Madness Madness!

Sometimes a stark tragedy takes the form of an imperfect history. In this case the tragedy is that the Beast of Gévaudan, a creature or creatures who spent a chunk of the 1760s taking fatal chunks out of terrified villagers of the French countryside, did not show up 200 years later in the bus containing Ken Kesey and his "Merry Pranksters" and spend at least a few minutes of the 1960s di...

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

Is it hyperbolic to call it a Clown Riot when they were rioting against the Toronto Fire Department? Maybe. When clowns kick the ass of a city's fire department, and the fire department are Orangemen to a man and collectively symbolic both of municipal graft and Ulster Unionist fuckery, are the clowns immediately granted IRA membership? Friends, I've been drinking. Thus the work of parsi...

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Well fuck, it's wartime again on Madness Madness. Today we learn about legitimate national hero Chris Noel, who started her work actually supporting the actual troops in a way more useful than car window stickers in Vietnam and never looked back. We also learn about The Hunley!, a Civil War-era submarine that worked about as well as the submarine you picture in your head after hearing the wor...

Look, the IRA did some unforgivable things in response to some equally unforgivable things done by the Ulster Unionists and centuries of even worse things done by the fucking English. But when you kidnap a horse hailed as a national hero by the people of Ireland itself, you have officially gone too far. Today we hear the tale of Shergar, a horse who was real good at running fast, and of Bild Lilli...

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

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

How 'bout we just list some key items this episode has in it: Border Blasters, goat testicle implantation, rootin' tootin' child neglect, Brother Al ("A-L"), one hundred baby chicks by mail, Big Tex continuing to slowly and mechanically wave as he is engulfed in flames *, the ionosphere. Get to it! * this is quite possibly the funniest thing that had ever happened before t...

Friends, do you like stunning stone structures perched on piney hilltops? Do you like the ghosts of mistreated sanitarium patients, dead from neglect? OK what about the ghost of a cute little orange tabby cat? OK! Me too! Let's go to the Crescent Hotel then, and learn about Eureka Springs' most haunted place! (Also one of the prettiest.) Oh, and be sure to bring a book! We'll be rel...

This week we have a look at the actual events that led to a legendary song, the most famous version of which contained the line "I've got three little children and a very sickly wife." Stagger Lee! Real shit! That there is a song that contains absolutely no hidden backward lyrics, which means it wasn't a part of the moral majority scare about rock music hiding backward lyrics t...

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

OK WELL ANYWAY now that the tornado has passed, Erin can continue talking about Kit Williams' book "Masquerade" and the real-life treasure hunt it spawned (on purpose). And Amanda can tell us a little something about some obvious straight-up horse shit that the British scientific community uncritically gobbled right up because it wanted to believe fucking England was the cradle of l...

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

Gather 'round, listeners, and hear the story of what happens when dictatorships—sorry, I'm being told the proper name is monarchies—get so far up their own asses they get syphilis and start wars and basically murder literally millions of their own citizens. The Mayerling Incident was a low-key extremely important* example of this brand of royal fuckery, and we are definitely going to hea...

Today we squint quizzically at James Bernard Schafer, a teleporting doctor who founded the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians and set out to raise an immortal baby! Until the baby's mother showed up and wanted her back. Still totally immortal, possibly.* We keep going, though, and end up with a look at “the most famous con man you’ve never heard of,” except that if you listen to this p...

This week we examine a real insane person and fake books! Lyndon LaRouche ran for president 8 times and was less coherent with each successive run. Though he started out as a semi-Marxist pro-labor kinda guy, he quickly moved squarely into right-wing pro-insane bullshit territory. No matter what, there was always room in his heart for all sorts of old-fashioned racism, anti-semitism, and an undyin...

This week on Madness Madness we're out here lookin' for starters, but all we can see is a bunch of jackoffs . First off we take a surprisingly thought-provoking journey to the '80s and '90s for a look at the Church of the Subgenius, a cult that wasn't actually a cult from the heady days of heavy 'zine-ing! Straight out of Dallas, very close to our home base in central...

we're back / from a brief hiatus / time off is a predatory bird, and it ate us // This week we step away from cults for a bit, and look instead at an ongoing mystery and a straight-up conspiracy theory! Oak Island is, as the name suggests, an island! In Canada! With a hole in it! Several holes now, in fact, since about once per generation, some dude (it's always a dude) is absolutely sur...

Today we learn how to live forever, but for real this time, from People Unlimited Incorporated! (We also take a moment to mourn the death of its founder, Charles Paul Brown, who died in 2014 NO YOU SHUT UP!) Are we ready to spend our immortal lives eating the worst food imaginable? Before we decide, we'll take a look at The Waldorf School, founded by Rudolf Steiner, who dared to ask the quest...

We don’t have a new episode this week, so please accept Brian’s alternate rendition of the Terasem … anthem? from last week's show. The song might be called “Earth Seed” because every line in it has the words “Earth Seed” in it but also seriously who gives a shit. Content Warning: Some really bad white person “rhythm” comes into play and honestly the whole thing never recovers. See you next w...

One of this week's cults is a rare example of a cult not primarily being a financial grift. Terasem's founders are already super fucking rich, and so they're really more interested in your unquestioning allegiance, their own desperate desire to cheat death, and your interest in hanging out with a deeply disturbing AI automaton named BINA48. It's pitted against Access Consciousn...

This week we're throwin' a party! A POLITICAL party! Under the smug, starfucking veneer of leader Daisaku Ikeida, a Japanese Buddhism rip-offshoot called Soka Gakkai that is also a political party? With like 20% of the vote?!? I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation (there isn't). We're also partying down in an abandoned secretarial school, in Paris! That's tha...

I think we can all agree that what we really need in these troubled times are more diploma mills. How else are we gonna get more unlicensed group psychotherapists? THERE IS NO OTHER WAY. The founders of Ganas, which as it happens began as an unaccredited school for group therapy, are entirely with me on this one, and would like to interest you in a completely different, entirely legitimate diploma...

There are cults where you skulk around the racist fringes of Southeastern Oklahoma planning terrorist attacks, and cults where the Daughter of God tells you to go out and do crimes so you can all keep staying in luxury hotel suites. Obviously the second kind of cult is way better for everyone, but whatever, we're examining both on today's show! Elohim City's most notable claim to fa...