Madness Madness!

Any of your better cheese experts will tell you there’s nothing that pairs better with a fist-sized hunk of Government Cheese than a couple of British ghost stories, one almost certainly made up, the other definitely made up. Warm up your false vocal chords for some fake ghost sounds, and learn more about the chain of government fuckery that ended with the son of a bitch Ronald Reagan offloading warehouses of third-rate Velveeta to his most hated enemy, Poor People!

My freshman year in college I (Brian) got like, Freshman Drunk at a house party where a home video was playing. My friend Jeff appeared in the video several times, and apparently every time he was onscreen I would slur, from the living room floor, "there's Jeff." The story of Gef (he's Welsh!) the Talking Mongoose seems not dissimilar, except the house where it took place was definitely harder to get to, from the sounds of things. Good thing College Brian wasn't addicted to drugs, or he might have wound up at Narconon, a "drug rehab" program that's "definitely not a Scientology front" and is surely "not responsible for the deaths of numerous patients over the years due to its foundation on utter quackery spouted off by an oily maniac." Dodged a bullet there!

We don't like to brag or anything, but the people behind Madness Madness have accomplished some pretty incredible feats of combat prowess, to the point where several hit movies have been based on our exploits: Avatar, Avengers: Endgame, Avatar: The Way of Water, Titanic, Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, Avengers: Infinity War, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Jurassic World, The Lion King, The Avengers, Furious 7, Top Gun: Maverick, Frozen II, and of course Barbie. That’s more than $27 billion at the box office just from the ones we can name off the tops of our heads, so honestly we’ve got nothing to learn from Frank Dux, a fight choreographer and semi-professional liar whose “life story,” the 1988 Jean-Claude Van Damme breakout “Bloodsport,” pulled in a mere puff of dust to the tune of $11.8 million worldwide, which I don’t even think is enough money to wipe your ass with these days.

Nonetheless we’ll hear about this valor-stealing boomer schmuck, then imagine him dropped into Cassadaga, Florida (formerly New York), the fortune-telling capital of the world, mouthing off to a series of increasingly irritable palm readers until the ghost of Patrick Swayze manifests and Road House roundhouses him so hard he lands in a different ZIP code from his medals of honor, which turn out to be made of cardboard and cellophane anyway. Join us, won’t you?

Aine’s in town! In honor of friend of the pod/friend of us as actual people, today’s episode is all Australia, all the time! There’s Corn Thins! Mike invented them! There’s Tim Tams! Some saint or another invented them! And there’s research that yields phrases like “singer Paul Joseph, Donny McCormack (ex-Nutwood Rug Band), The Larrikins and Ian Farr!” Former Nutwood Rug Band members infested the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, a surprisingly thoughtful invasion of a small town in New South Wales during the sixties; decades earlier, significantly less thought was given to the entire enterprise known as the Emu War, which you may know by now was not won by non-Emus. Join us, won’t you?

Florida’s state government isn’t the only bunch to get a bug up its collective ass over Disney not being fundamentalist enough: Turns out there’s a storied history of Old Testament fanboys opening entire theme parks, except instead of a theme there’s the Bible, and instead of a park there’s the Bible. Today we learn more about this string of inexplicable failures, plus one man’s equally successful plan to boost Americans’ frog intake by several hundredfold. Albert Broel is the author of “Frog Raising for Pleasure and Profit,” and believe us when we tell you that’s not even the best part of Albert Brull. All this, plus Doug! Our friend Doug is here, and we love him. Also there's a lot of singing, and most of it's pretty great. Doug! Songs! Frogs! Fundamentalists! It’s all here!

Like reasonable people everywhere, we here at Madness Madness, when considering the accurate and true representation of American Indians in film, television, and literature, immediately think of Germany. Thus none of you will be surprised to learn of Karl May, creator in the 1890s of the “Old Shatterhand” novels, the Wild West adventures of the titular benevolent whitey and his “blood brother” Winnetou, a wise chief of the Apache, a formula that would in no way lead to an utterly bizarre century-plus-long fixation by Germans on American Indian life as portrayed by a man born in the Kingdom of Saxony.

You know what Old Shatterhand didn’t have? Access to driver’s education snuff films, the bread and butter of one Richard Wayman, a man with access to a vast store of color film and a frankly troubling affinity for the Ohio Highway Patrol. Wayman’s literal snuff films—“Signal 30,” “Highways of Agony,” “Mechanized Death”(!), and of course “Hell’s Highway”—routinely terrorized driver’s education students from the ‘50s through at least the early ‘90s. His interests also included filming “sting” operations to publicly humiliate gay men and producing disastrous telethons featuring Sammy Davis Jr. Meet both these white guys on this episode of Madness Madness!

We say it a lot here on the show, but the 1960s was an era unique for its sheer volume of uninformed drug-induced white guy fuckery. Emblematic of said fuckery was Dr. John C. Lilly, who was real into dolphins and LSD and giving dolphins LSD when he wasn't floating in an isolation tank trying to miraculously make it even further up his own ass. Fortunately the '70s and '80s came along, and everybody got their shit together hahahahahaha just kidding. One guy did get an idea to put on a rainbow afro wig and cram some Jesus into televised sports though: Rollen Stewart gained a kind of fame, then a kind of infamy, and finally a free ticket to life without parole for his trouble. Fortunately he also inspired one of the greatest early '90s SNL sketches ever made.
Content warning: There is some deeply upsetting stuff about dolphins in here. Also there's a hostage situation in a motel room during which no dolphins are harmed.

If you’ve ever asked yourself, “Do I have what it takes to cross the equator? On a boat? For the first time?”, you’ll need to consider some follow-up questions: How good a swimmer are you? How do you feel about the biggest, hairiest dude on your ship being greased up and dressed like a baby? And is there a way you can take a car, plane, or train instead? We’ll examine these questions on today’s episode, plus we’ll learn how relatively straightforward it is to exploit repressive Victorian social mores for fun, profit, and crimes, crimes, crimes! Of COURSE you can sell people literal poison packaged as an elixir of youth! Of COURSE you can skate straight on through to extortion! Of COURSE your storefront is a terrific anchor business for the brothel you’re running upstairs! Come on in and let’s get started, using the Madame Rachel method!

SPRING BREEEEEAK!!!! Today we're taking a break from not talking about cults, so as to learn more about the Blackburn Cult, the proper name of which is the Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, a name perhaps designed to remind people that while the Great Depression might be raging, you can still use as many words and letters as you want when naming your Jesus-adjacent child-resurrection grift. Then it's time for a ROAD TRIIIIIIP!!! To a blank spot by I-35, just north of Dallas, in June, for an outdoor Jesus music festival in weather more like Actual Hell than anyone seems willing to discuss! Explo '72 was the fundamentalist Woodstock that people had, I guess, been waiting for? Which people, and since when, are questions I definitely don't care about. Join us, won't you? SHOTS! SHOTS! SHOTS! SHOTS!

Have we all, every one of us, stared at a small humanlike doll and thought to ourselves, "What would it be like if this doll were like 35+ dudes and I starved them for six months in the University of Minnesota football stadium?" Of course we have; there's no need to even phrase it as a question. A notable fellow of science thought the same thing during World War II, and the results were the Minnesota Starvation Experiments, in which at least one dude just went full raccoon and started wandering around campus at night eating garbage. None of that is made up.

Meanwhile in northeastern Oklahoma, the Duke Boys were watching, helpless, as Ole Boss Hogg stole a bunch of American Indian land AGAIN, dug a bafflingly high number of lead mines, abandoned them when they stopped making money, and left countless piles of lead and rock dust hundreds of feet high next to stagnant pools of acidic lead water sitting on top of gigantic underground man-made caverns that were supported only by old boards! Don't worry though—the Dukes never put two and two together to pin it on Boss Hogg, as they'd been severely lead poisoned by the air and water of Picher, Oklahoma, one of our nation's very worst Superfund sites that's uninhabitable to this very day. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Tar Creek, one of the more perfect examples of Oklahoma fellating businesses while said businesses burns the entire state down and puts on a fake nose and big glasses when it's time to foot the cleanup bill! Join us, won't you?

A lot of people say dentistry lost its street cred when it started happening in "Offices" with "Sterile Instruments" and "Windows that close," and at one point the Street Dentist who legally changed his first name to Painless to avoid a lawsuit would have agreed with you. Today we learn about this ... guy ... in the history of dentistry. Plus, a look at Tokugawa Ieyasu, the actual guy at the center of James Clavell's incredibly lengthy but surprisingly pretty good historical novel "Shogun."
PROGRAMMING NOTE: The guy Amanda couldn't remember in this episode was Charles Bronson.

Most days you get up, have a coffee, look at the same six gifs again, and then it's off to work. But what if you didn't have the daily grind to distract you, and you could focus on doing the things that really feed your soul?

If the things that feed your soul include dressing in blackface and pranking the entire Imperial Navy, you've got some racist shit going on. But also the story of the Dreadnought hoax will be of particular interest to you! Meanwhile, if you've ever been an oppressed native woman in dire enough straights to accept a caretaker job on an expedition designed to claim an Arctic island for Canada even though literally everyone agrees it's Russian territory, only to find yourself the only survivor, you are probably Ada Blackjack, because to our knowledge she's the only person that's happened to. Hear all about it on this week's Madness Madness!

What better way to ring in the new year with a solid six months of deafening, damaging aural assaults that you're powerless to stop? Other than a bracing series of square dances, nothing I can think of! This week we learn about what would ultimately become one of the most important reasons we don't have cross-country supersonic passenger flights. We also learn about what is almost certainly the rootin'est, tootin'est American tradition of all: the venerable square dance. All this knowledge, delivered with the benefit of several bottles of Prosecco and a poop shotgun*! Join us, won't you?

*Poop shotgun does not fire poop. Restrictions apply.

Are you now, or have you ever been, a Lady? If yes, were you a Lady in the United States during the 19th Century? You are doubtless familiar, then, with Godey's Lady's Book, a source of densely packed text, hand-colored fashion plates, piano sheet music, and the odd Edgar Allan Poe short story ("for the love of Godey, Montresor!"). All this, plus a look at the troubled romance between legendary circus aerialists: Lillian Leitzel, a tiny woman who is stronger than you or any man you know, and Alfredo Codona, a shining star of the Flying Codonas, shunned for years by the Walking Codonas, who were generally agreed to be fiercely jealous of their far more glamorous cousins. Join us, won't you?

You know what's awesome? VICTORIAN LADY THIEVES. You know what else is awesome? Science Fiction! Mostly! Partly. It's complicated. Today we hear tales of both things!

Two pivotal questions lie at the heart of this week's episode. One: To what extent have we been collectively missing out as a society since the practice of soap carving fell by the wayside? Two: What happens when Erin and Amanda don't call their dad?

By the time July 4, 1976 had rolled around, a lot of people had put a lot of effort into crushing the whole thing into a bureaucratic logjam. A lot more people had made sure not one single American had the option of forgetting, even for a moment, that it was the BICENTENNIAL AND EVERYBODY BETTER AMERICA REAL REAL HARD STARTING RIGHT NOW, GOT IT?!? By that point, chiropractic medicine had begun to ease into a slightly less quackery-intensive version of itself (don't worry, it was still pretty batshit). Learn about both on today's Madness Madness, now brought to you in color!

Today, a lighthearted look at England's long and storied history of, as an official act, killing men for being gay. It goes back a while! It's awful and pointless, but ... uh. Well. No actual "but" there, as it turns out. We'll also examine a group of racist vigilantes of the pedigree that's only possible in central Missouri. Also they called themselves "The Bald Knobbers," and the fact that they went around beating people for moral failings while having a name only slightly less pornographic than "Sleazy Gang Bang XI: Thursday Night at The Man Hole" is an irony seemingly lost on them. It's just gross. Join us, won't you?

George Pullman, it should be universally agreed, was a huge piece of shit. Nobody who isn't a huge piece of shit has himself buried in hundreds of cubic feet of concrete and railroad ties to keep his employees from besmirching his corpse. Today we'll be talking about the Pullman Porters, black men and women who migrated north for a better life after the War the South Started Because They Didn't Want to Stop Owning Other Human Beings and found work—up to 400 hours of it per month! This did ultimately lead to unionization, but not before a whole lot of racism from both the Pullman Company and the existing employees' union. Then we'll hear about The Hitler Diaries, which aired for 8 seasons on The CW and starred Ian Somerhalder. Wait, no. The Hitler Diaries were a different thing, but were also fake. Join us for our 69th* episode, won't you?
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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