Waiting 4 Wrath - Episode 236 - The One Where We Smoke A Fox's Face Until We Barf

In This Week’s Show, episode 236, we ate some tonkotsu ramen with seared steak and mushrooms… shitakies… they’re shitakies.

Now, grab a beer and help us test the god hypothesis — because, while Pythia, the high priestess of the temple of Apollo at Delphi (aka, the Delphic Oracle), hasn’t struck us down yet, we are trying her patience!

Shea’s Life Lesson

This week I learned that in 2020 there will be a whole month of 4/20 and there will a super 4/20 where everyone will smoke crack.

Jenn’s Actual Lesson

Did you know that recent geological investigations have shown that gas emissions from a geologic chasm in the earth could have inspired the Delphic Oracle to "connect with the divine." Some researchers suggest the possibility that ethylene gas caused the Pythia's state of inspiration.

But before we get to all that, let’s have a beer!

This Week’s Beer

Black Currant Saison by White Elm Brewing

Donated By: Brendan

* BA Link: http://bit.ly/2VqAxk9

* BA Rating: 3.89 out of 5

* Style: Belgian Saison

* ABV: 6.5%

* Aaron: 7

* Jenn: 6

* Shea: 6

* Steve: 5

Round Table Discussion

New patron Randy! Yeah, baby! Because we are CURRENT with our jokes.

Marshall: I've made a pledge to donate $5 to Planned Parenthood each time I see anti-choice protesters in front of their clinics.

Wonderful follow-up voicemail update from our very favorite nurse, Rebecca:

(also, we need to add a couple of math updates: $1200 pounds to dollars is about $1600. This goes into Jenn’s correction corner of her intro tidbit from last week. She TOTALLY meant BC instead of AD, but saying “the 13th of the fourth moon of the ninth year of Xiantong” is hard enough without random, religious-y letters. ...

Math sucks and is hard.)

Short Story

Psycho Shaman Stuff

http://bit.ly/30nj4g2

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 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 analysed 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,