What do you do if your neighbor's bull keeps rampaging through town? In Missouri, castrate it. Legally. In this episode we open on a neighborly nightmare—a loose, dangerous bull, a three‑day reign of chaos, and an old statute that lets three neighbors agree to castrate a bull, boar, or ram over one year old after notifying the owner. It sounds like folklore, but the law is real, very old, and still on the books.

Then we swerve into traffic-law absurdities: a statute making it illegal to lean out and honk someone else’s car horn—specifically swinging upon a motor vehicle to sound the horn—written for pranksters and chaos agents. We chase myths too, like the rumor that Missouri bans driving with an uncaged bear, separating the common-sense guesses from the actual code.

By the end you’ll laugh, wince, and be surprised at how seriously some places once took runaway livestock and late-night hijinks. We close by heading west to Montana, teasing trains, cows, and frisbee-golf curfews—because once you start, the strange laws keep piling up.

Imagine walking into a diner and ordering a 64-ounce soda — legally yours, thanks to a Mississippi law born out of a feud over New York’s soda limits. This episode peels back the oddball statutes that let you guzzle a bucket of cola, ban certain obscene bumper stickers, and once criminalized public swearing near the vulnerable.

We tell the stories behind each statute: the politician or cultural clash that put it on the books, the courtroom and civic battles that tested it, and the surprising ways these laws have been enforced — or quietly ignored. From a law still on the books defending your right to supersize, to a decal ban enforced only when things get graphic or personal, to a swearing ban that survived for more than a century before finally being repealed in 2013, these are laws that read like the setup to a joke but happened for real.

Join us as we trace the quirks of Mississippi’s legal landscape, laugh at the strange consequences, and tease what Missouri brings next — because sometimes truth is stranger, and funnier, than fiction.

Follow the thunderous footsteps of Big Boy 4014 as a 1.2 million-pound steam giant becomes a moving time capsule—linking the dreams of 1862, the urgency of 1941, and the celebrations of 2026. We ride the whistle from Cheyenne to Philadelphia, feeling the boiler’s heartbeat, the human hands that made it run, and the towns that stop to watch history pass.

Through short, vivid scenes—rooftop vigils, steam-filled crossings, reunions with sister engines—this episode stitches together engineering, wartime urgency, and the messy, powerful sweep of American movement. Listen for the whistle; it calls us to gather, remember, and reckon with the stories the rails carry.

Ever imagined running after a greased pig at the county fair? In Minnesota, that slapstick dream collides with the law — greased pig contests and turkey scrambles can actually be misdemeanors under animal-cruelty statutes. This episode opens with a laugh, then sharpens into a real legal bite as we trace why protecting animals turns fairground stunts into crimes.

We pivot to local legend: a quirky tale that Minnesotans can’t cross into Wisconsin with a chicken on their head. It’s probably apocryphal, but the image sticks — and so does the wider question of how folklore fills the gaps where statutes don’t. Then we kick up the dust on muddy tires: is there really a law against dirtying the road? We unpack debris-discharge rules, how they’re enforced in farm country, and what’s headline-worthy versus what’s practical.

By the end, the verdicts land — some statutes are real, some stories are urban legend, and most enforcement depends on place and people. Stay tuned: Mississippi’s strange soda-sticker and speech quirks are up next.

Step into a world where romantic betrayal could land you on a true crime episode — not because you were murdered, but because Michigan still treats adultery like a felony. We follow the curious edges of the state code: a rarely enforced law that could mean up to four years behind bars, a ban on being intoxicated in a train station that applies to Amtrak (sorry, Polar Express), and a blasphemy statute declared unconstitutional yet stubbornly written into law.

This episode stitches together courtroom lore, baffling statutes, and the real people who bump up against them, with a detour to Minnesota’s greased pigs and chicken-head antics for comic relief. Tune in for legal oddities, human drama, and the unsettling reminder that some laws outlive common sense.

Step into a short, surprising tour of Massachusetts law where patriotism, profanity and old-school honor collide. Picture a crowd at Fenway — someone queues up a remix of the Star-Spangled Banner and suddenly the mood shifts from celebration to caution: the state still carries a $100 penalty for dancing to or remixing the anthem. That’s the opening scene.

Turn the page and you’re courtside at a youth baseball game, where a teenage outburst at the umpire could ring up a $50 fine. The rules sound absurd, almost theatrical, but they’re on the books — rarely enforced, often symbolic, and undeniably real. Finally, a forgotten clause in the state constitution prevents duelists from holding office, a vestige of a bygone era that reads like a historical footnote come to life.

This episode threads these oddities together, using quick scenes and a sharp narrator’s voice to explore how laws can be both comical and consequential, revealing what they say about a place and its past. Tune in for a brisk, story-driven look at laws that still matter — even when they feel out of step with modern life.

December 19, 1972: Apollo 17 splashes down, three astronauts recovered, and for the first time in human history, no one has returned from another world for more than fifty years. In this episode we tell that final descent as a story of triumph and unraveling—how a Cold War victory, exploding budgets, a nation at war with itself, and the strange absence of what came next combined to pull the curtain down on the greatest technological feat of the twentieth century.

We follow the people who built Apollo—the scientists who never got their data, the rockets that sit in museums like monuments, and the photographs that reshaped how we see Earth—and we ask the uncomfortable question the program left behind: why did we stop? Told through canceled missions, quiet personal losses, and the lingering power of images like Earthrise, this episode turns policy and politics into a human story.

Short, urgent, and unexpectedly intimate, this finale asks what we owe the past explorers and whether a new era of lunar ambition will be driven by rivalry, cooperation, or something altogether different. Listen to the end of an era and the question that still pulls our eyes up toward the moon.

Imagine being hauled into court for reading tarot, or chased down the bay for stealing oysters — these are not punchlines but real laws with real stories. From a Maryland misdemeanor that treats fortune telling like fraud to Rockville’s almost-forgotten ban on public swearing, this episode walks the boundary between the absurd and the enforceable.

We stitch together on-the-street vignettes, 19th-century oyster wars with state navies in hot pursuit, and a teaser about Massachusetts rules that make dancing to the national anthem questionable. Listen as we unpack why these laws existed, who they targeted, and what it feels like to stand where history and the bizarre collide.

We spent six episodes with the men who flew; this is the story of the thousands who never left the ground. Picture a seamstress in Dover sewing a pressure suit to perfection, a young flight controller with a handwritten list saving a lunar landing, and a handful of programmers rewriting fate in the hours between life and death. These are the moments that made missions possible.

Through intimate portraits, John Aaron’s SCE fix, Jack Garman’s late-night alarm list, Don Isles’s two-hour software patch, Frances Northcutt in a room full of men, we meet the faces behind the consoles, the factory floor, and the machine code. Their preparation, quiet courage, and obsessive attention to detail become the heartbeat of the program.

And then there is Wernher von Braun: engineering genius and morally compromised architect of the Saturn V. The rocket that carried humanity to the moon was built on brilliance and buried truths. To understand Apollo honestly, we hold both the triumph and the cost.

Listen as Time Tellers gives names to the invisible, stitches history back together, and asks who we celebrate—and why.

Pull into South Berwick and you might notice something strange: the best spots in front of Dunkin' are spoken for—reserved for police, by law. What starts as a laughable stereotype—cops and coffee—quickly becomes real when a ticket or a tow looms over anyone who dares park there. Follow the host through the tiny ordinances that make small-town rules feel both absurd and oddly practical.

Then the story winds through even stranger territory: laws that bar advertising on gravestones and, once upon a time in Augusta, even frowned on sidewalk violinists. Each quirk peels back a layer of local history and unintended consequences, revealing the characters, debates, and curious compromises that shape a community. Tune in for a short, sharp tour of Maine’s legal curiosities—equal parts civic weirdness and human drama.