This week It’s a touch of the ol’ divine madness in Middle America as we take a look at the highly entertaining and very American art form of revival preaching. From the big top on the frontier to Aimee McPherson, the sexiest preacher who’s ever lived, to Oral Roberts’ saying God was going to kill him if he didn’t get eight million dollars, the tradition of the revival is a type of performance art in a league of its own. It also fills a pretty interesting role in culture. We also learn a whole lot about the very, very American form of Christian mysticism: Pentecostalism, AKA the flavor of Christianity closest to being bombed out of your mind on designer drugs at a warehouse rave. That’s just a true statement.

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Finding yourself with one foot in reality and the other in dreamland is frightening, especially if you were alive in the 1940s when the solution was to remove all your memories by either drilling a hole in your head or hooking your brain up to the medical equivalent of a car battery. Today’s episode takes us back to that time to explore a book of case studies titled Oneirophrenia and how the author, a physician named Ladislas Meduna, sought treatment for these patients.

You know how they say you shouldn't stare at the sun because you'll go blind? Well, what if that's just what they want you to think? What if the secrets to immortality, an enlarged pineal gland, not needing to eat food, and not needing to wear a shirt on your youtube videos were all unlocked by simply...staring at the damn sun? Welcome to the "ancient" practice of sungazing. Where you stare down the sun until you receive magic powers. Is it an ancient practice? Will you go blind? Is it as stupid as it sounds? And didn't the sun used to be a different color? All these questions and more we will attempt to answer as we explore the world of sungazing. 

Tiny Tim was once one of the most famous men in America. Everything about him was a spectacle. From his trembling falsetto to his odd mannerisms, it's easy to see how he became America's laughingstock. Most people know him as an entertainer but what about as a husband? While tabloids took shots at Tiny, he was taking shots of his own--at the teenage wife he married on The Tonight Show. She wouldn't be his only wife, however, as he'd go on to marry twice more! Tune in to learn all about the man who tiptoed through the tulips and what kind of lover he was.

This week we're telling a story that is very much not our normal fare here at the bazaar: a ghost story, a true-crime murder case, and a courtroom drama. But it also happens to be exactly what we're about. The story of the Greenbrier ghost is often told in the context of "that time an encounter with a spirit was used as evidence in a trial." But that doesn't really do the story justice. After 22-year-old Zona Heaster was found dead under mysterious circumstances, her mother Mary Jane Heaster claimed to have an encounter with Zona's ghost who told her exactly what happened. This story directly led to the arrest, conviction, and death of Zona's husband: Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue, whose character was indeed commensurate with his name. 

We’re traveling to the past to explore the careers of two game show greats: Ralph “Nobody knows who I am anymore” Edwards and Chuck “They made a movie about me” Barris. Between the two of them, they’re responsible for some of the most famous game shows of the 20th century including Truth or Consequences and The Newlywed Game. We’ll learn how their creations altered the media landscape of the 20th century and discuss the possibility of game show hosts secretly having double lives as assassins. We also learn about a Victorian party game called "Forfeits" that we all need to put a solid effort into helping make a comeback. It's fantastic. 

Did you know that all of history is nothing but a bald faced lie? That the entire generally accepted arc of history has been fabricated to keep you, dear listener, from realizing your God-given birthright to fancy architecture, free energy and flying turtles? That there used to be a globe-spanning supercivilization with magic sound technology, strong jaws, and craftsmanship and artistry that we can't even come close to approximating in this fallen age of ours? And did you know that the evidence of this great, wonderful, and "fun, fun, fun loving" civilization is quite literally all around us? And unlike the Atlanteans and Lemurians, this lost globe spanning supercivilization with free energy technology was destroyed not thousands of years ago...but in 1850. Friends, welcome to the dumbest show on Earth. Welcome to Tartaria. 

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This week we’re taking a look at the curious history of one Charles Entertainment Cheese, a robot who claims to be “America’s favorite rat” and built a cardboard-flavored pizza empire which heralded the cybernetic colonization of our childhoods and traumatized generations with animatronic animals dug straight out of the uncanny valley.  We look at the history of Charles Cheese and the various personas he’s inhabited, from rude cigar smoking gangster rat, to rockstar orphan mouse,  the rivalry between Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz Pizza, the incredibly odd persistent fandom and the ill-advised Chuck E. Cheese live action sci-fi film. We also look at the history of animatronics, from their inception to their role in keeping asses in pizza parlor seats, and how pizza and animatronics collided in 1970’s California and gave birth to the eldritch terror that is Chuck E. Cheese. 

Pay us and we won’t send the rats after you. What’s more you’ll get access to bonus episodes and our patron Discord server starting at just $5 a month. 

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We're headed back to one of our favorite centuries to talk about one of the most famous UFO cases in history. Well, at least on the History Channel. The 1561 "celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg, Germany" entered modern consciousness by way of that spooky Swiss psychologist Carl Jung who wrote about this odd woodcut broadsheet describing a day in April 1561 when the sky filled with all sorts of strange, unidentified objects. Balls and rods and shafts of many colors (primarily "blood"), great big black triangles, swarming the skies and seemingly doing battle in what was, at the time, thought to be a revelation and warning from God signaling the end times. Of course, now we're past all that silly superstition now, we know the truth...it's aliens. Or...do we?  And what is it with revolutions in information technology always signaling apocalyptic mindsets and madness? 

On today’s episode we’re taking a look at some of the rather silly psychic experiments conducted by the folks over at the Center for Inquiry, a non-profit organization dedicated to stopping the spread of nonsense and promoting reason and skepticism. We’ll learn about the founder Paul Kurtz, secular humanism, ol' James Randi, and their history of legal battles against the most famous spoon bender in history, Uri Geller. They claim to be skeptics but are they actually haters? Or are we? Listen and find out!