Yaarrr Brain On Facts
This is a rare episode indeed, my beautiful Brainiac - it’s almost topical! Outside of a few holidays and the start of the covid pandemic, rare is a YBOF tied to current events. Evergreen content, me. But there’s a little something in popular culture that has...
We Can’t Have Nice Things – Radio Contests
Canadian radio station AMP Radio in Calgary, caused a lot of buzz with a promotion called “Bank it or Burn it” which asked listeners to vote whether they should #BANK C$5,000 and give it away to a listener, or #BURN the money, literally. With 54% of the votes, the...
Courthouse Rock
It’s not unusual for the business side of the music business to include trips to the courthouse. Usually, these are for copyright infringement, someone else ripping off your schtick. In the halcyon days of 2005, the band Slipknot was moved to sue, of all...
Apple of Our Eye
What’s more wholesome and iconic than an apple? In the Bible, Eve ate an apple and now half of us have to have periods and crap. In fairness to apples, the Bible just says “fruit” and it was Milton’s “Paradise Lost” that declared the fruit was an apple...
Gregor MacGregor
Gregor Mcgregor Remember back in episode 155, Hate to Burst your Bubble, we talked about, among other things, the Florida real estate boom and bust of the 1920s? It’s where we get the phrase, “if you believe that, I have some real estate in Florida to sell...
Fell on Black Days: Sunday
Every year, tens of millions people or so go through Denver International Airport, the fifth busiest in the country and in the top 20 busiest in the world. That’s a lot of bodies to get from hither to yon, so the airport relies heavily on Automated Guideway Transit...
Tax and Taxonomy
We like labels, as humans we like labeling things. Taxonomy is the branch of science concerned with classification and there used to be several inconsistent and sometimes conflicting systems of classification in use. Then came Carl Linneaus and his influential...
It Stinks!
Interior: The Morgue. The medical examiner stands over a body on a table. Two grizzled detectives stand nearby, one with a notebook in his hand. The ME pulls back the sheet and her nose wrinkles. She takes a deep sniff; the detectives look at her with confusion. ...
Witty, Wild Women
Dorothy Parker was a famously wry, witty, and acerbic writer and critic, with a low opinion of relationships. Her wit was apparent from an early age, referring to her father’s second wife as “The Housekeeper.” She was described by journalist and critic Alexander...
Dying for Your Art
In 2013, Canadian artist Gillian Genser started to feel sick and for two years, no doctor one could determine why. Agitation, headaches, and vomiting gave way to hearing loss and memory problems. Finally, Genser was diagnosed with heavy metal poisoning. But...
Earth’s Unsung-est Heroes: Black Inventors pt 4
The first Africans arrived at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. They were recorded as “20 and odd Negroes.” These Africans had been stolen from a Portuguese slave ship, transported to an English warship flying a Dutch flag and sold to colonial settlers in American. The...
Earth’s Unsung-est Heroes: Black Inventors, pt. 3
The U.S. legal system has both helped and hindered racial justice through our history. – high points like Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, which said that separate but equal inherently isn’t equal, and one of my favorites, Loving v. Virginia. This aptly titled...