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What a Year… 2024

The content below is from Episode #188 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend you be grateful for what you have.
    • Family
    • Friends
    • Community

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • Welp… it has been a full year since my last episode.
    • December of 2023 I published Episode #187 Beast of Jersey about a serial rapest from the UK. The VAST majority of the episode was just copied and pasted from another website. It was low effort and very little research was put in to it. This was a trend, a slippery slope the podcast seemed to be sliding down where I didn’t even try to paraphrase the words of others anymore. I simply was making disclaimers that I had copied and pasted from other sources. And that’s why I stopped making Who’d a Thunk It? episodes. They were becoming a chore and the quality of the pod was declining.
    • But as I checked back every once in a blue moon I noticed you folks, the Who’d a Thunkers never stopped listening. I was baffled. The podcast seems to have increased its listener base… even without me post or saying a single word.
    • So at the very least I thought I would create this episode to explain why I stopped making Who’d a Thunk It? episodes on a regular basis, to recap what has happened in my personal life in the year 2024, and just to check in with you guys.
  • In the summer of 2023 Shannon (my wife) and I found out we were going to be Parents.
    • Im not sure if already shared that on Who’d a Thunk It? of not, but because I knew we would have a lot less free time, that certainly factored in to ending the podcast.
    • We had baby showers and daiper parties. Our friends and family were so kind.
    • We decided to not know the gender of the baby until they were born.
    • Making room for the baby’s room we shuffled some things around in our house and by March of 2024 we turned one of our tool sheds into a home office space for Shannon to work from home.
  • Just 2 weeks later, on a Monday morning, Shannon had just left for work and I was logging on to my work computer to work from home, I heard a loud crack come from the back of the house. It sounded like thunder.
    • In my pajamas I quickly went to look out back to find the retaining wall behind our house had failed. The hill behind our house was crashing into our house and all the floor boards and walls were cracking loudly.
    • Not knowing what else to do I called 911 and asked for help. The fire department arrived and told me I had 60 seconds to grab what I could and vacate the home.
    • I grabbed my dog, my coffee, and a pair of pants. I couldn’t find the cat.
      • You never really know how ill-prepared you are until someone says you have one minute to grab whatever is most important to you.
    • Shannon cancelled all her appointments for the day and rushed home. In the pouring down rain I was told to wait at our local police station.
      • There a nice woman who works at the municipal building offered me a cigarette. I would end up bumming about 4 from her before the day was over.
    • The rest of that day consisted of us panicking, crying, talking to red cross, and going to Shannon’s parents house about 20 minutes away to try and sleep in my wife’s childhood bedroom with our dog who was dying from cancer.
      • Shannon was 8 months pregnant.
    • The next couple of days were a blur of countless phone calls to insurance, local aid, lawyers, politicians, family, and friends.
      • I started drinking heavily
      • It was 2 days later when we went back to the muddy field that was our house when I heard our cat. He came running out and jumped in my arms. It was the only joy Shannon and I felt that week, when we were reassured Beerus the farm cat was alive.
    • We quickly found out insurance was NOT going to offer any help. NONE. We tried to fight it. Even hired a public adjuster… but in the end, they didn’t help at all. NOTHING.
      • So I started a GoFundMe and for the first time in my life begged my family, friends, and community to help in anyway they could.
        • Even now, many months and tears later, I still get choked up thinking about how much kindness we were shown. People I hand’t spoke to in years, people we hardly knew, people we hadn’t even met were giving us money, daipers, clothes, etc.
        • When our neighbor (who turned out to help us so much more later on) unexpectedly handed me cash I broke down like a baby in my own drive way.
    • We ended up moving a lot of our stuff to Shannon’s childhood home under the same roof as my in-laws. People I had already considered family, but after this ordeal will forever hold a special place in my heart.
      • Then when an old friend from college offered us a place to stay for a very low rate with no binding lease agreement, we moved again to a completely different county.
    • Not long after we moved into my friends Duplex renting in the next county over, our dog Rorschach died.
      • He had been battling cancer in his eye. He was my best friend. He was my wife’s dog. Because I worked from home I spent virtually ever moment with him. We walked for hours every day, the whole neighborhood knew us as inseparable.
      • When Bubby died… that’s when all the difficult adult anxiety stuff with the house turned to dark feelings and I started seeing a therapist.
  • Our lives had become a bad blues song.
    • My 8-month pregnant wife and I lost our house, the dog died, then my job started layoffs… it was rough.

  • Then in the final days of May 2024, still living in my friends newly renovated duplex down in Washington county while we waited for the house to be fixed, our baby started to stir. Shannons was having contractions!
    • I drove Shannon to Magee Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh and in the wee hours of the June 1st 2024 our lives changed forever.
    • After all the nurses were taking poles to guess if it was a boy or girl, just 10 minutes of pushing, we met Theodore Patrick Robert Carbaugh.
    • And Holy Shit. Let me tell you, that was a wild time.
    • It ain’t the 1950’s anymore. The dad doesn’t wait in the lounge with a cigar anymore. I was front-row-and-and-center for my son’s birth.
      • The act of birth is by far the most metal thing I have ever witnessed.
  • We were given so much in donations, but the extent of repairs needed… it was a struggle to find the right person for the job.
  • Even though my friend charged an insanely low rent, we couldn’t pay both rent and mortgage at the same time and we had to move back in our home.
    • Yes, the house was repaired, but we didn’t, and still don’t want to live here any longer. Mainly because it is too small for us now that we want to grow our family and a little traumatizing after everything.
  • There are so many more details about the house getting hit from that failed retaining wall I could share. and because I didn’t write them down here those details will likely be forgotten.
  • We are living in this, what we now call cursed house. We are trying to sell it. With clear consciousness mind you because the first couple years we lived here we LOVED it and we did repair it after all.
    • But for us personally, it just isn’t where we want to live anymore.
  • Baby Teddy is our lives now. We plan to have more kids and life is something to smile about. I think Shannon and I are more grateful people now.
    • Oh, and I quit drinking. I loved it so much and I still had a few brewskies on my birthday. But I needed to cut WAY back, for the Tedster if not for anything else.
    • Even though I only have 6 months under my belt, I love being a dad. I know Shannon loves being a mom.
  • since my last episode on 12-20-2023, my life has changed A LOT… but I don’t think I regret anything
  • 2024 was one hell of a year

CREDIT:

  • Kim and Tom
  • Neighbor Rob
  • Artie
  • TZ and Janay
  • Mom
  • Dad
  • Cas
  • Casey and Brendan
  • and the hundreds of people who helped
    • by helping us move any of all of the 3 times
    • by helping us financially so we could have home for our baby
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Beast of Jersey

Content below is from #187 of The Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend a 90s classic: Matilda
    • Now, I’m hoping most of you have already seen Matilda and to you, I urge you to give it a rewatch. It is surprising just how well this movie holds up after nearly 3 decades
    • But to those of you who haven’t seen it, heres the plot:
      • This film adaptation of a Roald Dahl work tells the story of Matilda Wormwood (Mara Wilson), a gifted girl forced to put up with a crude, distant father (Danny DeVito) and mother (Rhea Perlman). Worse, Agatha Trunchbull (Pam Ferris), the evil principal at Matilda’s school, is a terrifyingly strict bully. However, when Matilda realizes she has the power of telekinesis, she begins to defend her friends from Trunchbull’s wrath and fight back against her unkind parents.
  • I recommend this beloved movie because I was recently at my friend’s 30th birthday and brought it up… to my surprise, a bunch of my friends and their significant others hadn’t seen Matilda… They hadn’t even heard of it.
  • So naturally, Shannon and I… plus my friend Tori were recounting some of our favorite parts of the movie… all while the people who hadn’t seen it look at us with bizarre reactions LOL

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • My dad sends me more instagram DMs than any of my friends and I love it.
    • In between the posts about grilled meat, grizzly bears, and dad jokes, he will occasionally send me something he thinks would make a good podcast episode.
    • This week’s main event was inspired by one of those posts. Thanks dad.
  • The vast majority of this episode is read directly from the website behind the Instagram post my dad sent me and All Thats Interesting .com…
    • With a smattering of Wikipedia info to tie it all together.
    • I know, I know.. wikipedia isn’t the most reliable source. You are correct… but I’m not doing this for money or a grade in a class or anything. I’m just here to tell mostly-accurate stories LOL

Edward John Louis Paisnel[1] (1925 – 1994)

Edward Paisnel was born in 1925. While the exact date and location of his birth are unclear, the Brit came from a family of means. He was barely a teenager when the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in 1939 and was at one point briefly imprisoned for stealing food to give to starving families.

– Throughout the 1960s, Edward Paisnel appeared to be a pillar of his small community on the English Channel Island of Jersey. He was a family man who was devoted to his wife Joan and her young children, and he even played Santa Claus at Christmastime for the young foster children at the group home that Joan founded.

But when he wasn’t spending time with his family or doing good deeds, he was donning this mask and sneaking into his neighbors’ homes at night in order to assault and rape women and children.⁠

Dubbed the Beast of Jersey, Edward Paisnel was a notorious sex offender who terrorised the Channel Island of Jersey between 1957 and 1971. He entered homes at night dressed in a rubber mask and nail-studded wristlets, attacking women and children.

During the Beast of Jersey’s crime spree There were no alarm systems at the time and hardly any policemen at hand. Home telephones were easily destroyed by a cut of the cord.

Paisnel’s crimes began in early 1957, long before he garnered his infamous moniker or donned the Beast of Jersey mask. With a scarf over his face, the 32-year-old approached a young woman waiting for a bus in the Monte a L’abbe district and tied a rope around her neck. He forced her to a nearby field, raped her, and fled.

Targeting bus stops and using isolated fields became his modus operandi. Paisnel assaulted a 20-year-old woman in the same manner in March. He repeated this in July, then again in October 1959. All of his victims described their attacker as having a “musty” stench. Within a year, that smell wafted into homes.

It was Valentine’s Day 1960 when a 12-year-old boy awoke to find a man in his bedroom. The intruder used a rope to force him outside and into a nearby field to sodomize him. In March, a woman at a bus stop asked a man parked nearby if he could give her a ride. It was Paisnel — who drove her to a field and raped her.

He targeted a 43-year-old woman’s remote cottage next. She was awoken by alarming noise at 1:30 a.m. and tried calling the police, but Paisnel had cut the phone lines. Though he violently confronted her, she was able to escape and find help. She returned to find him gone, and her 14-year-old daughter left behind raped.

Paisnel began exclusively targeting children at this point, invading a 14-year-old’s bedroom in April. She awoke to find him watching her from the shadows, but screamed so loud that he fled. An 8-year-old boy in July, meanwhile, was taken from his room and raped in a field only for Paisnel himself to walk the boy back home.

It took long enough, but police began questioning all residents with criminal records. With 13 of them including Paisnel refusing to provide fingerprints, the suspect list had narrowed. Police believed a fisherman named Alphonse Le Gastelois was their man, although the only evidence they had was that he was a known eccentric.

Suspicion for the attacks initially fell on eccentric agricultural worker and fisherman Alphonse Le Gastelois, who was arrested but released through lack of evidence. Public suspicion remained so strong, however, that Le Gastelois’ cottage was burnt down in an act of arson. Le Gastelois, fearing for his life, fled to Les Écréhous where he spent 14 years in self-imposed exile on La Marmotière as the second self-styled king of the Écréhous despite being cleared of suspicion when the attacks of the Beast of Jersey continued unabated.

The rapist was estimated to be between 40 and 45 years old, five feet and six inches tall, wearing either a mask or scarf. He smelled terrible and attacked between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. He invaded homes through bedroom windows and used a flashlight. Curiously, the Beast of Jersey soon vanished — only to return in 1963.

After two years of radio silence, the Beast of Jersey resurfaced. Between April and November 1963 he raped and sodomized four girls and boys he had snatched from their bedrooms. While he yet again disappeared for another two years, a letter appeared at the Jersey police station in 1966, taunting police.

It chastised investigators for being incompetent while proudly proclaiming that the author had committed the perfect crime. It also stated that this wasn’t satisfying enough and that two more people would be victimized. That August, a 15-year-old girl was snatched from her home, raped, and covered in scratches.

The same exact thing happened to a 14-year-old boy in August 1970 — and the boy told police the attacker wore a mask. Fortunately, the Beast of Jersey mask would never be donned again, as 46-year-old Paisnel was pulled over for running a red light in a stolen car in the St. Helier district on July 10, 1971.


⁠
It would take more than a decade for police to finally catch up with the “Beast of Jersey” as they repeatedly focused on other suspects, blind to the fact that a man like Paisnel could commit such crimes.

On 17 July 1971 Edward Paisnel was stopped by the police after running a red traffic light and then attempting to evade police pursuit. In the car, which he had stolen earlier that evening, police discovered several pointed sticks and elements of his “Beast” costume. In December 1971 he was convicted of 13 counts of assault, rape and sodomy and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Police found a black wig, cords, tape, and an ominous mask inside. Paisnel wore a raincoat with nails fitted on the cuffs and shoulders, and had a flashlight on his person. He claimed he was on his way to an orgy — but he was taken into custody instead.

A search of his home yielded a hidden room with photographs of local properties, a sword, and an altar covered with books on the occult and black magic. Paisnel’s trial began on November 29. It took a mere 38 minutes of deliberation for the jury to find him guilty.

Convicted of 13 counts of rape, sexual assault, and sodomy against six of his victims, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Disturbingly, Edward Paisnel was released for good behavior in 1991, but died of a heart attack three years later. To this day, evidence of his abuses at various children’s homes continues to surface.

Paisnel was released in 1991 but died of a heart attack in 1994.

His wife, Joan Paisnel, was the founder of a community home in Jersey where, at her request, he once played Santa Claus.

In 1972 his wife Joan Paisnel wrote the book The Beast of Jersey (published by NEL Paperbacks, ISBN 0-450017-17-6).

After the trial, freelance journalist Alan Shadrake became Joan Paisnel’s literary agent, and ghost-wrote a first person article with John Lisners which was published in the Sunday Mirror under the title “The Beauty & the Beast” with a photograph of Mrs Paisnel, in a ballet dance pose in white, and a police photo of her husband wearing the horrific mask which he wore when he kidnapped and assaulted his victims. One source, however, reports that at the trial it was stated that Paisnel never wore the mask during his attacks.

CREDIT:


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Harmonist Rappites

Content below is from #186 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend you watch Love Has Won.
    • It is currently on HBO Max. It is a limited series with only 3 episodes (all of which are currently streaming).
    • Here is the wikipedia explanation of the organization Love Has Won… not a summary of the doc
      • Love Has Won is an American new religious movement which was led by Amy Carlson, referred to within the group as “Mother God”, who described herself, among other things, as the creator of the universe. The group has been described as a cult by many, including ex-members and media outlets
    • And here is how I pitched it to my buddies who also enjoy cult documentaries:
      • “a cult. Lady thinks she is GOD. and recruits ppl to join her in a cabin where they peddle fake medicine and do drugs all day. That’s all I’ll say without ruining anything”
  • I must thank my sister Cas for suggesting I watch this series. I binged it in one night!
  • I just watched this 3 part series last night and it ties in PERFECTLy to this week’s main event
    • There are a good amount of similarities between this 21st-century cult Love Has Won and this week’s main event… which is based on a cult from the 18th century
    • They might be over 200 years apart, but a cult is a cult I suppose LOL

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • This week is about the Harmonist Rappites, or The Harmony Society
    • A cult founded in the 1700’s in Germany and settled in a town very close to my house.
    • I have some paintings on the blog of their leader and while I may not agree with the man’s lifestyle choices… I DAMN SURE love his look.
    • this dude pulls off a BALLER 18th century santa vibe and I’m digging it
  • Johann Georg Rapp was born in 1757
    • In the 1780s he and his adopted son Frederick founded The Harmony Society in Württemburg, Germany.
    • The society was made up of Anabaptist Christians who weren’t accepted by other Lutheran churches.
      • Anabaptist just means they were Christians who believed that baptism as a baby doesn’t count…
        • It gets super complicated, but there are all sorts of anabaptist sects out there from the Amish to church my wife belongs to
        • The term “Anabaptist” literally means “re-baptizer.” Their opponents gave them this name when they began administering adult baptism to one another, believing that their baptism as infants was not an authentic form of baptism.
    • So in 1803 they packed up and immigrated from Germany to Butler Pennsylvania
      • … a hop and a skip away from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania… so like, really close to where I live.
      • I’ve been to this place a couple of times and I was surprised to learn about its history.
  • The Harmonist Rappites hoped to find religious freedom in their new home of Butler PA.
    • They bought 3,000 acres of land and started a colony. They called it Harmony.
    • They regarded the Christian Bible as the one and only authority over humanity.
      • Meaning, they didn’t give a hoot about what their local government had to say… which typically leads to conflict.
  • It was February 15th of 1805 that Harmony Pennsylvania became official. The articles of association were signed officially recognizing The Harmony Society in the US.
    • This official document decreed that The Harmony Society members (the Harmonist Rappites) would pool their money together to make about $23,000 for the society to maintain livestock, tools, land, and other essential goods.
  • Here’s where it starts to get culty…
    • The members of The Harmony Society were expected to give away all their possessions to the society…
      • A typical trait of cults: Give all your worldly posessions (especially money) to the movement. What do you as individuals need money for when the second coming is gonna happen any day now?
    • They pledged to promote The Harmony Society and all its interests (AKA the leader Johann Rapp’s interests).
    • And they had to agree to not be paid for any of their work…
      • THAT’S CULT STUFF RIGHT THERE
      • Fully submit and dedicate your entire life to this movement… or we won’t accept you as one of us
    • To the Harmonist Rappites credit, they DID take care of their own.
      • As long as a member lived (even into old age, long after they could work) they would be cared for
      • AND, here’s the biggest un-culty thing, if a member left the society, they would receive all their money back that they paid into it (without interest.
      • EVEN if a member didn’t contribute anything (because some joined while poor) they would still be given a small amount of money when they left
      • That sounds nice, but when you consider the fact that they all were expected to work for ZERO pay… it just comes off as FAIR at-best
  • So what was life like as a Harmonist Rappite?
    • Well the founder Johann Georg Rapp was the head honcho
      • In true culty manner, he went as Father Rapp
        • Nothing says Cult Leader like having your followers address you as FATHER
      • Johann was the #1 guy for anything spiritual. The rest of the Harmonists went to him for advice on everyday stuff, confession, and general council (therapy sort-of).
    • Daddy Rapp’s adopted son Frederick was the Society’s financial dude
      • Anything pertaining to money, business, commercial traide, etc. went through Frederick and only Frederick…
        • This is another Cult quality. One dude who is VERY close to the leader handles all the money
    • Every member of The Harmony Society was supposed to believe every word Daddy Johann Rapp said.
      • If he or Frederick said anything pertaining to their spiritual or material lives (AKA virtually any facet of their lives) every member was expected to believe and obey those words completely
    • And Daddy Rapp didn’t have some simple word on spirituality… no, the dude had LOTS of decrees, big ones
      • The biggest being one being that the Second Coming of Christ would happen during his lifetime.
        • This is perhaps one of the biggest cult cliches: The world will end within our lifetimes because we are super important and ONLY this group will be the chosen ones!
          • This sort of decree appeals to people’s desire to be special… that’s why people fall for it and have fallen for it for as long as history has existed… this week’s recommendation segment about the Love Has Won cult has similar tones and that stuff went down in the 2010s and 2020s
      • Just a brief summary of what the Second Coming is:
        • The Second Coming is the Christian and Islamic belief that Jesus will return to Earth after his ascension to heaven. The idea is based on messianic prophecies and is part of most Christian eschatologies. Other faiths have various interpretations of it
        • Those various interpretations almost always involve Jesus’s second coming co-insiding with the end of the world.
        • Every generation of people has always had a large portion of the population who thought the world would end during their lifetime… LOL
        • From what my memory can piece together from my Bible School days, Jesus returns and has a bare-knuckle fight with the antichrist. All souls either ascend to heaven or stay on earth to suffer for an eternity… keep in mind, I’m no Biblical scholar LOL
    • Daddy Rapp basically said “hey, Christ is going to come back and when he does, he is going to pick only the most righteous of us to follow him to heaven so we gotta be SUPER boring during our time here on Earth.”
      • His followers had to give up every sinful thing there is to follow Daddy Rapp’s strict religious doctrine. No Tobacco, no sex* (we will get to the asterix soon LOL)… basically no fun/sinful stuff. You know, all the stuff that makes life worth living IMO
    • And here is a sentence from the VCU’s Library website that isn’t super clear:

“They believed that the harmony of male and female elements in humanity would be re-established by their efforts.”

  • Let me tell you what I think that means…
    • They didn’t have sex. They practiced celibacy right… but they hoped that by living a SUPER “righteous” lifestyle, that somehow god would bestow their Society with peace and some way to procreate…
      • AND here is where I think old Daddy Rapp and his son Frederick were slinging on the side.
      • Now hear me out, I’m not basing this off nothing. another cliche cult thing is for the leader(s) to sexually take advantage of their followers.
      • I think Johann Georg Rapp told all his followers to not have sex… while he himself was banging ALL of the women himself… I mean, how else did they have kids to keep the society going?
  • Another way they kept their numbers up was recruitment.
    • Daddy Rapp would let new members in on a trial basis and usually after a year he would let them become full-fledge members of his super boring sexless, tobaccoless, and funless society.
    • But while there were a bunch of Anabaptist joining their ranks (particularly a bunch of people from Germany).
      • other groups of Anabaptist from Germany turned out to be the Amish… Like I said early, its complicated… there are THOUSANDS of different kinds of Christians… its such an old religion
    • But while new people were coming in to the society, there were a bunch of members who found the lifestyle too difficult to follow and would leave.
    • It was in 1807 when the whole Celibacy stuff was being touted by Daddy Rapp. He didn’t make it a requirement, but it was HEAVILY suggested that no one get married/have kids
      • One of Daddy Rapp’s sons Johannes got married in 1807 and there wouldn’t be another marriage in the town of Harmony Pennsylvania until over a decade later in 1817… how depressing.
      • Even when people did get married, they had VERY little kids.
View of Frederick Rapp House in Harmony Historic District in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Photograph by Stanley E. Whiting, Harmonist & Historical Memorial Association, Harmony, Pennsylvania, National Register collection
View of Frederick Rapp House in Harmony Historic District in Butler County, Pennsylvania.
Photograph by Stanley E. Whiting, Harmonist & Historical Memorial Association, Harmony, Pennsylvania, National Register collection
  • Since all the Harmonist Rappites couldn’t distract themselves with any fun/sinful stuff… they burried themselves in their work
    • These people kicked ass at working hard and under Frederick Rapp’s commercial guidance they went from a subsistence farming community to a diverse manufacturing society in no time.
  • By 1811 their numbers had hit 800.
    • they were in the farming business as well as many other various trades
    • They weren’t trying to turn a profit, but with nothing else fun to do, they did just that. Their finances improved and the town was flourishing. It had an inn, tannery, warehouses, brewery, a bunch of mills, stables, barns, church, school, extra housing, a “labyrinth” (lol), and a bunch of different workshops to support all the different trades they were involved in.
      • Sounds like a nice place to live actually.
      • They even expanded to have vineyards and crops.
      • They produced yarn and cloth goods
    • By 1814 their numbers were around 700
      • The town had about 130 buildings which included processing plants.
      • Word spread that these goofy looking Harmonist Rappites made good quality stuff. Their woolens, textiles, wine, and whisky were known for being exceptionally high quality.
        • I bash them for having no fun, but if they were cranking out beer, wine, and whisky… who knows!
  • From VCU’s Library website :

Several factors led to the Harmonists’ decision to leave Butler County. Because the area’s climate was not suitable, they had difficulties growing grapes for wine. In addition, as westward migration brought new settlers to the county, making it less isolated, the Harmonists began having troubles with neighbors who were not part of the Society. Butler County’s growing population and rising land prices made it difficult for the Society to expand, causing the group’s leaders to look for more land elsewhere. Once land had been located that offered a better climate and room to expand, the group began plans to move. In 1814 the Harmonites sold their first settlement to Abraham Ziegler, a Mennonite, for $100,000 and moved west to make a new life for themselves in the Indiana Territory.

After selling all their holdings they moved to a new location on the Wabash River in Indiana. Here again they built a prosperous community, New Harmony (now a National Historic Landmark), only to sell it to Robert Owen, a social reformer from New Lanark, Scotland, and his financial partner, William Maclure, in 1825. The Harmonists next returned to Pennsylvania and built their final home at Economy (now called Old Economy and recognized as a National Historic Landmark), in Ambridge on the Ohio River.

  • Daddy Rapp was the founder of The Harmony Society and he is what kept the group together. Everyone came to him for practically everything.
    • This society had gone from Germany, to Butler PA, to Indiana, and finally to Ambridge PA (a town even closer to where I live). That sort of uprooting over and over again would destroy most groups, but because Johann Georg Rapp was there, they stuck together…
    • Until he died.
    • After Daddy Rapp dies in 1847 a bunch of members left the cult.
      • They were understandably pissed that their leader’s prophecy that the Second Coming would occur during his life time did NOT happen. Disappointment and disillusionment started to fracture the group.
    • But a number of members remained… LOL. They couldn’t face the fact that their cult leader had lied to them. Instead of face their delusions, they doubled down!
    • The Harmony Society grew their profitable business community. Their new leaders Romelius L. Baker and Jacob Henrici turned out to be two driven businessmen.
  • With their sights aimed more at profits instead of spirituality, the group also started to close itself off to new members. Recruitment was a thing of the past.
    • And while strict rules such as celibacy were fading within the group, a century of very low childbirths and lack of recruitment dwindled the Harmony Society’s numbers.
  • The Harmony Society reached its peak of financial power and prosperity in the year 1866.
    • But it was a quick decline after that. With such a large number of their members being old and those senior members increasing trying to cash in on the whole “we’ll take care of you for your entire life” policy… the group was hurting.

The surviving buildings of the first settlement in Harmony, with their sturdy, simple brick dwellings, the Great House with its arched wine cellar, and the imposing cemetery and original town plan are today a National Historic Landmark named the Harmony Historic District.

The land and financial assets of the Harmony Society were sold off by the few remaining members under the leadership of John Duss and his wife, Susanna, by the year 1906.

Today, many of the Society’s remaining buildings are preserved; all three of their settlements in the United States have been declared National Historic Landmark Districts by the National Park Service.

CREDIT:

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Hubble

Content below is from #185 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend Netflix’s The Killer starring Michael Fassbender
    • Solitary, cold, methodical and unencumbered by scruples or regrets, a killer waits in the shadows, watching for his next target. Yet, the longer he waits, the more he thinks he’s losing his mind, if not his cool.
  • I watched a show and movie critic I find amusing on YouTube, the Critical Drinker analyze this movie and I think he had a great point… it ain’t what you’d expect.
    • I knew from the trailer, that The Killer would be about an assassin. So I expected James Bond type stuff with high tech gadgets, slick martial arts, cool fast-paced writing, and for the main guy to get the girl… right?
    • Nope, The Killer is about a practical, seemingly unfeeling contract killer doing his job in the most efficient way possible.
      • He dresses like a dweeb, uses low-tech tools that get the job done, and as the first line of the movie suggests, does a lot of waiting.
        • “It’s amazing how physically exhausting it can be to do nothing. If you are unable to endure boredom, this work is not for you.”
      • That opening line got the message across that this isn’t your typical assassin move and hooked me right away.
  • So that’s why I recommend you watch The Killer

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • Edwin HUBBLE the man.
    • Born on the Ozarks (November 20, 1889 [about 10 years after Einstein] in Marshfield Missouri, raised in a suburb of Chicago.
    • He was the Son of an insurance exec, so a rich kid with a silver spoon in his mouth.
    • He was Athletic as all hell, good looking, and he knew it.
      • His colleagues said he was too good looking for his own good and it got him into trouble.
    • Won 7 gold medals in 1 track meet.
      • He won seven first places and a third place in a single high school track and field meet in 1906. That year he also set the state high school record for the high jump in Illinois. Another of his personal interests was dry-fly fishing, and he practiced amateur boxing as well.
    • He said that along with being devilishly good-looking, wealthy, and absurdly athletic, he constantly boasted about all of his astonishing acts of valor and manliness that he did all the time.
      • He said he saved many lives of men on the battlefields of France in WW1
      • He said he saved several lives from drowning as he was such a good swimmer.
      • He said he had a habbit of knocking out world-class boxers in exhibition matches…
      • This was all malarky. LOL He made it all up.
      • Edwin Hubble had a massive ego.
    • One of the funniest parts about him from the book I read (A Brief History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson), said Had a fake British accent that wasn’t quite British lol. Like he wanted to sound almost knightly, but it was like an American’s idea of a British accent.
      • He somehow picked it up (or fabricated) the accent in college when he was still a teenager… and unlike most ppl who pick up douchey full-of-ourselves traits when we are younger… Hubble never left the fake British accent behind LOL
    • He said he spent the 1910s studying law in Kentucky to become a distinguished lawyer… but he was actually a high school teacher in Albany Indiana lol.
      • Not that there is anything wrong with being a high school teacher, on the contrary, teachers shape the world’s youth and future generations on how to see the world. I have the utmost respect for teachers…
      • But its the fact that he lied about it that cracks me up.
      • As if Lawyers have better reputations that teachers
    • Although I said he lied about saving many lives in WW1, it is true he served in the Great War.
      • Shipped to France 1 month before ww1 armistice. Saw no action so the whole “saved men from the battlefield” thing was poppy cock.
  • Hubble the Astronomer
    • Went to Mt. WILSON observatory near LA in 1919.
    • In 1919, Hubble was offered a staff position at the Carnegie Institution for Science‘s Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, California, by George Ellery Hale, the founder and director of the observatory. Hubble remained on staff at Mount Wilson until his death in 1953. Shortly before his death, Hubble became the first astronomer to use the newly completed giant 200-inch (5.1 m) reflector Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California.
    • We now know there are 140 Billion galaxies.
      • BUT, At this time when Hubble started astronomy in 1919, we only knew of 1 galaxy… our own Milky Way.
    • Everything else astronomers saw was thought to be a puff of gas on the periphery (what they called a Nebula) or part of the Milky Way itself…
    • Hubble proved all that to be wrong.
    • For the next decade he set out to answer 2 big questions:
      • 1 How old is the universe?
      • 2 how big is it?
      • He had to figure out how far other galaxies were and how fast they were traveling away. He measured their light compared to known stars’ distance.
  • Hubble proved that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as “nebulae” were actually galaxies beyond the Milky Way.
    • In 1923 he discovered galaxies thought to be a puff of gas by previous astronomers.
    • He used the strong direct relationship between a classical Cepheid variable‘s luminosity and pulsation period for scaling galactic and extragalactic distances.
    • This Cepheid variable luminosity and pulsation period scaling was discovered in 1908 by a one Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a female astronomer.
      • He had the help of a female astronomer. You see Female astronomers were required to work under male astronomers… unfortunate how sexist that rule was at the time, but had an unexpected benefit. The female mind was able to interpret the cosmos in ways that males just didn’t seem to grasp.
    • Leavitt helped Hubble measure distance with these Cepheid stars.
      • Stars that pulse like these are rare, but we have a rather well-known one: Polaris. They are red giants, old stars that burn their Helium ion fuel in a way that pulses from dim to bright. This reliable pulsing was a measurement tool used by Hubble to guage distance in the void of space to date the universe. It was a relative measurement, but the best way to age the universe.
      • This is (a summarized version) of how he figured out how far away the galaxies were, and how old the observable universe is.
  • Hubble provided evidence that the recessional velocity of a galaxy increases with its distance from Earth, a property now known as Hubble’s law, although it had been proposed two years earlier by Georges Lemaître.
    • The Hubble law implies that the universe is expanding.A decade before, the American astronomer Vesto Slipher (yes… that was his real name… another Badass name) had provided the first evidence that the light from many of these nebulae was strongly red-shifted, indicative of high recession velocities…
    • What the heck does that mean?
    • In 1924 he wrote a paper about Nebulas and how vast the Universe must be with that amount of galaxies out there.
    • Then discovered they were all moving away from us… and their distance and speed was proportional.. the farther they were, the faster they were going away from us… Trippy stuff huh?
    • This blew ppls minds!!!
      • And Hubble, he was sort of known for not knowing the gravity of his discoveries or much about fields outside his own. By 1924, Einstein’s theory of relativity was world-famous… yet Hubble hadn’t heard a peep about it LOL
  • But like I said, the fact that there are so many other galaxies out there started to make big news.
    • The stuff in telescopes that people thought were unremarkable smudges or clouds turned out to be entire galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each of them!
      • When big brain scientists think about the future of our species, I’m talking thousands or millions of years in the future with tons of exciting new technologies… they still don’t think Humanity will ever be able to journey beyond our own Galaxy… its just too damn big!
      • And before Hubble we thought, “well damn, 100 billions stars, a space so vast that even Science Fiction writers don’t dare to venture beyond… thats enough. Makes sense that the Milky Way is all there is…”
      • Then Hubble comes along with proof that “no… the Milky way ain’t all there is… in fact… there are A LOT more galaxies out there.” It was the greatest discovery.
    • And then he was able to to say how far away they were AND that they were exponentially moving faster away from us… meaning… the universe was expanding…
      • This implied the universe had a beginning… which is huge on its own, but then everyone’s next thought was… “wait… so there is probably and end too!”
  • Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Catholic Priest, theoretical physicist, mathmetician, astronomer, and professor of physics was the one who theorized that galaxies were moving away from each other and that the universe was expanding, even before Hubble was able to actually observe it.
    • He was the first to theorize that the recession of nearby galaxies can be explained by an expanding universe,[2] which was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble. He first derived “Hubble’s law”, now called the Hubble–Lemaître law by the IAU, and published the first estimation of the Hubble constant in 1927, two years before Hubble’s article. Lemaître also proposed the “Big Bang theory” of the origin of the universe, calling it the “hypothesis of the primeval atom“, and later calling it “the beginning of the world”
    • He combined Hubble’s discoveries with Einsteins’ theory of relativity to suggest the universe was at one point a single point (singularity) that suddenly expanded to make the known universe (what we now call the big bang)… but his idea wasn’t accepted by the public as we do today, as the big bang.
  • That is until many decades later when a couple of grad students in Phoenix Arizona were trying to listen to cosmic noise with a radio telescope, but kept picking up an annoying hum…
    • In 1964, when Robert W. Wilson and Arno A. Penzias initially heard those astonishing radio signals that would lead to the first confirmed proof for the Big Bang Theory, they wondered if they had made a mistake. Was the signal actually radio noise from nearby New York City? Was it the after-effects of a nuclear bomb test that had been conducted over the Pacific several years earlier? Could it be a signal from the Van Allen belts, those giant rings of charged radiation circling the Earth?   
      • Or maybe, the hissing sound was the result of a defect in their instrument?
    • They thought it was a leak in their equipment. So they duck taped and cleaned everything ad.nauseum… They even re-constructed part of the radio telescope… but still the noise persisted.
      • At one point, new suspects emerged. Two pigeons had set up housekeeping inside the guts of the antenna. Maybe their droppings were causing the noise? Wilson and Penzias had the birds trapped and then cleaned the equipment, but the signals continued.   
    • They eventually realized the sound they heard was the cosmic after shock of rhe big bang. It was energy that traveled from the beginning of time as we know it and through all that time and distance decayed into radiation.
      • After a year of experiments, the scientists concluded that they’d detected the cosmic background radiation, an echo of the universe at a very early moment after its birth.
      • “We started out seeking a halo around the Milky Way and we found something else,” notes Dr. Wilson. “When an experiment goes wrong, it’s usually the best thing. The thing we did see was much more important than what we were looking for. This was really the start of modern cosmology.” In fact, Wilson and Penzias were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 for determining that the hiss they were hearing wasn’t pigeon poop at all, but the faint whisper of the Big Bang, or the after glow that astronomers call the cosmic microwave background.
  • This background radiation from the Big Bang isn’t EVERYWHERE like some omnipresent radiation thing, but you’ve surely encountered it many times in your life.
    • The gray static our TVs used to display in between channels… that’s your TV picking up the big bang radiation (or at least 10% of that static is from the big bang).
      • “What’s in TV today?… oh not much… just the creation of everything”
    • As I was listening to Bill Bryson’s “A Brief History of Nearly Everything”, it started this part with Hubbles backstory.
      • As the book talked about what arrogant, egotistical, dishonest doucher he was, I thought “why the hell did we name one of the greatest space telescopes (Hubble Telescope) after this guy!?!?”
      • But it makes sense. He was human… like the rest of us and that doesn’t change what he contributed to our knowledge of this reality
  • A side story, a little fun fact I found on Wikipedia that I did not know about Hubble:
    • Hubble also worked as a civilian for U.S. Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland during World War II as the Chief of the External Ballistics Branch of the Ballistics Research Laboratory during which he directed a large volume of research in exterior ballistics which increased the effective firepower of bombs and projectiles. His work was facilitated by his personal development of several items of equipment for the instrumentation used in exterior ballistics, the most outstanding development being the high-speed clock camera, which made possible the study of the characteristics of bombs and low-velocity projectiles in flight. The results of his studies were credited with greatly improving the design, performance, and military effectiveness of bombs and rockets. For his work there, he received the Legion of Merit award.

CREDIT:

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War Poetry

Content below is from #184 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

UPDATE

  • Rabies Update
    • Episode #178 was about the Rabies virus, how it scares the hell out of me and should scare you too.
    • Well recently I played #319 of This American Life podcast (great pod by the way) and the first part was about a woman’s experience with Rabies.
      • There were some VERY important points made on their pod that I didn’t mention on my rabies pod so here we are.
      • This American Life #319 is called “And the Call Was Coming from the Basement”
    • If you are bitten by an animal that has rabies… you have only 72 hours to get the rabies vaccine. DON’T WAIT
    • Bats can bite you while you are sleeping without you knowing and leave no mark which could transfer rabies.
      • So if you wake up with a crazy bat in the room you were sleeping in, catch the bat and get it tested. If you can’t catch the bat… go to the hospital to test yourself.
        • That sounds excessive… but the rabies virus is horrible and the risk makes all of these precautions worthwhile.
    • Some hospitals (like the one in This American Life’s podcast) don’t take rabies seriously. They don’t regard it as an emergency.
      • They might mistakenly tell you that you have weeks to get the vaccine… YOU DON’T HAVE WEEKS. GET IT TAKEN CARE OF NOW
  • I also recently had a nightmare where I got rabies and it woke me up in a cold sweat. It was horrifying.
    • So…. yeah, I may have given myself a nightmare-inducing fear because I researched rabies to make my podcast episode LOL

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend the movie Violent Night
    • here’s the plot:
      • An elite team of mercenaries breaks into a family compound on Christmas Eve, taking everyone hostage inside. However, they aren’t prepared for a surprise combatant: Santa Claus is on the grounds, and he’s about to show why this Nick is no saint.
    • Shannon and I sat down to watch a movie and she asked if we could watch a Christmas movie…
      • I groaned “No… because it will be some movie we’ve watched a billion times and that will bore the hell out of me…”
      • But I’m glad I chose Violent Night. It was mostly original (sort of like Die Hard, but it was properly Christmas-themed instead of just lightly Christmas-themed).
      • It was funny, action-packed, and gave old Santa a badass backstory.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • I was scrolling through facebook reels yesterday and came across Michael Sheen reading Y Gododdin, an old Welsh poem from the medieval period about Welsh soldiers charging off to battle.
    • It reminded me of the Charge of the Light Brigade and how much awe that poem inspired in me.
    • And so I went down a rabbit hole of War Poetry.
    • I am not the biggest poetry fan. I just haven’t spent much time studying or writing poetry… but I do remember having a distinct fondness for it as a small boy.
    • Well, reading/listening to these poems yesterday was a moving experience.
    • So I wanted to share some of the poems I listened to yesterday with you now, along with some of the history behind them.
  • Here are 3 poems that stuck out:

Charge of the Light Brigade

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

I

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said.

Into the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

II

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

   Someone had blundered.

   Theirs not to make reply,

   Theirs not to reason why,

   Theirs but to do and die.

   Into the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

III

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

   Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell

   Rode the six hundred.

IV

Flashed all their sabres bare,

Flashed as they turned in air

Sabring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

   All the world wondered.

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right through the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reeled from the sabre stroke

   Shattered and sundered.

Then they rode back, but not

   Not the six hundred.

V

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

   Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell.

They that had fought so well

Came through the jaws of Death,

Back from the mouth of hell,

All that was left of them,

   Left of six hundred.

VI

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

   All the world wondered.

Honour the charge they made!

Honour the Light Brigade,

   Noble six hundred!

(Oct. 25 [Oct. 13, Old Style], 1854) The poem is about a disastrous British cavalry charge against heavily defended Russian troops at the Battle of Balaklava (1854) during the Crimean War (1853-56). The suicidal attack was made famous by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his 1855 poem of the same name. Military historians and strategists continue to study the attack to underscore the importance of military intelligence and a clear chain of command and communication. 

The poem recounts an assault by a brigade of British cavalry under the command of Lord James Thomas Brudenell, Earl of Cardigan, which cost the lives of 113 men and injured 143 others. The charge took place at the Battle of Balaclava, during Britain’s war with Russia in the Crimea in the mid 19th century. The charge was regarded as one of the most heroic yet futile assaults in British military history, and was instantly the subject of speculation back home.

The Crimean war, which lasted from 1853-1856, was an example of a war caused entirely by the imperialstic agenda of the major powers involved. With the Turkish (Ottaman) empire in serious decline, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia anticipated its inevitable collapse, and thus took measures to ensure that when it did, Russia would not be deprived of certain valuable territories in the Balkan area. Russia had long been in conflict with the Turkish empire, so this atmosphere was nothing new to the region (Warner, 6). However, Britain and France, both with interests of their own in the territory, were not prepared to allow Russia to muscle in on the region unopposed. Britain supported the Turkish empire (their preservation was taken as essential in protecting trade and lines of communication with their Asian and Indian colonies), and thus came to Turkey’s aid when the confict began. Although the war would conclude with a compramising treaty in 1856, the three years of fighting exposed the British army as ill-equiped and disorganized, and likewise exposed the Russian army as backward and inferior (Warner, 211-213).

Tennyson, like many other Brits at the time, was inspired by the tale of altruistic sacrifice on the part of the Light Brigade. Their action was seen as a defining example of honor and bravery in the face of hopelessness. Their charge, a result of misinformation and miscommunication on the part of British intelligence, both illuminated the British military’s shortcomings and inspired all those around them. This is precisely what Tennyson attempts to capture in Charge of the Light Brigade. The poem was written both as a commemoration to the soldiers and as a testament to the horrors of war. Tennyson was known to have two contrasting styles in his writing. He wrote pieces like Light Brigade in a short period of time, as a reflection of immediate reaction and emotion. On the other hand, epics like his Idylls of the King were written over long periods of time with meticulous attention paid to detail and composition. These two contrasting styles made themselves evident in his poetry. Light Brigade is said to have been written immediately upon hearing the news of the attack.

  • The Light Brigade were given an order to charge down a valley toward a heavily defended Russian position.
    • They knew it was suicide and they knew it didn’t make sense, at least not from their perspective. they were told to charge with Cannons firing from literally all directions. The order came from a complete miscommunication from their superior officers.
    • Had their command known what was going on, no one would have given the Light Brigade their death order… but when they got the order… they obeyed.

Someone had blundered.

   Theirs not to make reply,

   Theirs not to reason why,

   Theirs but to do and die.

   Into the valley of Death

   Rode the six hundred.

  • I love this poem and so do many people. It is one of the most famous poems out there…
    • And while it sounds cool and insights bravery… the other blaring perspective is that these men died for NOTHING
  • While The Charge of the Light Brigade hints at the folly and horrors of war, it ultimately shines upon the epicness of war.
    • Tennyson ultimately sells war as a glory trip….
    • but that’s not the case for the rest of this episodes poems…

Dulce et Decorum Est

BY WILFRED OWEN

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

-Source: Poems (Viking Press, 1921)

  • That latin at the end there “Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori” or the “old Lie”, as Owen describes it – is a quotation from the Odes of the Roman poet Horace, in which it is claimed that “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”
    • This was a poem written during WW1, originally published in 1920, published posthumously.
    • Wilfred Owen enlisted in 1915 and by 1916 was on the front lines.
    • He wrote in 1918 that he had two reasons for joining the war: “I came out in order to help these boys—directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can.”
    • On April 1, 1917, near the town of St. Quentin, Owen led his platoon through an artillery barrage to the German trenches, only to discover when they arrived that the enemy had already withdrawn. Severely shaken and disoriented by the bombardment, Owen barely avoided being hit by an exploding shell, and returned to his base camp confused and stammering. A doctor diagnosed shell-shock, a new term used to describe the physical and/or psychological damage suffered by soldiers in combat. Though his commanding officer was skeptical, Owen was sent to a French hospital and subsequently returned to Britain, where he was checked into the Craiglockhart War Hospital for Neurasthenic Officers.
    • Owen’s time at Craiglockhart—one of the most famous hospitals used to treat victims of shell-shock—coincided with that of his great friend and fellow poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who became a major influence on his work. After their treatment, both men returned to active service in France,
    • Owen himself was a casualty of that senseless war.
      • On November 4, 1918, just one week before the armistice was declared, ending World War I, the British poet Wilfred Owen was killed in action.
      •  he was shot by a German machine-gunner during an unsuccessful British attempt to bridge the Sambre Canal, near the French village of Ors.
      • In his hometown of Shrewsbury, near the Welsh border, his mother did not receive the telegraphed news of her son’s death until after the fighting had ended.
    • Now celebrated as one of the greatest English poets of the 20th century, Owen’s war poems were popularized in the 1960s when Benjamin Britten included nine of them in his War Requiem, dedicated to four friends who had been killed in World War II. The most famous of them, “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” is not only a memorial to those who died in the Great War of 1914-19, but a classic and timeless representation of the waste and sacrifice of war.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

BY WILFRED OWEN

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

      — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

      Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; 

      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

      The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

N/a

Source: The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Jon Stallworthy (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1986)

  • On that November day when Owens was gunned down in the war he found so horrifying… he was only 25 years old.
    • I read these poems and then read how Owens died… just 1 week before the fighting was over… and 25 just seems so young for those words.

CREDIT:

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Terrible Lizard

Content below is from #183 of Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend you check out the show Billions.
    • Wealth, influence and corruption collide in this drama set in New York. Shrewd U.S. attorney Chuck Rhoades is embroiled in a high-stakes game of predator vs. prey with Bobby Axelrod, an ambitious hedge-fund king. To date, Rhoades has never lost an insider trading case — he’s 81-0 — but when criminal evidence turns up against Axelrod, he proceeds cautiously in building the case against Axelrod, who employs Rhoades’ wife, psychiatrist Wendy, as a performance coach for his company. Wendy, who has been in her position longer than Chuck has been in his, refuses to give up her career for her husband’s legal crusade against Axelrod. Both men use their intelligence, power and influence to outmaneuver the other in this battle over billions. The high-profile cast is led by Emmy winner Paul Giamatti (“John Adams”) as Chuck Rhoades.
    • Shannon and I are currently watching it via Amazon Prime, but it is created by Showtime
    • The first 5 or so seasons are on Amazon and a bunch of other streaming platforms. It is addicting and we love it.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • The first thing my 4-year-old nephew says to me when I visit is either something about Spiderman or something about dinosaurs. He loves them.
    • He astonishingly tells me the names of obscure dinosaurs even though their names are several syllables long. This is typical for a little kid. They love dinosaurs, fascinated by them.
    • We adults most likely remember a time in our lives, long ago, when asking “what is your favorite dinosaur?” was common etiquette on the school playground.
  • We now think of Dinosaurs as a given. Everyone knows about them. Dinosaurs are featured in our movies, toys, museums, and even come in chicken nugget form.
    • That’s why it is hard for us to imagine a world where no one even knew they existed.
    • It wasn’t that long ago.
  • You see, the first dinosaur bones found were regarded as unremarkable. The first bone was found in New Jersey, but because no one seemed to care, the person who found it and the bone itself have been lost to history.
  • But then scientists became obsessed to figure out how old the Earth was.
    • The working estimation was about 20 Million years old, but that was based on Lord Kelvin (a titan in science) and his guestimations.
    • Until we started to find more and more fossilized bones of the megafauna and recognizing a pattern.
    • Geologists societies in England pointed out that there are different layers of Earth and that each layer contained different kinds of fossils.
    • So there was motivation to find as many of these ancient fossils as possible and document what layer of Earth they came from.
    • Scientists started to realize that if the Earth was merely 20 million years old, then these vast amounts of extinct species would have come into existence and become extinct virtually in the blink of an eye.
    • Eventually, they discovered the Earth is much older and now we know the Earth is 4.543 Billion years old… but our fascination with Dinosaurs didn’t stop there.
  • In comes one of the most famous figures from this Dinosaur discovery period in science. Sir Richard Owen.
    • I partially picked Owen to be this episode’s main topic because of his importance to the study of dinosaurs / paleontology (study of the history of the Earth based on fossils) and partially picked him because he was such an odd person.
    • He was by most accounts, a horrible person.

Sir Richard Owen  (20 July 1804 – 18 December 1892) was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and paleontologist. Owen is generally considered to have been an outstanding naturalist with a remarkable gift for interpreting fossils.

Owen produced a vast array of scientific work, but is probably best remembered today for coining the word Dinosauria (meaning “Terrible Reptile” or “Fearfully Great Reptile“). An outspoken critic of Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution by natural selection, Owen agreed with Darwin that evolution occurred but thought it was more complex than outlined in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Owen was the first president of the Microscopical Society of London in 1839 and edited many issues of its journal – then known as The Microscopic Journal. Owen also campaigned for the natural specimens in the British Museum to be given a new home. This resulted in the establishment, in 1881, of the now world-famous Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London. Bill Bryson argues in his book A Short History of Nearly Everything that, “by making the Natural History Museum an institution for everyone, Owen transformed our expectations of what museums are for.”

While he made several contributions to science and public learning, Owen was a controversial figure among his contemporaries, both for his disagreements on matters of common decency, and for accusations that he took credit for other people’s work.

  • He worked with reptiles early in his career. He would take skeletons of extinct reptile species and construct what the creature would have looked like.
    • His work was published in a series. History of British Fossil Reptiles (4 vols. London 1849–1884)
    • He published the first important general account of the great group of Mesozoic land-reptiles, and he coined the name Dinosauria from Greek δεινός (deinos) “terrible, powerful, wondrous” + σαύρος (sauros) “lizard”. Owen used 3 genera to define the dinosaurs: the carnivorous Megalosaurus, the herbivorous Iguanodon and armoured Hylaeosaurus‘, specimens uncovered in southern England.
  • Like his work with reptiles, he took dinosaur fossils and tried to reconstruct them similar to how we see dinosaur skeletons in museums today.
    • Humorously though, he didn’t have a reference like we do now and the results were all over the place.
    • Looking back on his first attempts, the thumb bones of dinosaurs would be placed on the head like a horn or bipedal species would have been depicted with 4 legs awkwardly.
  • Despite his mistakes, Owens is still regarded as one of the most talented people to construct the skeletons of these ancient extinct creatures.
    • He gained quite the reputation and was granted permission to have the freshly dead animals from the London Zoo. It was known as “right of first refusal.”
    • He would have all manner of species at his home for him to disect and tear apart to further his scientific understanding.
    • His wife once arrived home to find the carcass of a newly deceased rhinoceros in her front hallway.

He was the first director in Natural History Museum in London and his statue was in the main hall there until 2009, when it was replaced with a statue of Darwin. A bust of Owen by Alfred Gilbert (1896) is held in the Hunterian Museum, London.

  • But what I find more interesting is his personality.
    • He was described by his colleagues as a malicious, dishonest, and hateful person. … they all said that.
    • He was the only person that Charles Darwin adamantly hated.
    • He has been described in one biography as being a “social experimenter with a penchant for sadism. Addicted to controversy and driven by arrogance and jealousy”. 
    • Deborah Cadbury stated that Owen possessed an “almost fanatical egoism with a callous delight in savaging his critics.”
    • An Oxford University professor once described Owen as “a damned liar. He lied for God and for malice”.
    • Gideon Mantell (a tragedy story in his own right) claimed it was “a pity a man so talented should be so dastardly and envious”. 
    • Richard Broke Freeman described him as “the most distinguished vertebrate zoologist and palaeontologist … but a most deceitful and odious man”.
    •  Charles Darwin stated that “No one fact tells so strongly against Owen … as that he has never reared one pupil or follower.”
  • Owen claims to have discovered the Iguanodon. He told Georges Cuvier as much.
    • He failed to mention the man who actually discovered the Iguanadon and dedicated his entire life to paleontology Gideon Mantell.
    • Mantell’s entire life (financially and personally) was destroyed by his passion for paleontology, but Owen took all the credit.
    • Owen famously credited himself and Georges Cuvier with the discovery of the Iguanodon, completely excluding any credit for the original discoverer of the dinosaur, Gideon Mantell.
    • This was not the first or last time Owen would falsely claim a discovery as his own.
      • Gideon Mantell lost all of his money and his wife and kids left him.
      • He had discovered so much and contributed so much to Paleontology, but had nothing to show for it.
      • One day, after he had lost his mansion and family, Mantell was in an accident where his carriage hit something and startled his horses. They dragged him for about a mile at a gallop. It left him crippled and in chronic pain. His spine was twisted in ways thought unsurvivable at the time.
      • What did Owen do when he heard about his peer’s misfortune?
      • That’s when Owen started taking all of the credit away from Mantell
      • It has also been suggested by some authors that Owen even used his influence in the Royal Society to ensure that many of Mantell’s research papers were never published. Owen was finally dismissed from the Royal Society’s Zoological Council for plagiarism.
    • He tried to wipe Mantell’s work from the historic record.
    • But Owen didn’t stop there. He had Mantell’s deformed skeleton brought to his lab for study and put Mantell’s twisted spine on display at one of his museums…
    • Poor Gideon Mantell (the real discoverer of the Iguanodon) had his spine on display from the 1800’s until is was destroyed by the Nazis in WW2 during an air raid on Britain.
    • How did Mantell die? Owen drove him to suicide… as he did his own son.
  • Owen’s son described his father as having the “coldest of hearts” and a few days after saying so took his own life…
    • Owen was a monster.
Owen with his granddaughter Emily

Another reason for his criticism of the Origin, some historians claim, was that Owen felt upstaged by Darwin and supporters such as Huxley, and his judgment was clouded by jealousy. Owen in Darwin’s opinion was”Spiteful, extremely malignant, clever; the Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book is so talked about”. “It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me”.

Owen also resorted to the same subterfuge he used against Mantell, writing another anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review in April 1860. In the article, Owen was critical of Darwin for not offering many new observations, and heaped praise (in the third person) upon himself, while being careful not to associate any particular comment with his own name. Owen did praise, however, the Origin‘s description of Darwin’s work on insect behavior and pigeon breeding as “real gems”.

Caricature of an elderly Owen, captioned “Old Bones”, in the London magazine Vanity Fair, March 1873

Owen’s lost scientific standing was not due solely to his underhanded dealings with colleagues; it was also due to serious errors of scientific judgement that were discovered and publicized. A fine example was his decision to classify man in a separate subclass of the Mammalia (see Man’s place in nature). In this Owen had no supporters at all. Also, his unwillingness to come off the fence concerning evolution became increasingly damaging to his reputation as time went on. Owen continued working after his official retirement at the age of 79, but he never recovered the good opinions he had garnered in his younger days

  • I thought Owen was the paleontologist that asked for his bones to be the type specimen for the human race in his will.
    • That was NOT Owen, but instead Edward Drinker Cope
    • Quick little side story here because I find it fascinating.
    • Cope and Marsh were two paleontologists that had a bitter rivalry with each other. Obsessed with outdoing one another, they discovered hundreds of new dinosaur species in America.
    • Towards the end of their rivalry, ED Cope was poor and unwell. He asked to have his bones be the type specimen for homo sapiens.
      • Typically the type specimen for a species would be the first fossil discovered. So the first T-Rex bones found became the type specimen.
      • Well we don’t have the first human bones ever found so there was no official type specimen for mankind.
      • This is what ED Cope was asking his bones be used for to sort of immortalize himself.
      • While it was a weird request, no one seemed to have a good reason not to use Cope’s bones.
    • So his bones were shipped to the officials in charge of filing his remains away forever as the type specimen… but they found his bones riddled with syphilis and decided it best to NOT have them represent mankind. They were quietly put into storage.
    • LOL these old-school paleontologists were weird. The more important their contributions, the weirded they seemed to be on a personal level.
  • There you have it.
    • The man who did some of the most important work in discovering that Dinosaurs were their own beasts on the evolutionary chain and even coined the term “Dinosaurs.”
    • The word dinosaurs means terrible lizard.
    • Ironic that many dinosaurs weren’t terrible, most of them were smaller than a chicken and they most certainly weren’t lizards. Reptiles predated Dinosaurs by millions of years.
    • What did seem to fit the description of a “terrible lizard” was the man Sir Richard Owen himself.

CREDIT:

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Owen
  • The main inspiration for this episode comes from Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything.”
    • Which is a book I am currently listening to on my daily walks.
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Balloon Boy

Content below is from #182 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend you watch Netflix Original LOVE
    • Here’s the plot:
      • When his cheating girlfriend leaves him, people-pleasing nice-guy Gus (Paul Rust, “I Love You, Beth Cooper” and “Inglorious Basterds”) moves into a trendy apartment complex inhabited by lots of college students. A chance encounter introduces him to wild-child Mickey (Gillian Jacobs, “Community”), also recently single, and who despises her job in radio. Though wildly different, the two are drawn to each other, and that relationship is the basis for the Judd Apatow-helmed Netflix original series. And in the end, their differences may be what help them figure out just what love is.
    • It was created by comedy writing giant Judd Apatow and it has a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes
    • It’s good, it’s funny, and it was one of the shows I thoroughly enjoyed binging back in college.
  • It very loosely ties into today’s main event:

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • Search your memory of the past decade-plus, back before Covid, before the war in Ukraine, before Harambe, and before Occupy Wall Street…
    • Remember Balloon Boy?
    • My wife and I were watching that Netflix Original show titled LOVE when the main character referenced Balloon Boy. When he did, my long-term memory dusted off that old file and I sat up in my seat exclaiming “Holy shit! I forgot all about Balloon Boy!”
      • That’s when Shannon revealed she had ZERO recollection of the Balloon Boy incident from the late 2000’s… and I promptly jotted down “Balloon Boy – news story from a decade or so ago” into my “Who’d a Thunk It Ideas” note in my phone. … and here we are.
  • In 2009 a US couple told the world their son had been carried away by a balloon. The story began when Richard and Mayumi Heene told police that their six-year-old son had floated away in a helium balloon. Rescue services scrambled to save him, but it was revealed to be a hoax within the same day.
    • That’s the gist of it. But this story received so much media attention, just a few years after smart phones were invented so the story went Viral like a lot of stupid news stories did back then. People were just happy to read about some stupid shit on their phones in 2009.
      • We take them for granted, but smartphones are incredible, and I know there is a decent chunk of the population that doesn’t remember a time before they existed and were in everyone’s pocket… I do though.
      • When those things first came out it was like we had stepped into the future. We had computers in our hands and we could use them to download stupid apps like the lighter app and the drinking beer app LOL
  • The entire country was transfixed by the story of Balloon Boy.
    • That image of that silver UFO-looking balloon floating in the sky was on virtually every news outlet for a few hours.
      • I remember it. I was a sophomore in High School about to turn 17 years old.
  • Will Leitch from OneZero.Medium.com writes:

The story was absurd. How did this boy get in there? How did this balloon get loose? What kind of balloon was this, anyway? The story was so strange, so random, that you almost had to take it at face value: Why would someone make up details so intricate and weird? It didn’t occur that it might not be real, because why wouldn’t it be real? It had the specific insanity of something that was true.

  • NPR’s David Folkenflik explains the possibilities the media was trying to captivate. Pointing out that lots of kids go missing at the mall for an hour or so, but none of them get this kind of media coverage:

In this case, there were at the outset only three possible broad outcomes to the tale. Bluntly put:

1. The boy could have survived an epic cross-state accidental flight.

2. The boy could have been killed or badly hurt either in the air or upon the balloon’s descent.

3. The boy could have been found eating Cheetos, or napping or playing video games somewhere else that was significantly not inside the balloon itself.

The first result would have been a heartwarming conclusion to a frightful situation. The second story would have been a tragedy requiring delicate handling. The third would — or at least should be — something of an embarrassment to the news outlets giving it blanket national coverage for more than an hour.

It turned out that, no, there was no boy in the balloon, and that specific insanity belonged to a man named Richard Heene, a stuntman/handyman/inventor/reality television pseudo-star who had appeared on “Wife Swap” and decided he wanted more fame for himself and his family than just that. So he lost the tether on his invented balloon, told police and the media that his son Falcon was in it and next thing you knew, people like me were wrapping up their workday terrified that a small boy was going to fall out of a balloon shaped like a flying saucer. I really was worried at the time. You would have been too.

Falcon Heene
Falcon Heene, 6, outside his family’s home in Fort Collins, Colo., after he was found hiding in a box in a space above the garage on Oct. 15, 2009.David Zalubowski / AP file NBC news: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/parents-convicted-balloon-boy-hoax-pardoned-colorado-governor-n1252343
  • That was it. The whole story… what a let-down.
    • The incident temporarily shut down Denver International Airport and prompted local authorities and the National Guard to deploy military helicopters on a rescue search that cost at least $14,500.
    • US networks devoted hours of coverage to the drama showing footage of emergency services and two National Guard helicopters deployed to save the child as an enormous balloon floated away.
    • When the balloon landed in a field, there was no sign of him and authorities feared for his safety.
      • I remember that moment. Everyone watching was like “OH GOD HE FELL OUT!!”
    • Falcon Heene (THE Balloon Boy) was later discovered unharmed, hiding in the attic of his family’s home in Fort Collins, about 60 miles north of Denver.
    • The family were being interviewed on national TV show Larry King Live by prominent journalist Wolf Blitzer when the young boy appeared to out his parents’ hoax.
    • When asked why he was hiding at home, he said to his father: “You guys said that, um, we did this for the show.”
    • Following the revelation that it was staged, police said the house of Richard and Mayumi Heene was searched for evidence that the family was hoping to use the incident to obtain a lucrative contract for a television reality show.
    • “The plan was to create a situation where it appeared Falcon was in the craft and that his life was in jeopardy in order to gain a lot of publicity with the ultimate goal of gaining some notoriety and perhaps furthering their careers by gaining a contract for a reality TV show,” Colorado sheriff Jim Alderden said at the time.
    • Police had also found that the balloon was extremely flimsy, made of plywood and cardboard, and held together with “string and duct tape”.
  • I’m not surprised people like my wife don’t remember the story because it was such a disappointing ending.
    • A few jokes were made on late-night shows and a few obscure references were made for a few years to come on shows like Netflix’s LOVE, but not much else came from it.
    • The nation was captivated by the plight of these poor people and their poor boy alone and scared in a balloon floating over several different states. If he survived we were ready to celebrate him… if he didn’t survive we were all ready to memorialize him and console his family. Those were the outcomes the nation was ready to react to… and then we all found out that we were all lied to.
      • So on that Thursday October 15th back in 2009 we went back to work (school work for kids like me) and forgot the whole thing ever happened.
    • Until news broke that his parents were going to jail for it…
Richard and Mayumi Heene walk out of the courtroom after their sentencing hearing in Fort Collins, Colo., on Dec. 23, 2009. – NBC news: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/parents-convicted-balloon-boy-hoax-pardoned-colorado-governor-n1252343
  • Authorities said the false report was a publicity stunt to land a reality television show for the Heene family.
    • Richard Heene (the dad that was on Wife Swap) pleaded guilty for attempting to influence a public servant and was sentenced to 90 days in jail, while Mayumi Heene pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for filing a false report and was sentenced to 20 days in jail.
    • NBC News previously reported that the couple’s three sons knew of the hoax at the time but were not charged because they were minors.
    • At the time of the incident, Richard said the family pleaded guilty to protect his wife, who was a Japanese citizen at risk of deportation.
    • When it was all said and done, the parents served jail time and had those nasty criminal records. But one of the biggest factors was that the entire nation (and a bit of international news coverage) lead to the parents being outcasts from society.

In December of 2020, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis pardoned a couple who were convicted of staging a hoax that captivated the nation more than a decade ago.

Eleven years after the debacle, Polis, who pardoned or commuted the sentences of 20 other people, said the family had “paid the price in the eyes of the public.”

“We are all ready to move past the spectacle from a decade ago that wasted the precious time and resources of law enforcement officials and the general public,” Polis said in a statement on Wednesday. “It’s time for all of us to move on.”

Image: Richard Heene holds his son Falcon Heene, 6.
Richard Heene holds his son Falcon Heene, 6, at home in Fort Collins, Colo. on Oct. 15, 2009.Cyrus McCrimmon / Denver Post via Getty Images

David Lane, the attorney who helped the family apply for a pardon, said that after more than a decade, the “balloonacy was finally over,” the Denver Post reported.

Lane did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Richard told the Denver Post that he was excited the governor wiped his slate clean. “This is like a new launch,” he said. “I’m flying high.”

Mr Heene served a month in jail and Mrs Heene was jailed for 20 days for filing a false report. They were also ordered to pay $36,000 (£26,000).

  • That was the whole story. A barely-famous douchey reality TV guy and his wife lead the entire nation to think their son was in danger.
    • It cost the taxpayers money and wasted everyone’s time. It is something most of us want to forget…
    • LOL and that’s why I am delighted to remind all of you of the story.
    • LOL Thanks for listening Who’d a Thunkers!

CREDIT:

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Borderland

Content below is from #181 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • I recommend you watch the movie directly inspired by this week’s main topic. The movie is Borderland (2007) and it is about the life of Adolfo Constanzo.
    • The movie has a 100% score on rotten tomatoes… but only a 43% audience score

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • The movie Borderland’s plot is described as:
    • Ed (Brian Presley), Henry (Jake Muxworthy) and Phil (Rider Strong) are three American college graduates in search of wild times in Mexico. After a night of partying with two local women, Ed and Henry realize that Phil is missing. Joining forces with an ex-cop, their search for their friend leads them to a horrifying encounter with cultists who practice human sacrifice.
  • The movie is loosley based on the real life story of Adolfo Constanzo. He was an American serial killer that went down to Mexico City where he met a bunch of friends who became his cult followers.
  • Adolfo was born in Miami back in 1962.
    • His mom was a widow immigrant from Cuba.
  • Growing up he was exposed to Catholicism and Voodoo practices… a potent mix.
    • He was baptized catholic in Little Havana.
    • The rumor was that his mom and grandma were priestesses in Santeria religion.
      • Santeria is a mix of African and Cuban religions with a pinch of Catholicism. Santeria is popular throughout the Caribbean.
  • When he was 14 he started to learn from a local sorcerer.
    • Adolfo and his master made money off superstitious people and by dealing drugs.
    • It was his sorcerer master who showed Adolfo all about palo mayombe which is like a dark side of the Santeria religion. … that’s when the small dead animals started piling up around Adolfo’s house.
      • The nganga, or blood cauldron, is an important part of palo mayombe: worshipers believe that by placing bones and blood in an iron cauldron, they can summon spirits to do their bidding.
    • The rest of his youth was spent getting arrested, learning black magic, and shoplifting.
    • Then he moved to Mexico City as a model, apparently this dude was kind of hot.
  • In Mexico City Adolfo met Martin Quintana and Jorge Montes. The three started a romantic relationship as well as a cult…
    • That’s how Adolfo amassed his following. He went to Mexico City’s gay clubs, seduced a bunch of dudes, and then gradually brought them into his cult.
    • He would also read tarot cards in Zona Rosa (Mexico City’s gay area).
  • AllThatsInteresting.com writes:

Adolfo Constanzo set up shop in Mexico City permanently in 1984 and worked on establishing his reputation as a powerful padrino in the city. Mexican drug dealers presented the perfect combination of superstition and blood-lust upon which Constanzo could prey: for sums of up to $4,500 he would perform ceremonies that involved the sacrifices of animals that he guaranteed would protect the dealers during their illicit activities.

Constanzo’s diary later outlined the exact prices customers paid per animal: from $6 for a simple rooster, all the way up to $3,100 for lion cubs; one prominent dealer racked up a $40,000 bill with Constanzo over a three-year period.

As the sorcerer lured in more and more impressive clientele (including not just powerful cartel leaders, but fashion models, nightclub performers, and a few federal policemen), he needed to put on more impressive spectacles to satisfy them. Constanzo and his followers had been raiding cemeteries for actual human bones for some time, but in time even they would not be enough.

Graves For Ritual Sacrifice Victims

  • When 1987 rolled around Adolfo had graduated far beyond just reading tarot cards in Mexico City’s gay area.
    • He now had lots of rich clients and was able to afford a higher quality of living. Nicer crib with garage and expensive cars were the staples of his life now. He wasn’t the poor kid from Cuba anymore.
    • He was also using all the connections he had made through law enforcement and cartels to start dealing drugs big-time.
    • He started casting protection spells for the Calzada family (a big cartel)… and charging a lot for each spell.
  • The Calzadas success was soaring and they became extremely powerful in the region. Adolfo insisted he was the one responsible for their success and demanded a higher position in the cartel.
    • The high-ranking Calzada that denied Adolfo (and 6 of his close family members) went missing not long after.
    • The Mexican Police did find the missing members of the Calzada family. They had been mutilated. Their corpses were missing more than a few parts. Constanzo had taken the fingers, toes, hearts, testicles, spines, and brains from his former partners and added them all to his own nganga (blood cauldron) in hopes of strengthening his dark powers.

Voodoo Bucket

  • How many people did Adolfo and his cult kill? We have no idea the full amount, but 23 have been confirmed and documented.
    • The local cops have many mutilated bodies that were found in the area during that time that they believe were connected to Adolfo Constanzo’s Padrino cult. But they aren’t able to prove the connection.
  • The people Adolfo typically preyed upon were usually small-time crooks, frequent members of the Zona Rosa, or even his own cult followers that disobeyed him.
    • What all his victims had in common were that they were from the dark side of society. The outcasts. So most murders weren’t reported and many of the homicides were found by happenstance.
    • Most who followed him had unrelenting loyalty to Adolfo. He was a god to them.
    • They had no problem offering human sacrifices to Adolfo.
    • And here is where the movie Borderland picks up:

When the “Pied Piper of Death” demanded the sacrifice of an “anglo” one night in 1989, they did not hesitate to grab one of the many American college students who had crossed the border from Texas during his spring break.

This time, the padrino had overreached himself. The student they had snatched, Mark Kilroy, was not a lone drifter whose disappearance would go unnoticed. His friends and family alerted both American and Mexican authorities, triggering a massive manhunt that would eventually bring about Constanzo’s downfall.

When the Mexican police busted a small-time marijuana dealer that April, he led them to a small ranch where, as the police had expected, they found a cache of drugs. What the police did not expect was the small windowless shack on the ranch property that one would later describe as “a human slaughterhouse.”

  • The police had been led to Adolfo Constanzo’s nganga (blood cauldron). Adolfo himself wasn’t there.
    • When the cops arrived it was filled with a stew of human remains. Kilroy was horribly mutilated and the other victims were buried in shallow graves out back.
    • The cops decided to demolish the shack… by burning it down. They even had a priest bless the place with a purification rite.
    • It didn’t take long after that for the cops to find the actual Adolfo. They surrounded him in an apartment in Mexico city.
  • Instead of giving in to custody of Mexico City’s law enforcement… he had one of his followers shoot him in the face.

CREDIT:

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Strangers

Content below is from #180 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

  • This week I recommend you watch The Strangers!
    • It ties directly into today’s main event so let’s get right into it.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

  • In 2008 a movie was released that looked pretty darn creepy based on the trailer. It was called The Strangers.
    • Google’s description:
      • Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) are expecting a relaxing weekend at a family vacation home, but their stay turns out to be anything but peaceful. First, a mysterious and dangerous woman arrives at the door while James is out on an errand. When he returns, he accidentally kills his friend Mike (Glenn Howerton), mistaking him for an intruder. And then real danger does show up — in the form of three masked torturers, leaving Kristen and James struggling for survival.

The Strangers – 2008

The Strangers - HeadStuff.org
The Strangers via ilarge.lisimg.com
  • It was directed by Bryan Bertino. It made about $82 million at the box office. It is currently sitting at around 50% on rotten tomatoes (so not universally loved).
    • Now, over a decade later most people probably forgot about the movie. It was … OK. Nothing amazing.
    • The coolest/scariest part was in the trailer when one of the victims asks the cliche question “Why are you doing this to us?!” and the intruder answers with a disturbingly calm voice: “because you were home.”
    • That’s the best part, that and their masks are super plain in a freaky way. The trailer and movie poster were probably the best parts about this film… so why make an episode about it?
    • Same reason I did one on the Blob from last week’s episode… it’s based on real events!

HeadStuff.org summarizes:

Director Bryan Bertino’s main inspirations for the story are the Manson murders and the unsolved quadruple homicide case known as the Keddie Cabin Murders. In 1981 at a resort town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, an entire family were stabbed, strangled, and bludgeoned to death in the middle of the night with no witnesses or any suspects. Nobody has ever been arrested for the murders. 

  • Skipping over the Manson murders because that stuff has been covered ad nauseam by books, articles, movies, etc. … I thought it would be cool to look into the Keddie Cabin Murders.
    • It was April 11th and 12th of 1981 when 4 people were tortured and killed in a resort town Keddie California. The crime was never solved.

Keddie Murders

Plumas County Sheriff’s OfficeCabin 28 at Keddie Resort, 1981. The former Sharp home was condemned and demolished in 2004

  • Fourteen-year-old Sheila Sharp was coming back to Cabin 28 in Keddie Resorts California on April 12th, 1981. She had spent the night at a neighbor’s house.
    • When she stepped into the little 4-room cabin she walked into a horror scene that would come to be known as the Keddie Murders.
    • Bodies lay everywhere. Her mom Glenna “Sue” Sharp, brother John, and John’s high school girlfriend Dana Wingate.
    • The three had been tied up with tape, stabbed, beaten, and strangled.
    • There was someone missing though… Sheila’s 12-year-old sister Tina Sharp wasn’t at the cabin. She was missing.
    • Weirdest part, one of the bedrooms had little Rickey and Greg sharp, as well as their friend and neighbor, 12-year-old Justin Smartt inside. The three boys had slept through the night and were unharmed. They supposedly woke up on April 12th with no knowledge of the carnage that occurred just a few feet away on the other side of the cabin wall.

The Keddie Cabin Murders

Keddie Cabin Murders

Plumas County Sheriff’s Department – back view of cabin 28 where the family had lived for a year.

  • This family, the Sharp family had just recently moved to cabin #28 a year prior.
    • Sue, the mom, had just had a divorce and brought her kids from Connecticut to Keddie in north Calfornia.
    • There were 6 of them
      • 36-year-old Sue,
      • her 15-year-old son John,
      • 14-year-old daughter Sheila,
      • 12-year-old daughter Tina,
      • and 10-year-old Rick
      • and 5-year-old Greg
    • April 11th, Sheila stayed over at a friend’s/neighbor’s house.
    • John and his 17-year old girlfriend hitchhiked (yes, hitchhiking was still a thing) to a party, but came back later in the night.
    • Tina went with Sheila to the neighbor’s house, but returned home to cabin #28
    • Rick, Greg, and their buddy Justin Smartt slept in Cabin #28 that night. They were the ones unharmed.
  • When sheila saw most of her family butchered she went back to the neighbors in a panic. The Neighbor’s dad got the three young boys out of the bedroom window so they wouldn’t see the carnage.
  • The cops were called. Deputy Hank Klement (very small-town cop kinda name) was the first to arrive. His report said he saw “blood everywhere.” it was on the walls, the bottoms of the victim’s shoes, Sue’s bare feet, the bedding in Tina’s room, the furniture, the ceiling, the doors, and on the back steps
    • This amount of blood lead the cops to think the bodies had been moved multiple times

Keddie Family Photo

Plumas County Sheriff’s Department – The Keddie family about four years before the murders.

AllThatsInteresting.com describes:

Young John was closest to the front door, face-up, his hands blood-covered and bound with medical tape. His throat had been slit. His friend Dana was on the floor beside him on his stomach. His head was badly damaged as though bashed in with a blunt object and lay partially on a pillow. He had been manually strangled. His ankles were tied with electrical wire which was wound also around John’s ankles so that the two were connected.

Sheila’s mother had been covered partially with a blanket though that had done little to hide her gruesome injuries. On her side, the mother of five was naked from the waist down, tightly gagged with a bandana and her own underwear secured with medical tape. She had injuries consistent with a struggle and had an imprint of the butt of an .880 pellet gun on the side of her head. Like her son, her throat had been cut.

All victims had suffered blunt-force trauma by hammer or hammers. They also all sustained multiple stab wounds. A bent steak knife was on the floor. A butcher knife and claw hammer, both also bloodied, were side-by-side on a small wooden table near the entry into the kitchen.

  • It would be hours until they realized a potential 4th victim was missing, Tina. When they did realize, the FBI was called in.
    • Lt. Don Stoy said “The strangest thing is that there is no apparent motive. Any case without an apparent motive is the toughest to solve,” Stoy recalled to the Sacramento Bee in 1987.
    • There was no sign of forced entry. Only one unknown fingerprint was found on the back stairs. the phone was left off the hook. The lights were off and the drapes closed.
    • The weirdest detail to me is that the 3 boys (3 survivors) didn’t hear anything at all. Even though a neighbor reported muffled screams woke them up at 130AM.
    • It later came out that although Rickey and Greg always maintained they saw and heard nothing… their buddy Justin Smartt saw Sue with two adult men… and one of them had a hammer.
      • One reportedly had a mustache and long hair and the other was clean-shaven with short hair but both in glasses.

Suspected Culprits

Plumas County Sheriff’s OfficeComposite sketch of the Keddie murder suspects.

  • Justin started to become a wealth of knowledge… the only person who saw anything. he said that John and Dana entered the home and argued with the men which resulted in a violent fight. Tina was then was taken out the cabin’s back door by one of the men.
  • This was pre-DNA testing so most evidence taken was virtually useless.
  • The cops did have two suspects before too long. It was Justin Smartt’s dad/the neighbor Martin Smatt and his friend who was staying at Smartt’s house that night John Bo Boudebe.
    • That would explain why the boys were left unharmed…
    • And Martin’s house guest Bo was an ex-con. He was known to have connections to organized crime in the area. Both men had been seen in suits and ties behaving oddly in the bar the night before.
  • A LOT of evidence points to Martin and Bo as the killers…
    • For a long time it was believed that was the end of it. Cops did a bad job and two guys got away who committed horrible murders… but in the past decade a lot of other theories… conspiracy theories have arisen from this case.
    • Turns out Martin Smartt admitted to the cops that he had a hammer that matched the one discovered and also his hammer was now coincidentally missing just before the murders…
    • Later in the year, a knife was found in a trash can near the Keddie convenience store and it was believed to be part of the murders.
    • So much evidence was found in this case and two VERY likely suspects… why was this never closed?
  • The 4th and final victim Tina was found 3 years later about 30 miles away from Cabin #28. Her skull was found by a guy in neighboring Butte County.
    • The cops found a child’s blanket, a pair of jeans (missing a back pocket), a blue jacket, and an empty surgical tape container… the same kind of tape found on the scene at Cabin #28.
    • Tina’s body being found made the Keddie Murders a quadruple homicide case.
    • Not to mention, the local head honcho overseeing the Keddie Murders Sheriff Thomas resigned just 3 short months into the case. Looking back, Law enforcement saw a LOT of holes in Sheriff Thomas’s investigation almost like he intentionally threw the case.
    • “I was told the suspects were told to get out of town, so to me, that means it was covered up,” Sheila Sharp told CBS Sacramento in 2016.
  • The rest of the episode will mainly be read from AllThatsInteresting.com‘s take on these murders… written in Fall of 2021:

Remarkably, the tape of the anonymous tip regarding Tina was found sealed in case files, untouched by Plumas County Sheriff’s Dept. until 2013 when the case was reopened with new investigators Plumas Sheriff Greg Hagwood and Special Investigator Mike Gamberg.

In 2016, Gamberg located a hammer believed to be one of the murder weapons in a dried-up pond in Keddie.

Further, it came to light that Marilyn Smartt, Marty’s wife and mother of Justin, had left her husband on the day of the murder discovery. Afterward, she provided Plumas Country Sheriff’s Dept. with a handwritten letter sent to her and signed by her estranged husband. It read: “I’ve paid the price of your love & now that I’ve bought it with four people’s lives, you tell me we are through. Great! What else do you want?”

This letter was not treated as a confession nor was it followed up on at the time. Even though Marilyn admitted in a 2008 documentary that she thought her husband his friend Bo was responsible, Sheriff Doug Thomas contradicted this and stated that Martin had successfully passed a polygraph test. It was later confirmed that Martin was close with this Sheriff.

In 2016, Gamberg met with a counselor at the Reno Veteran’s Administration. The anonymous counselor told him that in May 1981, Martin Smartt had confessed to killing Sue and Tina Sharp. “I killed the woman and her daughter, but I didn’t have anything to do with the [boys],” he purportedly told the counselor. When the DOJ was alerted to this confession in 1981, they dismissed it as “hearsay.”

The Keddie Murders Revisited

Weapons From Cabin 28 Murders

Plumas County Sheriff’s OfficeProbable murder weapons for the Keddie slaying discovered and submitted as evidence in 2016. Between them lies the forgotten tape of the anonymous phone tip left in 1984, rediscovered in 2013.

The most widely accepted theory involves a love triangle between Martin, Marilyn, and Sue.

It was believed that Martin and Sue were having an affair and that Sue was supposedly counseling Marilyn to leave her husband, who she had said was abusive to her. When Martin discovered this, he enlisted Bo, his friend, and known mob enforcer who had lived with the Smartt’s a mere 10 days before the Keddie murders, to take Sue out of the picture.

This would account for Marilyn leaving her husband the day of the murder discovery. It would also explain why the Smartt boy and the other Sharp boys in the adjoining room were spared. Additionally, it gives context to Martin’s handwritten note that Marilyn gave to the Plumas Sheriff’s Dept.

Some investigators who picked up the case when it reopened in 2013 tie the slayings into an even larger plot. To Gamberg, it is clear that the DOJ and Thomas-run Sherriff’s Dept. “covered it up, is the way it sounds.” He alleges that Bo and Martin fit into a larger drug-smuggling scheme that involved the federal government.

Martin was a known drug dealer and Bo was connected to Chicago crime syndicates with financial interests in drug distribution.

This might explain why the Sacramento DOJ sent two allegedly corrupt organized crime special agents instead of agents from the homicide department. It also provides an explanation as to why the two lead suspects were seemingly given a free pass and told to leave town by Sheriff Thomas.

Furthermore, it suggests an answer as to why this case was handled so sloppily, remains unsolved, and is seemingly not a priority to the Sacramento DOJ.

What is known is that this 37-year-old crime is far from a cold case, as new evidence sheds light on what may have occurred at Cabin 28 in Keddie, California.

Although both Martin Smartt and Bo Boudebe are now deceased, new DNA evidence has pointed investigators to other suspects who may have had a hand in these murders, and who are still alive.

“It’s my belief that there were more than two people who were involved in the totality of the crime–the disposal of the evidence and the abduction of the little girl,” Hagwood said. “We’re convinced that there are a handful of people that fit those roles who are still alive.”

  • Cabin #28, the home where at least 3 members of the Sharp family were murdered (possibly Tina as well) was demolished in 2004.

CREDIT:

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The Blob

Content below is from #179 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

This week I am prepping for one of our annual parties: Lief Erikson Day!

So the episode is a bit peckish, I will admit. Listen to the audio podcast for more.

As for a recommendation… uh… drink lots of water and stay in school kids.. LOL

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

The Blob 1958 - HeadStuff.org
The Blob via antifilmschoolsite

An alien lifeform consumes everything in its path as it grows and grows.

  • The movie The Blog is about an alien blob that falls from outer space and engulfs people into a horrible, gooey death.
    • It first came out in 1958 then again in 1972… and then again in 1988
    • The Blob was based on a 1950 police case in Philadelphia. A bunch of cops found a big disk of quivering yet solid jelly-like substance. When they tried to move it, it dissolved into a sticky scum.
    • Scientists later chimed in with their labeling machines and gave this stuff a name… The goo is called star jelly and is usually reported seen near the site of a meteorite landing.
  • Today the 1958 Blob movie is viewed as a novelty type thing. It is over the top and not taken seriously. People who watch it tend to see it as a campy oddball flick from a long-gone era.
    • Unlike some of the best sci-fi horror movies we enjoy today about AI taking over the planet or interstellar space travel (both real-world possibilities), No one thinks the blob is actually going to rain down from the sky and gobble up entire towns.
    • But that’s where people are wrong LOL
    • This actually happened! … sort of
  • In 1950, eight years before The Blob was released, a couple of cops in Philly named Joe Keenan and John Collins saw a big-bright flying saucer six feet in diameter fall out of the night sky.
    • After a brief existential crisis…
    • They chased it, and where it landed they found a foot-tall mass of glittering “purple jelly.” The officers believed it was alive. In their report, they said that the jelly was pulsing and glowing, but that it weighed so little it didn’t even bend the grass it was resting on.
    • The weight distribution thing is the eeriest part for me. I imagine a foot-tall blob to be rather heavy, but if it didn’t bend the grass… it would probably look like it was defying the laws of physics.
  • What did Joe and John do? They did what all cops do when they find something interesting… they called for more cops.
    • Two other cops arrived for backup. Sergeant Joe Cook actually picked up a handful of the blob stuff.
      • Side note, in the movie, The guy who does that in The Blob suffers a horrible fate, obviously.
      • I mean… in every horror movie, it is the curious one that gets got!
  • But this was a real-life account and Sergeant Cook didn’t get eaten by an other-worldly mass.
    • No, it just sort of fell apart in his hands. It disintegrated into smaller blobs and stuck to his hand. Then those smaller blogs evaporated into thin air.
    • What was left was an “odorless scum”… that’s a direct quote from the police report.
    • By the time the FBI arrived, according to an AP story at the time, “there was nothing to show FBI agents except a spot on the ground.”
  • Was there really a blobby flying saucer that touched down in Pennsylvania in 1950?
    • Scientists are pretty skeptical; any liquid or semi-liquid substance on an asteroid would almost certainly burn off when the object entered the earth’s atmosphere.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/analysis-whistleblower-testimonies-did-not-change-our-basic-understanding-of-ufos
  • So what was that stuff?
    • Well the Pentagon recently issued a report discussing what appear to be unidentified flying objects in American airspace. Those recent hearing on July 26th 2023 with Ryan Graves, executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, David Grusch, former National Reconnaissance Office representative on the Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, and retired Navy Commander David Fravor were pretty eye-opening as well.
      • If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the hearing discussed UFOs and retrieved living beings inside those UFOs… from 3 reputable sources.
    • More, many eye-witnesses to meteorite landings have claimed to have found what the Welsh people call pwdre ser, or “star rot” near the site of impact.
      • Pwdre ser is a bad-smelling, jelly-like substance that evaporates quickly. It’s also been called “star jelly” and in French “crachet de lune”, or moonspit. Pwdre ser has been analyzed a couple of times. The most recent was following a meteorite landing in Scotland in 2009. Scientists found that the space jelly lacked DNA and didn’t seem to be either plant or animal. That’s what it wasn’t. They never figured out what it was.
  • What’s creepy is that it is scientifically proven that meteorites leave behind an unknown jelly substance when they crash into Earth… and no one really knows what this stuff is.

It’s also not completely clear whether the Philadelphia incident inspired the 1958 movie The Blob directly. Producer Jack Harris never acknowledged the real-life pwdr eser as the origin of his own space slime. But Harris was from Pennsylvania, and so was his old friend Irvine Millgate, who is credited with the original idea for the Blob. Millgate could easily have remembered the local newspaper articles about the police dealing with the weird space substance. That’s probably how the Blob crawled out of the headlines and into horror legend.

CREDIT: