Madness Madness!

It's easy to forget the days before fertility treatments that yielded between four and thirty babies per pregnancy. It's even easier to forget 1934, since most of us weren't born yet. You know who WAS born in 1934? The Dionne Quintuplets! As was the case for a great many Depression-era babies, things didn't go as well as they could have. Speaking of the number five and the year 1934, a guy named Philip Kives WAS FIVE YEARS OLD IN 1934! After spending several years as a child, Kives went on to form K-TEL records, which is a memory bomb that'll blow your mind if you're older than 42 or so. JUST THE HIIIIIITS

Boomeur Sooneur!! Today Erin takes a look at the practically unheard-of* football team at the University of Oklahoma, and Amanda introduces us to Julie d'Aubigny, a vastly overexposed** 17th-Century fencing master, opera singer, and lover of the ladies, who managed to do a frankly astonishing amount of L-I-V-I-N inside 33 years. Join us, won't you?

* a number of people may have actually heard of OU football
** d'Aubigny is not, in fact, overexposed

If you've listened to the podcast for a while, you've almost certainly been waiting literally months to hear us spend an hour and a half talking about cats. WAIT NO LONGER, MY FRIENDS! Today Amanda tells us about ship's cats, in between the times when we interrupt ourselves and each other talking about other cats. Then Erin takes us on a trip in the wayback machine to a sleepy little hamlet by the name of Pyongyang, and the time its former dictator kidnapped a couple of South Korean film luminaries to make a series of movies for him. Extras were absolutely harmed during the making of these films. Join us, won't you?

The thing about the '80s is that there was a lot of money and a lot of drugs, and they were both gonna last forever! Until they didn't. This week Erin tells us about the collapse of the Penn Square Bank, which knocked the oil business on its ass far beyond the greater Oklahoma City area, and was toooootally different than the financial collapse of 2008 you guys, OK? OK. Then Amanda takes us back to a time when the shitty actress wife of a shitty actor president told kids across America how all we had to do to avoid a life of drug-fueled desperation was Just Say No, OK? OK! It's her fault Gary Coleman is dead. Don't believe any of that horse shit kidney failure cover story.

Regretfully we must inform you, our avid listeners, that there is no new episode this week because Adobe is being a dick about things. 

We are working on these technical difficulties and will be back as soon as humanly possible. 

Today's show is a real study in contrasts. England's Pearly Kings and Queens (you've probably seen them even if you don't know the name) are working-class Britons who've been collecting money for charity by way of some truly jaw-dropping suits for more than a century. The person in charge of the "Irish Crown Jewels," by contrast, is ... actually exactly appropriate kind of person to be looking after English headgear that commemorates the subjugation of their very first colony, which largely did not deal with crap of this nature in earlier times. Oyster shells! Donkeys! Parades! Upper-class Gay Shit involving Ernest Shackleton's shitty brother! Don't miss it.

Sometimes a stark tragedy takes the form of an imperfect history. In this case the tragedy is that the Beast of Gévaudan, a creature or creatures who spent a chunk of the 1760s taking fatal chunks out of terrified villagers of the French countryside, did not show up 200 years later in the bus containing Ken Kesey and his "Merry Pranksters" and spend at least a few minutes of the 1960s dispatching one of the shining lights of white male Boomer self-indulgence. To hell with that guy. Enjoy the show! 

Vacations! You love 'em! Unless they keep your favorite podcast from having a new episode. Then you resent them, which is understandable. We'll be back next week! It's still hot.

Is it hyperbolic to call it a Clown Riot when they were rioting against the Toronto Fire Department? Maybe. When clowns kick the ass of a city's fire department, and the fire department are Orangemen to a man and collectively symbolic both of municipal graft and Ulster Unionist fuckery, are the clowns immediately granted IRA membership? Friends, I've been drinking. Thus the work of parsing the intricacies of clownsmen vs. protestant quislings will fall to you, dear listener. Once you're done doing that, consider this: Have you ever lesbianned so hard that you hallucinated? It's OK, apparently that was pretty common during the era of The Versailles Time Slip, a thing that happened to two unmarried women 120 years ago as they were TRYING to take a PLEASANT WALK at VERSAILLES without A BUNCH OF GHOSTS SHOWING UP, but alas. Join us, won't you?

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