www.cryptopia.us/site/2018/11/sam-the-sandown-ghost-clown-england/

* https://www.astonishinglegends.com/al-podcasts/2020/7/25/ep-183-sam-the-sandown-clown

* https://www.historydisclosure.com/two-children-close-encounter-strange-humanoid/

Ok, folks, today I bring you a story of the magic of childhood. And by magic I think I may mean nightmarishly bizarre.

A few things to keep in mind whilst I regale you with my story. Remember being a little kid? Perspective is different. Ever heard of the 70s, LSD was in the tap water and falling from the sky. You know the British? All lunatics.

So to begin: this story was first reported in the January/February 1978 edition of The BUFORA Journal. What bastion of journalistic strength is the The BJ? Well, for starters it’s an acronym for The British UFO Research Association. (It’s at this point in the story Steve has left the building.) But let’s not be hasty, this is definitely not your mother’s flying saucer story.

This is the story of 2 children, a young girl of about 8 who is known only as ‘Fay’ and an unnamed boy of about the same age and their experience with… Sam the Sandown Clown.

The setting is the Isle of Wight, one of the smaller of the British Isles, at Lake Common in the little town of Sandown. While walking around a golf course they heard a noise similar to an ambulance siren. They followed it across the golf course and through a hedge leading to a swampy field adjacent to Sandown Airport. The noise stopped.

https://www.cracked.com/pictofacts-1939-the-sandown-clown-wooden-astronaut-from-isle-wight/

Hut description: The being invited the children into his hut. The children crawled into the hut through a flap. The hut was divided into two levels. The lower level had a blue-green wallpaper and covered with a pattern of dials. Also, it had an electric heater and some basic wooden furniture. The upper level was less spacious and had a metallic floor. He told them that he fed on berries that he collected in the late afternoon without indicating where but indicated that he had a camp or a base in the mainland he could go. As far as drinking is concerned he drank water from the nearby river once he had cleaned it.

The children talked to the being for about half an hour and after saying goodbye they rushed out to tell the first person that they had seen the ghost. The man they spoke to just laughed assuming it was all just made up. Most probably lacking any other reference to their experience the children labeled the being as a ghost.

A few weeks later,

Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that always makes it up to you with a good time. I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me are:

I'm Steve, and I read recently that microdosing LSD makes one more productive and creative at work. But I also learned that a microdose of LSD is a lot smaller than I thought it would be...

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that before crowbars were invented, crows had to drink at home.

I'm Jenn, and this week I learned about magic mushrooms and reindeer. Did you know that reindeer in Alaska liked to eat stoner mushrooms? Like for real. Shamans of the area would collect urine from the stoned out reindeer and ingest that as a secondary high.

Clears up Santa’s flying reindeer, doesn’t it?

A quick word about last week’s missing show and this week’s longer show. Weddings are hard and despite the planning that I promise we all did, I dropped the ball, and last week’s show didn’t air. Therefore, this week’s show is longer!

I know it’s not the same, and my apologies for that, but hopefully this kinda makes up for it. Back to regular programming next week!

Shea, take it away...

Psycho Shaman Stuff

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-native-american-shaman-s-bag-from-1-000-years-ago-contained-multiple-psychotropics

A recent discovery in Bolivia has taught us that Native Americans living in South America over 1000 years ago had quite a powerful medical tool kit. Well, I say medicine… these drugs can certainly make you feel better. What anthropologists found was the largest number of psychoactive substances ever found in a single archaeological assemblage from South America. Drugs and paraphernalia were found in a pouch, stitched together from three fox snouts, yes I said fox snouts. the leather bag contained two wooden tablets for grinding psychotropic plants into snuff, two bone spatulas, a woven headband, and a tube with two human hair braids attached, for smoking hallucinogenic plants.

 

"We already knew that psychotropics were important in the spiritual and religious activities of the societies of the south-central Andes, but we did not know that these people were using so many different compounds and possibly combining them together," said anthropologist Jose Capriles of Penn State.

Archaeologists weren't specifically searching for psychotropics, but rather an evidence of human habitation in the dry stone shelters of the Sora River Valley Bolivia. There, in a cave, Cueva del Chileno, they found a leather bundle. Radiocarbon dating of the leather wrapping put its age at around 1,000 years old. The team took a small scraping of the material coating the inside of the fox pouch and analyzed it using liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry. They found that the pouch could have contained four or five different plants - but definitely at least three.

"Chemical traces of bufotenine, dimethyltryptamine, harmine, and cocaine, including its degradation product benzoylecgonine, were identified, suggesting that at least three plants containing these compounds were part of the shamanic paraphernalia," the researchers wrote in their paper. "This is also a documented case of a ritual bundle containing both harmine and dimethyltryptamine, the two primary ingredients of ayahuasca [a plant-based psychedelic tea]."

Bufotenine is a powerful hallucinogen found in some “magic” mushrooms and secreted from some well-licked frogs. Dimethyltryptamine or DMT is an intense naturally-occurring psychedelic. Harmine is a hallucinogenic alkaloid found in some plants and we all are familiar with coke. Of course,

Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that brings all the synthesis to the yard! That’s right, our waveform is better than yours.

Something… something… charge… something… https://www.patreon.com/iit ;)

I'm your host this week, Aaron, and this week I learned about MES or Musical Ear Syndrome. This rare and delightfully named symptom of hearing loss causes auditory hallucinations in the form of high-pitched elevator jungles. It's like getting the soundtrack to going deaf literally stuck in your head—it is not ideal.

And as ever, with me this week is the See No Evil to My Hear No Evil, Shea!

Hey Everyone, I’m Shea, and this week I learned that a stormtroopers favorite store is the one next to Target.

As for Speak No Evil, we promise she’ll be back soon!

The next few shows are going to be pre-recorded because weddings don’t leave a lot of editing time. When we’re back at the end of the month we’ll thank patrons, give updates, and maybe tell a story or two. In the meantime, here’s this…

Music To Your Earholes

Listeners may not be aware of this but Shea is a person who enjoys the musics. He’s a fan of, if I understand the terminology correctly, the hips and the hops and, maybe, the Ricks and the rolls. (that ‘typo’ is for you, single show note reading hero)

He’s also an accomplished music maker, having sung for the actual Pope, and braver still, on YouTube! As for me, I know so much about music. The most really. The bigliest beats.

That’s not true…

Actually, I know basically nothing about music. Luckily Ashley made the wedding playlist and Pandora handles the rest for me.

That’s not true either. I don’t think I even have Pandora installed anymore. I really only listen to Podcasts. And it’s with that high regard for the incredible, varied, and profound art of music I give you: the story of this weird music thing I found on Google!

(This is probably where Shea will tell me how well known about this is and how I’m late to another music thing… it’s what foxes say all over again…)

Most of the music searching I do is for free-to-use music for podcasts like this one. Thanks Waine! Otherwise, I’m hopeless. So hopeless, in fact, that recently while intending to search for how to add her playlists to the wedding live-stream (also, go home 2020, you’re drunk) Google thought I was doing research for the show and gave me historical results for music streaming services. And with that odd soiree into my media and cultural blindspot, I give you, the Dynamophone Telharmonium!

Our story begins in June of 1867—which in addition to this story saw the end of the Tokugawa shogunate, Dr. Lister’s papers on antiseptics in The Lancet, Alfred Nobel patented dynamite, and oh yeah, Canada became a country eh! (Oh yeah, they signed them-thar Articles of Confederation on July 1st dontcha know. Told those British hosers to take a hike eh. Aw but not really though, they’re ok, even if their beer is warm.)—anyway, back to 1867 and the birth of Thaddeus Cahill.

Little Thaddeus would grow to study Physics of Music at Oberlin Conservatory in Oberlin, Ohio while working as a Congressional clerk. Graduating with a law degree he became obsessed with the idea that electricity and machines could make and transmit music!

Basically, he was the Shawn Fanning of his day.

“Shawn Fanning”? He’s the guy who made Napster… yeah… there’s no reason you should know his name. At all.

Eventually Thaddeus would make the Telharmonium!

Considered one of, if not the, first electrical instruments - the organ was also called the Dynamophone. Thaddeus built his fantabulous contraption in 1896 and in 1897 submitted his patent “The Art of and Apparatus f...

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[et_pb_column type="4_4"][et_pb_text admin_label="Text"]Welcome to Interesting If True, the best podcast I make my wife listen to.

I'm your host this week, Shea, and of course my co-host, Aaron!

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that the hardest part of going for a run isn’t the running, it’s putting down the Doritos… and getting dressed… and leaving the house… and running…

Few updates this week. We still need to record an episode of 4 More Beers, apologies on that but real-life happened, but don’t worry—we’re on it! It’s another two man production this week. Jenn is under the weather and Steve is on vacation for a bit. Jim may be around once life allows but he’s doing his best not to actually be Mr. Flaming Pants, send him your well wishes. While Shea and I love doing a buddy-show we’re going to try to fill the empty seats with some guests in the coming weeks. No spoilers now but it’ll be good. It’ll be good…

If you’ve enjoyed the show so far please do us a solid and leave a 5-star review wherever you listen!

Worlds Fail

The 2020 olympics were unfortunately moved to next year to keep athletes and spectators safe from the current pandemic, this shows great preparation and forsite from the officials and a compassion that definitely wasn't seen back in the 1904 Olympics, especially if we’re talking about the marathon.

The 1904 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the III Olympiad was celebrated in St. Louis, Missouri from July 1 to November 23 at what is now known as Francis Field on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis.

The city of Chicago had won the original bid to host the 1904 Summer Olympics, but the organizers of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis would not accept another international event in the same time frame.

The exposition organization began to plan for its own sports activities, informing the Chicago OCOG that its own international sports events intended to eclipse the Olympic Games unless they were moved to St. Louis. Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement, gave in and awarded the games to St. Louis.

So St. Louis wasn’t as prepared as we are nowadays and they were competing with the World fair at the same time. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition or world fair was celebrating the Louisiana purchase and as the Olympics were only a few years old many of the events were lost in the chaos of the city. The president of the world's fair actually declined to invite anyone to the opening ceremonies so on July 1st he did it himself in a humdrum “ceremony.”

The participants totaled 651 athletes - 645 men and 6 women representing 12 countries. However, only 42 events (less than half) actually included athletes who were not from the United States.

This is just a small peak at the craziness that came during the olympics that year but I want to focus on the main event! The first organized marathon was held in Athens at the 1896 Olympics, the start of the Games’ modern era. The ancient games, which took place in Greece from around 776 B.C. to A.D. 393, never included such long-distance races. The idea for the modern marathon was inspired by the legend of an ancient Greek messenger who raced from the site of Marathon to Athens, a distance of about 40 kilometers, or nearly 25 miles, with the news of an important Greek victory over an invading army of Persians in 490 B.C. After making his announcement, the exhausted messenger collapsed and died. To commemorate his dramatic run, the distance of the 1896 Olympic marathon was set at 40 kilometers or 24.85 miles.

Official course 1904 Marathon

If you take away anything from this story I hope it’...

Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that will make you the best player of the worst sports. I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me are:

I'm Steve, and this week I’m wondering how I can simultaneously always want to watch, learn, or do something else before bed, but then never leave bed?

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that goth anti-vaxxers refuse to listen to the Cure.

Enter Story Title Here

Ok Shea, this one’s for you.

I’ve finally learned about sports...

Not tried, of course, but I read about them online.

Oh yes, I’ve put on my finest pair of pigeon-cleats and went for a jaunt in marry ol’England to partake of their finest sport...

Kottobas - Antiquity

Of course, if not for the Greeks we wouldn’t have the wonders of Dwile Flocking. It’s... let’s say predecessor... probably, Kottobas was a favorite circa fourth and fifth centuries BC.

To begin one must first tap a new vat of wine and serve to friends and enemies alike. Once the goblets near empty, contestants would assume the sporting position... reclining on there dining table, and deftly flick the remaining wine sediment from their glass at a target.

Apparently success in Kottobas was a precursor to success in affairs of the heart — because those who competes in the wine-games sees only 10s.

Pulling Your Goose

The Mid-17th century was a glorious time for animal based sport - and masterbation jokes.

To begin pulling your goose you need some rope to tie it up with and a horse. The goose is hung by its feet from a tree or whatever and contestants take turns riding the horse at a full gallop and try to grab the goose’s head.

The goal, because everything back then was terrible and covered in the blood of the innocent, was to pull the gooses head off. Thereby forever enshrining your position as a master head puller and also, I assume, winning you the goose-head. Also you’re, “crowned” as the “king” for one whole year with a crown and mantle. At the end of his “king” reign, he has to indulge his “subjects” to a feast of beer, cigars and bread pudding or sausages that is held either at his house or the local pub. Kings compete with each other to become the “emperor”.

The event is still practiced today in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. Though use of a live goose was banned in the 1920’s. Though purist still argue that half the challenge was the bird flapping about, and a flaccid goose just isn’t as much fun to pull on.

Dwile Flonking - 1960

First things first, we’re going to have to get into a gaming mood with a rousing round of Dwile Flonking.

One of the more recent inventions of English sport, Dwile Flonking comes from Norfolk, min-1960... and almost certainly a pub. The rules are simple enough.

You and 24 of your closest friends get together and divide into two even teams — the stupidest person of the group, or as the rules specify a “dull-witted person,” is picked last and becomes the Jobanowl, or referee.

From there players dawn their sporting apparel of a porkpie hat, a collarless shirt, trousers tied at the knee - which you’ll want to keep on for the next event - hobnail boots and a pipe (smoking optional but helpful).

To start the round the jobanowl tosses a sugar beet into the air to decide who goes first, yells “Here y’go t’gither!” and then both teams set out on the task of hitting each other in the face with beer-soaked rags.

The trophy is ultimately awarded to the team least able to keep their balance.

Stinging Nettle Eating

Welcome to Interesting If True, episode 21, the one where we’re finally old enough to drink!

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

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that adding salt is basically just sprinkling really specific, tiny, gravel on your food.

Round Table

Now that we can pull a stool up at the bar it’s time for the glorious return of the Round Table… or IP Table as the case may be until 2020 sobers up.

Being a fully grown, worldly podcast, we’ve got a few things to announce.

First, the return of the round table, which is, I think, going pretty well so far.

Second is that we’ll be recording an episode 4 More Beers this weekend, so look for that in your podcast feed soon! Updates on live shows are pending some Slack conversations but we’ll let you know as soon as we know.

Now that we’ve got a back catalog of sorts we’re also going to start properly promoting the show so make sure you give us some love on the Twitters, Facebooks, or wherever else you can! We’ll be posting fun stuff and hope to interact with all of you. Speaking of ways to interact with the show, leave us a voicemail at (513) 760–0463 and don’t forget to let us know if it’s ok to play on the air.

We’re also going to be visiting other studios and maybe, just maybe, dragging some guests back with us. More on that in the coming weeks.

With all of that out of the way, Shea, what are you drinking?

Idioms For Idiots

An idiom is a phrase that is common to a certain population. We use them every day, sometimes without even realizing that what we’re saying is nonsensical without the implied and widely accepted meaning behind it. What you might find Interesting If True (look I used the name of the podcast in a story!) is that most idioms had literal meanings back before time obscured this bit of history. I'm going to be teaching you listeners some of the origins of our favorite phrases.

Barking up the wrong tree might be the easiest to figure out without using the internet, so lets start there. Of course now it describes when someone is trying to achieve something but they're doing it in the wrong way. As you can assume it originally referred to a hunting dog literally barking up the wrong tree after its prey had moved on.

The phrase fly off the handle currently means to lose your temper suddenly and unexpectedly. This makes perfect sense because before mass production and safety standards occasionally your axe handle would come loose and fly off the handle as you were chopping wood. Makes perfect sense why we would now use the phrase as a way to describe risky behavior with unpredictable results.

An old nautical term has weaved its way into our language, feeling under the weather. Nowadays it means you’re not feeling 100% or you’ve caught a cold. But in the past when a sailor was feeling ill, he would go beneath the bow, which is the front part of the boat. This would hopefully protect him from adverse conditions, as he was literally under the bad weather that could further sicken him. Therefore, a sailor who was sick could be described as being “under the weather.”

To turn a blind eye is to refuse a known truth, you can see many examples in world wide politics. This, however, has a great story to how it came about, we can actually pinpoint who said it first and when. Horatio Nelson was a British Admiral in the late 17th century before he became a national hero, during his service he took French shot to the face and lost most of his vision in his right eye. Years later in 1801 he led an attack alongside Admiral Sir Hyde Parker in the Battle of Copenhagen. Parker communicated to Nelson at one point, via flags, that he needed to retreat and disengage. Nelson,

Welcome to **Interesting If True**, the podcast that slithers right into your ear holes and fills them with the wonders of yee-oldie medical stuff.

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

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that when you wear a mask with a big beard you look like an underwear ad from the 70’2

I'm Steve, and I’ve learned that the only place where I’m considered “essential” is at work, during a pandemic, so I can fix people’s computers, so they can keep shopping on Amazon… etc, etc, etc.

### There Be Oil In Them Thar Snakes!

Today's show will slither in under the bar I'm sure... because it's snake oil!

I'm a funny.

Snake Oil really has two histories. One of moderate efficacy in a better-than-nothing sense. And another of screwing people out of money, health, and often life with fake cure-alls.

The history of snake oil is a miss-mash of nonsense that's impossible to put into a straight line, but in general, it goes something like this:

1. Boil stuff, maybe a snake,

2. ...

3. Profit.

So, let's begin with, you guessed it, yee-oldie terrible doctors. The records are, of course, a bit of a mess and my research was not helped by my inability to read Chinese.

Snake Oil seems to have two origins. One with folks like Pliny The Elder, and another in Traditional Chinese Medicine. I should differentiate Traditional Chinese Medicine from TCM as it's now known. Today's TCM was created largely during the Great Leap Forward when people were dying by the millions and there was no real help for them so the Chinese government basically just made some nonsense up to placate the suffering. On the other hand are curatives that were used, traditionally, by the Chinese for hundreds of years. Much like yee-oldie western medicine most of this was rubbing dirt on you then hoping your dick doesn't fall off.

Before we dive into oils and how to apply them, what was Pliny’s cure for blindness?

That’s right, pickled snake skins! And for extra bad cases of not being able to see reduce the remainder of the snake to ash, mix that with the skin oil then rub that in your eyes daily until well visoned.

So, snake oil. Despite its common meaning today O.G. snake oil was actually better than nothing. Made from the oils released when boil-rendering a Chinese Water Snake, snake oil was rich in omega-3 acids that can reduce inflammation. 1

A Californian psychiatrist with a background in neurophysiology, Richard Kunin, analyzed snake oil from San Francisco's Chinatown, and the oil of two rattlesnakes he bought. His findings were published in the 1989 Western Journal of Medicine, this write up being from a Scientific American 2 article. He found that Chinese water-snake oil contains 20 percent eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), one of the two types of omega-3 fatty acids most readily used by our bodies.

"Snakes and fish share one thing, they're both cold-blooded animals," Kunin says of Omega-3 fatty acids found in snakes and salmon etc. A similar, but more recent study, from the Japanese National Food Research Institute found that the Erabu sea snake—used in Japanese Snake Oil and a relative of the Chinese water snake—contained significant amounts of beneficial omega-3's that did some interesting in encouraging stuff to mice in clinical trials. The researchers saw reduced inflammation, increased stamina and brain activity, and reduced blood pressure, cholesterol, and depression. All of which is a major contributing factor or Omega-3 fatty acid woo, which is another show I'm afraid. The takeaway is, there's something to EPA, but it's not better than, say, a paracetamol.

In the early 19th century Chinese laborers built America's Transcontinental Railroad.

Welcome to Interesting If True, the show that’s here to teach you something, but we won’t guarantee it’s worthwhile.

I'm your host this week, Jenn and with me are all three of the Stooges:

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that Russia is basically Europe’s less-responsible Florida.

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that you see Lesbian parents, and you see Gay parents but you don’t really see transparents.

I'm Steve, and all trucks have beds, but not all beds are for sleeping… Camping is harder once you reach a certain age.

Another rousing story of weird... history...eee!

That’s right, I’m back and I need some Aaron-Russian-accent and possible pan-dimensional destruction. So with that in mind, June 30th of 1908 was a total blast in Eastern Europe. Don’t believe me? Just ask the thousands of people in the roughly 900 mile radius who witnessed a giant fireball and explosion. Well, they’re dead now, but we have over 700 first person accounts to check out.

Of course, as you may know, I’m talking about the massive Siberian boom known as the Tunguska Event. (Named for the Stony Tunguska River, the area where it was centralized was so remote that the first scientists didn’t reach it until 1927.) It had the estimated explosive power 650 - 1,000x greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and flattened roughly 80 million trees.

* http://bit.ly/2KDaEgr

* http://bit.ly/2NsG1YI

* http://bit.ly/2NuBKEk

This story has been making the rounds of ‘craziest unsolved mysteries’ for decades, and a lot of brains better than mine, this is still one of those stories without a real ending. Despite it being generally agreed upon a massive space rock was involved, even today there is no scientific consensus on what exactly happened.

Farmer Sergei Semenov was having breakfast that morning only about 40mi from the epicenter: ‘‘I was sitting in the porch of the house at the trading station of Vanovara at 7 a.m. and looking towards the north . . . suddenly the sky appeared like it was split in two, high above the forest, the whole northern sky appeared to be completely covered with blazing fire. At that moment I felt a great wave of heat as if my shirt had caught fire… after a minute, there was a loud bang in the sky, and I could hear a mighty crash. Subsequently, I was fiercely thrown to the ground about 5-6 meters away from the house and for a minute or two I lost my consciousness.”

The closest seismic recorders were over 600 miles away but picked up strong readings for over an hour. This same type of equipment registered tremors as far away as England (where the luminosity created from the event kept the skies so bright a person supposedly could ‘read a newspaper’ at midnight).

More first hand reports describe a fireball in the sky, larger or similar to the size of the sun, a series of explosions “with a frightful sound”, followed by shaking of the ground as “the earth seemed to get opened wide and everything would fall in the abyss. Terrible strokes were heard from somewhere, which shook the air.” The indigenous Evenks and Yakuts believed a god or shaman had sent the fireball to destroy the world. Various meteorological stations in Europe recorded both seismic and atmospheric waves. Days later strange phenomena were observed in the sky of Russia and Europe, such as glowing clouds, colorful sunsets and a strange luminescence in the night.

Luchetkan, a member of the indigenous Tungus people of the region, whose relative herded reindeer in the area of the blast, recalled, “Of some reindeer they found the charred carcasses; the others they did not find at all. Of the sheds nothing remained; everything was burned up and melted to pieces—clothes, utensils, reindeer equipment, dishes,

Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that wants your lucky charms—and is willing to ply you with whiskey until you give them up!

Jenn wanted to call this one "Two Guys One Whiskey" but I didn't want to remake the artwork.... 0_o

I'm your host, Aaron, and this week I learned Jenn is a dirty, pant-burning, liar face:

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that I’m not lazy, I’m just an off-season hibernation innovator.

The Year was 1828—a leap-year starting on Tuesday for Gregory and Sunday for Julian (the Gregorian calendar was 12 days ahead of the Julian calendar at this point), saw the Turkmenchay peace treaty (between Russia and Persia), the feral child Kaspar Hauser was found in Nuremberg, and Andrew Jackson was elected the 7th President of the United States.

Meanwhile, in Edinburgh there was an explosion of anatomy!

Well... an explosion in the study of anatomy. Famous smarties like John Bell, Alexander Monro, and Robert Knox all studied human bits there.

First, if you're not familiar with Robert Knox, don't worry, we'll get there.

Second, there is now a market for human bits in Edinburgh.

Before we go to the worst farmer's market ever, a bit about Scottish law. It was illegal to make a body of course, and grave or funeral home robbing was generally frowned upon. So what was an enterprising "resurrection man" to do? Resurrection men, by the way, where the purveyors of fresh corpses that totally, for sure, honest, never robbed graves.

Turns out it was legal to steal a body, just not from someone or a hole in the ground. So if you could find yourself a ward of the state, orphan, etc, and get their body from the... body... cart, probably, it was yours because you can't steal what isn't technically owned.

Two of such Resurrection Men were William Burke and William Hare who sold corpses they... "farmed" I guess, to Robert Knox for dissection and lecture.

In the summer a body fetched 8 pounds. In the winter 10 as nature's refrigeration meant you could fiddle about inside someone longer and with more frequency. From a practical standpoint, this also meant that protecting graves was good business. Guard towers and fences of course but you could also commission a stone slab to be placed over the grave until the ground was frozen or the body was... too ripe to pick. Iron cages built over graves were another popular option. These had the dual feature of preventing robbing as well as eliminating any "pet cemetery" concerns the family might have.

Speaking of family, Hare and Burke had wives and family. Burke had an abandoned and a current wife. While Hare married a woman described as a "hard-featured and debauched virago". A virago, by the way, is an old term for a belligerent, ill-mannered, scolding, self-righteous, shrew. Or, a yee-oldie "Karen". Dedicated drinkers and assholes all, they soon found themselves in need of coin.

Hare's renter died of dropsy owing him $4. So, like ya do, they waited around until the family gave the body to the gavers, then opened the casket, took the body, filled the casket with wood and rocks and shit that 100% sounds like a body when if you move it, then sold the man's corpse at Edinburgh University.

I want to take a moment and pause here to say that they didn't have a pre-existing agreement with anyone. They'd just heard that those nutters in the ivory towers liked fresh meat and were willing to pay for it. So, corpse in hand, they Weekend At Burniesed a body around until an underclassman directed them to Robert Knox who paid $7 for it. One of Knox's assistants told the duo that the anatomists "would be glad to see them again when they had another to dispose of" and just like that, industry was born.

Now,