In This Week’s Show, episode 191, we call in ghosts to our new job at the Siberian ark-trailer park.
Now, grab a beer and help us test the god hypothesis — because, while Justin Trudeau hasn’t struck us down yet, we are wishing him a Happy Canada Day!
Shea’s Life Lesson
Like his fabled namesake, Shea’s presence today is only legend.
Jenn’s Actual Lesson
Did you know that female KGB spies during the Cold War (what few there were), had a signature smell? All were required to wear Chanel #5 as part of their personas. (I have a Russia-trivia heavy episode today.)
http://bit.ly/2NtftGI
But before we get to all that, let’s have a beer!
This Week’s Beer
M-43 - Old Nation Brewing
Steve E - Michigan
BA Link: http://bit.ly/2tsTuGS
BA Rating: 4.44/5
Style: American IPA
ABV: 6.8
Aaron: 9
Jenn: 8
Brendon: 8
Steve: 7
This Week’s Show
Round Table Discussion
We’ve got patrons!
Samantha
Matt
Salted Caramel - Lazy Horse Brewing
Brendon - Ohiowa, NE
BA Link: http://bit.ly/2Nubiud
BA rating 3.38/5
Untappd Rating: 3.51/5
Style: Blonde Ale
Aaron: 8
Jenn: 6
Brendon: 8
Steve: 6
No iTunes or Voicemail
Last week early … bird-subscribers got a bit of a worm. You might have noticed a second 10-minute story… that’s what patrons get! So you should be one at https://patreon.com/w4w
Hot Shots
Aaron -
Just call in sick…
http://bit.ly/2KDaDsT
Eli Aldinger is a dingwad. Not wanting to go to work one dark and stormy day, Eli — instead of calling in sick like a normal person — hit three people with his car. Driving down the sidewalk, he managed to run over two people and graze another, but don’t worry, he wasn’t really trying to kill anyone, just “to injure.” See, he was tired of working in the cafeteria at McMenamins Anderson school, so “I had to change something in my life, so I hit three people with my car,” and now he’s on his way to jail where he’s looking forward “spending a few years in a room.”
Steve - Stork brings more than a child. A polish charity learned the hard way that using a cell phone tracker to keep tabs on the movement of a stork can get very expensive. “Radio Poland” an ecological group had put a cell tracker on a stork to monitor its migratory movements, but some 3700 miles from Poland in South Sudan, they lost track of it. Well, someone in Sudan got a hold of the tracker and moved it’s SIM to another phone and made over 20 hours of calls, the $2700 bill of which is the charity’s responsibility. http://bit.ly/2KPNGC2
Aaron -
Right in the mangoes!
http://bit.ly/2KLYPnk
Nashik municipal Corp (NMC - a regulatory board as best as I can tell) has sent a “show cause notice” to Sambhaji Bhide — a right-wing activist and fruit fucker — to prove his claims that eating his mangoes will make you have a boy child… which is especially impressive if you’re infertile. According to Sambhaji “If a couple wants a male child they will have it after eating these mangoes. This mango is useful for those facing infertility," adding that 150 of 180 couples who’ve eaten his mangos now have kids… so, two things, 1, he doesn’t seem to be selling a lot of mangoes, and 2, per the local government, publish the names and fucking prove it.
Steve - Say Cheese! Lots and lots and lots of cheese as a matter of fact. Right now, the US has the most cheese stockpiled since record keeping began in 1917; 1.385 Billion pounds as a matter of fact. According to the Washington Post, the reason is that there is way too much milk on hand for processors and it’s much more easily stored as cheese. Put that together with school being out and cows being very productive and you have a recipe for the world’s biggest Quesadilla. http://bit.ly/2NwcGMT
Aaron - I’m a scary ghost!
http://bit.ly/2Ntfsm8
Anthony Stallard pleaded guilty at Portsmouth magistrates court to going out drinking with friends and, as has happened to us all, wound up in a graveyard pretending to be a ghost and harassing grave-goers. Apparently, after he and his mates couldn’t convince people they were the spirits of their dead by saying “wooooooo” and waving their hands around, they were arrested and fined in accordance with local laws. Anthony got another 3 months added to his existing sentence… of doing this same thing earlier in the year. We get it man, you want to be a ghost but could you at least put in enough effort to make a costume out of a white sheet or something… I hear you can get them with pre-made eye holes in most southern American stores now…
Steve - How does one fully enjoy their porn without grunts, moans, panting, and screams? Pornhub is doing their best to fill in the lost enjoyment for those with hearing loss by beginning a program of adding closed captioning to the videos they host.
Hot shot six is available on http://patreon.com/w4w right now!
This Week’s Stories
Another second half of weird history!
June 30th, 1908 - or 110 yrs ago yesterday as of the day of recording- was a total blast in Eastern Europe. Don’t believe me? Just ask the thousands of people in the roughly 900-mile radius who witnessed a giant fireball and explosion. Well, they’re dead now, but we have over 700 first-person accounts to check out.
Of course, I’m talking about the massive Siberian boom known as the Tunguska Event. (Named for the Stony Tunguska River, the area where it was centralized was so remote that the first scientists didn’t reach it until 1927.) It had the estimated explosive power 650 - 1,000x greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and flattened roughly 80 million trees.
http://bit.ly/2KDaEgr
http://bit.ly/2NsG1YI
Making this even more fun, this year’s International Asteroid Day also happened to fall on June 30th. However, despite it being generally agreed upon a massive space rock was involved, even today there is no universal agreement of what exactly happened.
http://bit.ly/2NuBKEk
Farmer Sergei Semenov was having breakfast that morning only about 40mi from the epicenter: ‘‘I was sitting in the porch of the house at the trading station of Vanovara at 7 a.m. and looking towards the north . . . suddenly the sky appeared like it was split in two, high above the forest, the whole northern sky appeared to be completely covered with blazing fire. At that moment I felt a great wave of heat as if my shirt had caught fire… after a minute, there was a loud bang in the sky, and I could hear a mighty crash. Subsequently, I was fiercely thrown to the ground about 5-6 meters away from the house and for a minute or two I lost my consciousness.”
The closest seismic recorders were over 600 miles away but picked up strong readings for over an hour. This type of equipment registered tremors as far away as England.
More first-hand reports describe a fireball in the sky, larger or similar to the size of the sun, a series of explosions “with a frightful sound”, followed by shaking of the ground as “the earth seemed to get opened wide and everything would fall in the abyss. Terrible strokes were heard from somewhere, which shook the air.” The indigenous Evenks and Yakuts believed a god or shaman had sent the fireball to destroy the world. Various meteorological stations in Europe recorded both seismic and atmospheric waves. Days later strange phenomena were observed in the sky of Russia and Europe, such as glowing clouds, colorful sunsets and a strange luminescence in the night.
Luchetkan, a member of the indigenous Tungus people of the region, whose relative herded reindeer in the area of the blast, recalled, “Of some reindeer, they found the charred carcasses; the others they did not find at all. Of the sheds nothing remained; everything was burned up and melted to pieces—clothes, utensils, reindeer equipment, dishes, and samovars…”
Even today the area where the explosion itself happened, despite no actual impact crater, hasn’t fully recovered:
So what exactly happened? There are a lot of good, and not so good, theories floating around so let’s discuss a few:
1.) A Collision with a Black Hole (or anti-matter): According to this theory, first suggested in the year 1941 by Lincoln LaPaz, the Tunguska event was likely caused by the annihilation of a chunk of anti-matter entering our atmosphere. While it may explain the lack of debris from a ‘splodey asteroid and the observed luminous phenomena, the existence of anti-matter “chunks” is considered theoretically impossible.
The tiny black hole theory (first suggested by American scientists Albert A. Jackson and Michael P. Ryan in 1973) is also full of...holes. Most specifically, the planet would have an ‘exit wound’ somewhere around the North Atlantic as the black hole plowed through the middle.
2.) A Comet (or at least a piece of one): Pretty popular one. Danish researchers have explained that this explosion may have been caused by a large fragment that fell from a comet passing close to Earth. Kaare Lund Rasmussen and his team from Geoscience Research Institute reached this conclusion by examining a century-old peat sample from the region. (Because it was apparently a swampy comet?) They postulate that it was mainly composed of ice at this point, which explains the lack of debris. However, detractors claim a space object made mostly of ice would have been incinerated long before it came so close to the Earth’s surface.
3.) Agda, the local Thunder God: Personal favorite. Akulina, an Evenki woman, who was closer than 20 miles to epicenter at the time of the explosion, recounted her experience to scientists. ”A mighty wind flattened our tent, while we had been sleeping. A brilliant ourburst of light blinded us, the wind was breaking trees like they were sticks. As a rising whirlwind lifted us off the ground, I lost consciousness”. After she woke up, she remembers seeking her husband, Ivan, being lifted up by the blast, and slammed into one of the remaining upright trees, 130 feet from the remnants of the camp they had slept in. He died a few hours later from fractures, shock and blood loss (one of only two known human fatalities). ”Our reindeers also vanished, and we haven’t found them since”.
The shamans of her village immediately chalked this up to the actions of a miffed Siberian Thor. “Dissatisfied by the tribal disputes, Agda reputedly sent ”demons with shining eyes and fiery tails”, to punish the disobedient Evenki men.” The villagers took this seriously. Immediately after the event, the area was declared a sacred and forbidden zone by Evenki tribesmen, who then reportedly expelled or killed dozens of Soviet scientific expeditions that ventured into the area over the next several decades.
4.) Nuclear powered UFO, apparently driven by joyriding teenaged aliens who promptly crashed it.
Of course, everyone from dime store sci-fi pulp novelists to the X Files tried to link this to ALIENS.
Good luck disproving this since evidence doesn’t seem to be really important.
When it’s all said and done, however, the generally agreed upon theory is that on the morning of June 30, 1908, a large space rock, about 120 feet across, entered the atmosphere of Siberia and then detonated in the sky." says Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in his decade-old study.
Patreon Story Hits Home…
Today’s story comes from Wyoming! Oh yeah, it’s the hard-hitting local reporting you expect from Waiting 4 Wrath!
As some of you may know Wyoming has a bunch of dinosaurs… ok we’ll, their bones anyway, but finding a new apex predator of the Cretaceous period is exciting for even the most jaded of Jurassic Park goers.
Well… ok… Arc Park goers.
Also, the only thing it predators is your brain.
Also, it’s a truck.
Semisaurus!
Semisaurus, seen here with its People of Walmart lawn ornaments in place, is as close as Wyoming dares come to its own Ark Encounter. The mobile home-of-misinformation was purchased by Lingle Wyoming’s very own Baptist church. Brian Young, who is basically a JV league Brian Fisher, bought the beast for his Bible school vacation weekends, which are open to the public… if you want to go to Lingle. Spoiler alert: you don’t.
Of course, not going to Lingle Wyoming is the correct choice, and realizing this Young said “When I go out and speak, church people will come to hear about creation, but the world doesn’t get to hear about it unless we go to them, so we developed this to take out to the world.”
No mobile, the Lingle Baptists are free to drive their crazy home… to your home that is. The museum primarily goes to county and state fairs and festivals throughout the Midwest; Young said it’s unusual for him to come out to a single event unless it’s a lynching… ok, I made that last part up, but it’s scary how well it fits and how easily you bought it eh.
Young bought the van to try to undermine the teaching of evolution. Though he prefers the term counterpoint.
Because new ideas in biblical scholarship are terrifying and outlandish, Young basically just ripped off the Ark Park method of plaques next to things with entirely unrealistic “evolutionary explanations” followed with good, biblical explanations of what really went down. Like that time cowboy Jesus and his posse getting attacked by a T-Rex while winning the west… mural below:
To the difference in explanations, Young offers “I believe that creation is a religion, but so is evolution,” he said. “The only difference is, only one religion is allowed to be taught to the kids.”
The trailer is rich with learning potential. For example, if you need to know how to blow 30 grand and you don’t have a bic to just set it all on fire, you could convert a trailer into a museum with “lots of stuff.”
North Hills Pastor David Anderson said he wanted to tie in the museum with this “year’s scientific vacation Bible school” theme (scare quote emphasis mine) with the goal of bringing it to Lingle from Thursday to Sunday. The “museum” will be open to the public for a few hours on the weekend. Which should be plenty enough time to enjoy it’s 23-minute walking audio-tour of “information” about the origin of life on Earth in all of its 6000-year glory.
And if you’re not yet convinced we need to go to budget Ark Park on wheels, I present to you this actual promotional video they made for their thing featuring the finest of pixelbay’s stock art, flying Papyrus lettering and an entirely too upbeat soundtrack… There aren’t any voiceovers in the audio-tours 2-minute promo, but you do get a lot of screen swooping in text and an action shot of a kid taking his T-Rex (well, a guy in a t-rex suit) for a walk. So that’s nice.
http://bit.ly/2NsffQp
http://bit.ly/2NsG3ji
As a small PS. Perhaps the best part of the Semisours’ facebook page, is all the shade and meme’s these young Earther’s throw at the Flat Earthers… it’s actually kind of impressive.
Next Week's Beer
The Shining Ale No. 217 - Estes Park Brewery
By Tim, Keith, and Anna
BA Link: http://bit.ly/2MNoESf
BA Rating: 2.98/5
Style: IPA
ABV: 6%
Faith In Humanity Restored
Rescue Quilts
http://bit.ly/2Nv75Xo
The Stitch and Chat sewing group of Rockhampton, Australia has made over 80 different “rescue quilts” that law enforcement officers can use to comfort children who may have endured a traumatic situation, such as a house burning down, domestic violence, or an automotive accident.
The gender-neutral patchwork quilts are made out of donated fabrics featuring everything from paisley prints to cartoon animals. Originally, the group only intended on creating enough quilts to put two in every police cruiser in the region – but according to Sandra McClelland, the organizer of the effort, the group doesn’t plan on stopping any time soon.
They have already surged past their original goal of 48 quilts, and they hope to expand their project into the future.
“When I read about how beneficial the quilts were to children, I thought it was a good idea to see if we could do something locally,” McClelland told the Morning Bulletin. “It’s a small way we can provide instant comfort to any child who is undergoing trauma.”
The oldest member of the Stitch and Chat group is 97, but they all put the same amount of care into their creations.
“There is a small label on the back of each quilt, that says ‘made with love’,” McClelland told the news outlet.
Bonus Cat Video
Plastic Pollution: How Humans are Turning the World into Plastic - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=RS7IzU2VJIQ
West Philadelphia, Born and Raised - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=lRyEjWQysVk
THE OVERLOOK HOTEL CLASSIC HORROR MASHUP. AMDS MOVIES. MOVIE MASHUP VO on Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/277328537
How the T-Rex Lost Its Arms - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=772GiBXnWoQ
Join The Discussion
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