Interesting Times

2016 has been a year marked by death. In this episode we get into a few other years notable for being especially deadly, and why this past year has felt so particularly lethal.

In this episode we tackled one of the major issues of our time: Why haven’t more countries used moose as Cavalry? Sweden tried it. The Soviet Union also tried it. But, the mighty moose has consistently resisted being turned into […]

Fidel Castro, after being in power in Cuba since the 1950s, is finally dead. Castro was known for his long reign as Cuba’s dictator, but he was also known for surviving a large amount of assassination attempts. The most common […]

Squanto and other Native Americans are a fixture of popular depictions of what has retroactively been termed the First Thanksgiving, such as in the fanciful, inaccurate 1914 painting pictured below, by Jennie Brownscombe. That popular image, reproduced so much in […]

In 1950s Portland, police and racketeers worked hand-in-hand to provide the city with gambling, protitution, and other in-demand vices such as pinball. The man in charge of all of this was Jim Elkins who, for a brief period, was Portland’s […]

For about 250 years, Europeans thought that giants lived in Patagonia. The inventor of this myth was Antonio Pigafetta, a member of the Magellan expedition who, in his memoir of the circumnavigation, reported seeing a huge man approximately ten feet […]

Thomas Jefferson loved mastodons, in part because he wanted to prove that American animals were not degenerate. In the late 1700s a French naturalist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, published a massive, multi-volume natural history called, appropriately Natural History. In […]

“Gothic” has described a lot of things: Mustachioed barbarians just outside the Roman empire, grand cathedrals such as Notre Dame and Chartres, eerie literature like Dracula and Frankenstein, and music by bands such as Joy Division and The Cure. This […]

Anymore it seems like scary clowns outnumber standard, whimsical clowns. Clowns are monsters, figures of fear, and they seem more likely to laugh with homicidal mania than laugh with joy. How did that happen? How did a figure of fun […]

Kara Helgren has previously worked for the city of Salem, Massachusetts as a tour guide, leading visitors through the ominously-named Witch House. According to Helgren tourist expectations veered toward the lurid and macabre. Visitors expected tales of ghosts, black magic, […]

We made it to 100 episodes! For the occasion we’ve a new name, a new logo, and your questions and my answers.

The platypus appears to be some kind of melding or mashup between a duck and a beaver. It is not, though the first Western scientist to examine a specimen thought that it was exactly that: A taxidermy hoax made of […]

Belief that one’s blood type affects personality is common in Japan. Dating sites, celebrity profiles, and vital statistics for fictional characters often include blood type, and belief that it affects personal attitude or character is somewhat akin to belief in […]

Immigration from Mexico to the US is not new. Workers have been deciding to immigrate to the US, legally or not, for over a century. However, legal channels for immigration have often not been forthcoming. In the early twentieth century […]

It was bound to happen eventually. There’s no new episode this week.

There is a statue on the moon. In 1971 the crew of Apollo 15 placed a small figurine and a plaque on the lunar surface to memorialize American and Soviet astronauts who had died in the pursuit of space exploration. […]

Teddy Roosevelt buried a time capsule in Portland in 1903. One hundred years later, Roosevelt’s time capsule was nowhere to be found. The box laid by the president that was meant to preserve history for 100 years could not be […]

In 1854 the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings made their debut into American politics. They ran candidates in 76 of the 82 available House of Representatives races, and won 35 of those seats. At the same time, they also became a force to […]

Decades before the modern versions of the Democratic and Republican parties formed, the US also had a few other major political parties. One was the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Another was the Whigs, who had intermittent […]

The ancient Mesoamerican ball game is very probably the oldest ball game in the world. We know that it was played with a rubber ball on a stone court, and that players would try to hit the ball with their […]