Jake and Dave Yapp‘s Audio Freqs

As we reluctantly enter the world of Song Poems - lyrics written by amateurs, and set to music (for a SMALL ADMINISTRATIVE FEE) by professional, and fairly existentially-troubled musicians. 

Also, a quick recap of our discussion of exciting new extras, which took up the first twelve minutes of the show: 

It's time for the second act of our Musicals extravaganza! You know, the half that goes on a bit and the songs aren't as good and you start wondering about train times. BUT! In this episode! All By Myself, sung by people who probably spent quite a lot of time in that state afterwards! Another regional musical - but this one even more staggeringly surreal than those from the last episode! You honestly won't believe it. 

AND! We have some NEWS. There's lots of stuff happening in and around the podcast. Anyone who's previously donated to the show, or makes a donation between now and the publication of the next episode will get a bonus episode, with more regional musical marvels and some old gubbins from my archive. Jake here. Hello. SO! Head over to www.ko-fi.com/audiofreqs - literally the worst url in the world, and make a donation! And all I'm saying is IF you decided to maybe sign up for a fiver a month, it JUST MIGHT be in your interest, if you were wanting more content on a more regular basis in the VERY NEAR FUTURE. Shhhhh xxx 

Part One of a deep dive into the murky waters of failed, flawed, and fabulously obscure musicals. Regional TV Musicals! Jesus Musicals! Truckin' Musicals! And not a whiff of Lloyd Webber to be had. You'll love this stuff. I promise. Part two next week. Put us about a bit, will you? Aw, thanks. 

In today's episode, Jake and Dave Yapp showcase Outsider Music - that particular body of work which appears to have rejected every musical organ. This doesn't really work as a line. There's something about bodies rejecting organs or something in there somewhere, but, ngl I have had a sherry. I am not being coy. Like when people say 'OOPS I MAY HAVE IMBIBED A SHANDY OR TWO HORRRHH HORRRHHH HORRHHHH' when they mean they've been doing Tequila for five hours. No, it turns out that Tesco and Sainsbury's both do a v good vegan sweet sherry. And it's nice, if you do alcohol. 

The honest truth is, I'm just making excuses. Now go and sign up to tptvencore.co.uk. x

Here's some recycled material about the moon! You're welcome!

The moon has had a massive impact on every culture, so before we get into the science, let’s do a whistle-stop tour of what we used to believe about the moon on a spiritual  level.

The Aztecs called the moon Mictecacuiatl and believed it travelled through the night sky hunting for victims to consume… As did the Maoris in New Zealand, calling it the ‘man-eater’. The Tartars of Central Asia called it the Queen of Life and Death… All very ‘deathy’, isn’t it? Early Hindus believed the souls of the dead returned to the moon to await rebirth, and some European stories, not just rather turgid Christmas TV adverts for department stores, tell of a man in the moon - banished there, having been sentenced to death by god for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, because, you know the old saying - Sabbath and Sticks / Do not mix, ok I made that up. Most excitingly, though, everyone’s loony - yes - about rabbits. I had no idea. In Chinese mythology, the goddess Chang’e is stranded on the moon after overdoing the old immortality potion, and only has moon rabbits for company. I mean, how high could they jump? Aztec cultures revered the moon rabbit, some Hindus believe the moon is inhabited by a hare, and in Japanese and Korean folklore the Moon Rabbit is believed to be pounding the ingredients for a rice cake, which is presumably, er, rice. Moon rice. Anyway. SCIENCE: The moon’s cycles were well understood by… the Chaldea, a small Semitic nation living in a marsh in south-east Mesopotamia, and the Chinese astronomer Shi Shen had also worked out solar and lunar eclipses, roundabout the same time as Anaxagoras in Greece worked out that the sun and moon were giant spherical rocks, and that one reflected the light from the other. Archimedes designed an accurate planetarium, presumably with an adjoining Waxworks and grossly over-inflated ticket price. Ptolemy, around 120AD said that the moon was about 60 earth-radii away and that the moon’s diameter was 0.292 of that of earth, honestly, what a nincompoop! Look at the reality! 59, and 0.273! Tchoh!

Just to remind you - there weren’t any telescopes yet. And, to be honest, almost nothing happened for the next, nearly 20,000 lunar cycles… Until Galileo drew one of the first drawings of the moon from what he’d seen through a telescope. But, if you want to show off at a dinner party, he wasn’t the first. An Englishman called Thomas Harriot, who had bought a ‘Dutch Trunke’ (ie a telescope, invented the year before in 1608) drew a map of the moon several months earlier, on July 26th 1609. Not only that, he helped Sir Walter Raleigh figure out how to stack cannonballs on ships’ decks efficiently which made him think about atomism, and he’s credited with bringing potatoes to Britain. 

But Galileo worked out that the contours were caused by mountains and craters, from his experience as an artist using chiaroscuro, a theory which went against thousands of years of thought that the moon was perfectly smooth. 1837 was a landmark year. Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich Mådler published books which finally put to rest any fancy ideas people had espoused about vegetation existing on the moon, along with Selenites (moon-people, after the Greek goddess of the moon, Selene [pron: Seleeni]) And other myths have been debunked - apparently, no matter what Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and the emergency services say, we don’t all go a bit loony when there’s a full moon (although, well, I can only speak for myself). The first metaphorical rock we managed to chuck at it was Luna 2, a Russian spacecraft on 14th September 1959. It would be ten years and several missions later before Neil Armstrong walked on it and infamously said ‘Wow! I’m walking on the freaking moon, here!’ on July 21st, 1969, a mission that used less computational power than you get in one of those birthday cards that plays a tune. In 1967, an Outer Space Treaty had been ratified, ruling that everything in outer space, including the moon, could not be owned by any nation, and not used for anything other than peaceful means. Which is a relief as the American military were eyeing it up for a military base as early as the fifties. Whether we fight or not, on a full moon or not, Ted Nield in his book Supercontinent writes movingly that many, many millions of years from now, when every trace of us, even the radioactive signatures from our nuclear power and bombs has decayed to nothing, when the continents have shifted until our planet is no longer recognisable, our footprints on the moon could be the only thing left to prove we ever existed. 

Well, here we are...

'Let's just see how it goes' - (c) 2021, Pablo, devoted listener. See you next week. WE'VE ALL TOTALLY GOT THIS xxx

So here it is. And if you've ever wondered how much Noddy Holder makes a year off it, then this is the podcast for you. Also if you've ever wanted to hear Marlene Dietrich singing a modern carol, or a song about Santa Claus in a helicopter, or wondered why we should all be saying a massive 'Sorry' to Baby Jesus right now, this, too, is the podcast for you. And if you've ever wondered why a historically Black university in New Orleans is beloved by everyone – except the US News best colleges rankings, then you want season six, episode four of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History Podcast. Personally, I don't. It's well-researched, and sometimes quite shockingly illuminating, but in all candour, the jokes are very thin on the ground. 

Anyway, enjoy this hot slop, and a veritable washing-up bowlful of Christmas cheer to you! Oh, and I promised a Christmas playlist of tunes I'd done. Turns out there's hardly anything I've uploaded, but, for what it's worth, here you go: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/15XcWNNRh6Ui4mrwBL1YYp?si=f8f3c108401c455f 

So I did more digging about the scandalous new-fangled AMERICAN version of Away In A Manger. The setting is known as 'Mueller', although I don't know why, because it was composed by a guy called James R Murray. Maybe he was just really into yoghurt. Meanwhile, the UK version is called 'Cradle Song', and was written by William J Kirkpatrick. And it is the ORIGINAL as well as THE BEST. Why, it predates the Mueller version by er a whole TWO YEARS erm. 1895 vs 1897. 

And they were both Americans FFS.

Anyway. Merry Christmas, part one! We'll go deeper and weirder next week xxx

Skiing is believing, as we delve into the Marvel Comics Universe (TM David's Family) and find out more about the man who does whatever a spider can. Like shedding urticating hairs, to irritate a potential predator. Me and Davey, we can both do that. You should see our sofas. 

Also, fun fact: for its weight, spider silk is over a thousand times stronger than a frozen Wham Bar.  I've got some more here, hang on. 

Some spiders do, indeed, eat their own webs, in order to recycle the amino acids, and few of us can forget the memorable spectacle of Tobey Maguire slowly glopping down huge long ribbons of his magnificent spidey-spooge. Boy, could he eat it!

The bite of the Brazilian Wandering Spider can cause lingering and painful erections. That's actually an actual fact. Look it up. And while you're online, consider signing up to buy us a coffee at www.ko-fi.com/audiofreqs, one of the most holistically unsuccessful urls produced by humankind. 

See you next week! Say hi on the socials: @audiofreqs 

In this four-star-rated episode, ahem-hem, we are enjoying a variety of filthy, potty mouths, spewing their vile profanities and turning your earbuds blue. 

You'll hear (bleeped, but, you know, pretty guessable) swearing and sauce, both intentional and inadvertent, from rugger b*ggers to Bessie Smith. So, pens at the ready to write to the Radio Times, and away we go!