Madness Madness!

Boomeur Sooneur!! Today Erin takes a look at the practically unheard-of* football team at the University of Oklahoma, and Amanda introduces us to Julie d'Aubigny, a vastly overexposed** 17th-Century fencing master, opera singer, and lover of the ladies, who managed to do a frankly astonishing amount of L-I-V-I-N inside 33 years. Join us, won't you?

* a number of people may have actually heard of OU football
** d'Aubigny is not, in fact, overexposed

If you've listened to the podcast for a while, you've almost certainly been waiting literally months to hear us spend an hour and a half talking about cats. WAIT NO LONGER, MY FRIENDS! Today Amanda tells us about ship's cats, in between the times when we interrupt ourselves and each other talking about other cats. Then Erin takes us on a trip in the wayback machine to a sleepy little hamlet by the name of Pyongyang, and the time its former dictator kidnapped a couple of South Korean film luminaries to make a series of movies for him. Extras were absolutely harmed during the making of these films. Join us, won't you?

The thing about the '80s is that there was a lot of money and a lot of drugs, and they were both gonna last forever! Until they didn't. This week Erin tells us about the collapse of the Penn Square Bank, which knocked the oil business on its ass far beyond the greater Oklahoma City area, and was toooootally different than the financial collapse of 2008 you guys, OK? OK. Then Amanda takes us back to a time when the shitty actress wife of a shitty actor president told kids across America how all we had to do to avoid a life of drug-fueled desperation was Just Say No, OK? OK! It's her fault Gary Coleman is dead. Don't believe any of that horse shit kidney failure cover story.

Regretfully we must inform you, our avid listeners, that there is no new episode this week because Adobe is being a dick about things. 

We are working on these technical difficulties and will be back as soon as humanly possible. 

Today's show is a real study in contrasts. England's Pearly Kings and Queens (you've probably seen them even if you don't know the name) are working-class Britons who've been collecting money for charity by way of some truly jaw-dropping suits for more than a century. The person in charge of the "Irish Crown Jewels," by contrast, is ... actually exactly appropriate kind of person to be looking after English headgear that commemorates the subjugation of their very first colony, which largely did not deal with crap of this nature in earlier times. Oyster shells! Donkeys! Parades! Upper-class Gay Shit involving Ernest Shackleton's shitty brother! Don't miss it.

Sometimes a stark tragedy takes the form of an imperfect history. In this case the tragedy is that the Beast of Gévaudan, a creature or creatures who spent a chunk of the 1760s taking fatal chunks out of terrified villagers of the French countryside, did not show up 200 years later in the bus containing Ken Kesey and his "Merry Pranksters" and spend at least a few minutes of the 1960s dispatching one of the shining lights of white male Boomer self-indulgence. To hell with that guy. Enjoy the show! 

Vacations! You love 'em! Unless they keep your favorite podcast from having a new episode. Then you resent them, which is understandable. We'll be back next week! It's still hot.

Is it hyperbolic to call it a Clown Riot when they were rioting against the Toronto Fire Department? Maybe. When clowns kick the ass of a city's fire department, and the fire department are Orangemen to a man and collectively symbolic both of municipal graft and Ulster Unionist fuckery, are the clowns immediately granted IRA membership? Friends, I've been drinking. Thus the work of parsing the intricacies of clownsmen vs. protestant quislings will fall to you, dear listener. Once you're done doing that, consider this: Have you ever lesbianned so hard that you hallucinated? It's OK, apparently that was pretty common during the era of The Versailles Time Slip, a thing that happened to two unmarried women 120 years ago as they were TRYING to take a PLEASANT WALK at VERSAILLES without A BUNCH OF GHOSTS SHOWING UP, but alas. Join us, won't you?

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Well fuck, it's wartime again on Madness Madness. Today we learn about legitimate national hero Chris Noel, who started her work actually supporting the actual troops in a way more useful than car window stickers in Vietnam and never looked back. We also learn about The Hunley!, a Civil War-era submarine that worked about as well as the submarine you picture in your head after hearing the words "Civil War-era submarine." Don't worry, they eventually succeeded in a mission that killed their fourth or fifth crew before sinking for the last time. (It's cool, they were Confederates.) A crucial fact about The Hunley: The 1999 TV movie TNT made about it was exactly the tribute it deserved. [GAAAAAAAASP]

Look, the IRA did some unforgivable things in response to some equally unforgivable things done by the Ulster Unionists and centuries of even worse things done by the fucking English. But when you kidnap a horse hailed as a national hero by the people of Ireland itself, you have officially gone too far. Today we hear the tale of Shergar, a horse who was real good at running fast, and of Bild Lilli, a doll originally made in 1950s Germany for a right-wing newspaper's gross dude readers. By 1964 she'd dyed her hair, crossed the pond, and started a job with a little joint called Mattel. All this plus we talk about how it's hot! It's hot.

Hello! Madness Madness is currently out of the office. You've pressed six to learn more about Tom Petty! Brian reads an excerpt from a remembrance by Warren Zanes, Petty's biographer, published a year after the absolute legend's death. You can read the full article here.

Hello! You've reached Madness Madness. We are currently out of the office. Please listen to your choices carefully, as our menu has changed.

How 'bout we just list some key items this episode has in it: Border Blasters, goat testicle implantation, rootin' tootin' child neglect, Brother Al ("A-L"), one hundred baby chicks by mail, Big Tex continuing to slowly and mechanically wave as he is engulfed in flames*, the ionosphere. Get to it!

*this is quite possibly the funniest thing that had ever happened before the "Four Seasons Total Landscaping" incident

Friends, do you like stunning stone structures perched on piney hilltops? Do you like the ghosts of mistreated sanitarium patients, dead from neglect? OK what about the ghost of a cute little orange tabby cat? OK! Me too! Let's go to the Crescent Hotel then, and learn about Eureka Springs' most haunted place! (Also one of the prettiest.) Oh, and be sure to bring a book! We'll be relaxing in the hot springs with an annotated copy of the Voynich Manuscript. The annotations all say "I don't know what this part here means either; this book is, as I have said repeatedly, mostly gibberish. Please let me see my family again." BEACH READS!!!

This week we have a look at the actual events that led to a legendary song, the most famous version of which contained the line "I've got three little children and a very sickly wife." Stagger Lee! Real shit! That there is a song that contains absolutely no hidden backward lyrics, which means it wasn't a part of the moral majority scare about rock music hiding backward lyrics that would ... subliminally make us think Paul McCartney was dead? Or something. Climb on, it's a ride!

Today we learn about automatons from hundreds of years ago, the most famous of which may have been The Mechanical Turk, which played chess with actual people in the room and got pissy with you if you tried to cheat. Then it's a personal story of a deeply unsettling babysitting gig, the 1989 Olympic Festival in Norman, Oklahoma, and the bleak shitscape that our lives as Americans is becoming. It's fucking awful! Join us.

BONUS: The OK 89 Olympic Festival in its entirety, cued up to Roger Miller's performance, which was unquestionably the best part.

OK WELL ANYWAY now that the tornado has passed, Erin can continue talking about Kit Williams' book "Masquerade" and the real-life treasure hunt it spawned (on purpose). And Amanda can tell us a little something about some obvious straight-up horse shit that the British scientific community uncritically gobbled right up because it wanted to believe fucking England was the cradle of life, and let that sink in for a moment before you learn the hoax's name: Piltdown Man! Join us, won't you? Bring a shovel.

This week we spend some time with Koreshan Unity, which has nothing to do with Waco, the ATF, or TV movies starring the guy from "Wings" or, later, Tim Riggins. Although it might be worth debating whether the standoff in Waco would have ended differently if the Earth were hollow, as today's cult insisted it was. We also learn more about "Masquerade," a picture book by Kit Williams that purposely led to an actual real-life treasure hunt ... wait, is that a tornado siren?

Gather 'round, listeners, and hear the story of what happens when dictatorships—sorry, I'm being told the proper name is monarchies—get so far up their own asses they get syphilis and start wars and basically murder literally millions of their own citizens. The Mayerling Incident was a low-key extremely important* example of this brand of royal fuckery, and we are definitely going to hear about it today. And if you're driven into a violent fury by tales like these, and run out and immediately get into a fistfight that ends up violating a number of international laws, don't worry: The French Foreign Legion is alive and well, and still asking few to no questions about how you came to be covered in blood and molasses. Learn more about the group countless early 20th-Century cartoon characters ran off to join approximately every five episodes.

*Is "low-key extremely" a thing? Discuss.