Scattered Curiosities

Ahoy, Matey, and welcome aboard the Curiosity Sloop. Prepare to have your timbers shivered as Commodore Einstone pulls back the thin veil separating kings from pirates, debunks the myth of buried treasure and explains maritime terms from the Golden Age of Piracy. Get familiar with the Gentleman Pirate, the Prince of Pirates, the Robin Hood of the Sea and learn which monarch was so obese they neede...

Court jesters have been associated with positions of authority throughout time in memorial from the Pharoah Neferkere to the conquests of Atilla the Hun to the Battle of Hastings and through the Age of Discovery. These wisecracking wearers of the "cap and bells" have gone by various titles: minstrel, juggler, jolly, clown, comedian, joker, harlequin, and fool. Join Albort as he gets acquainted wit...

1986 (a 365-day time frame fraught with discharge of toxic material, skyjackings, and espionage) was dubbed the International Year of Peace by the United Nations. And why not? The U.K. and Netherlands officially ended the 335-Years War, Hands Across America was raising funds for hunger and homelessness, the late Martin Luther King Jr. was honored with a Federal Holiday, and Pee-Wee Herman bridged...

Since The Simpsons debuted over three decades ago, Albort’s Jeopardy game has been embiggened exponentially. But for the Simpsons, he would never have known about Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose, or William Alton Carter’s Billy Beer; and that’s just scratching the surface. This episode celebrates the random factoids learned from the longest-running animated sitcom and h...

How many movies have you seen that feature a wardrobe montage, a protagonist tearing out an IV to hastily leave the hospital, post-coital bed-sheets that magically only cover the woman’s chest, or characters uttering stale lines like, “We’ve got company”, “No time to explain”, or “He’s behind me, isn’t he?” All are examples of clichés but they aren’t just confined to films and television. Join Alb...

It's been fifty years since Atari’s revolutionary game, Pong, ushered in a Renaissance for video arcades in America and gave rise to the animatronic house bands of Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz Pizza. Albort experienced it in real time and invites you to join him for a stroll down memory lane with detours at the 1982 World’s Fair, Blockbuster Video and the hilarious antics that take place within “Sh...

This is the second apportionment of our four-part Better Half mini-series containing four lectures regarding the First Ladies of the United States within the Reconstruction Era, the Gilded Age, through total global interwar, the Mad Decade, and up to the brink of the Dirty Thirties. The sixty-eight-year span features a shy First Lady entreating the Queen of Hawaii, a cross-eyed, anti-suffragist eq...

This is the inaugural episode of an introductory four-part mini-series regarding the First Ladies of the United States of America. The New Nation's inception thought nothing of what to call the President's wife as "First Lady" did not appear in print until thirty-six years after Martha Washington's death. Because women have been so thoroughly shafted in history, much of our familiarity of them com...

It has been eleven years since ABC’s smash drama LOST has been off the air, yet fans continue to debate and mythologize its doctrines via blogs and hundreds of podcasts devoted solely to dissecting the mysterious island series from multiple perspectives, delving deeper into the characters' connections to one another; this is not one of them. Instead, Albort wishes to introduce some historical figu...

What happens when a paranormal consultant remembers an incarcerated Nelson Mandela dying in the 1980s instead of famously being released from his twenty-seven-year sentence in 1990, becoming the first Black President of South Africa and living an additional three decades? The rara avis known as False Memory Syndrome gets rebranded as The Mandela Effect. Though it just as easily could have been nam...

When did fashion dolls morph into America’s movable men? Why do unicorns and Pegasus get confused for one another? Who, among rock stars, would make the ugliest, but most talented, baby? What Golden Raspberry Award-winning actor and former BOP Boy are we infatuated with? How is it that Weebles wobble but do not fall down? And where does Albort dream of going with the King of Horror? The long-await...

Did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt have Amelia Earhart shot down over the Pacific during a “reconnaissance” mission in retaliation for her lesbian affairs with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt? Probably not, but if you nit-picked your facts, you might be able to construct a plausible explanation to support that theory; we are not the first to suggest it, by the way. Today’s narrative was built ar...

*WARNING: CONTENTS OF THIS EPISODE CONTAIN CHRISTMAS SPOILERS. NOT FOR CHILDREN* Join Albort as he explores the many incarnations of the most fantastical, generous, Coca-Cola loving character of the holiday season, Santa Claus; from Saint Nikolas of Myra to Sinterklaas of the Netherlands to Pere Noel of France to L. Frank Baum’s “Neclaus” and why the wife of the man in the “Ho-Ho-Tuxedo” doesn’t e...

It’s October and time for our most spooktacular episode yet. Get a lesson in the provenance of Halloween and the many names it goes by, from the Celtic festivities of Calan Gaef and Samhain to All Hallow’s Eve, Hallowmas, All Saint’s Day, Reformation Day, Founder’s Day and the Day of Seven Billion. Albort’s cauldron is brimming with vampires, witches, candy, aliens, splatstick, Jack O Lanterns, so...

Orville Redenbacher, Mario Puzo and James Brown walk into a podcast…don’t you wish that was the set up to a fantastic joke? It’s not (sorry) but a connection between the three can be found in the year 1969; as well as Ho Chi Minh/Dwight D. Eisenhower, Judy Garland/Sharon Tate, Jack Kerouac/Joseph Kennedy, Sr. and Boris Karloff/Frank Loesser. Join Albort as he gets semi-centennially nostalgic for t...

Capital cities are the center of government to nations states and provinces but are not always the most prominent, popular, populous or permanent (New York City and Philadelphia are NOT capital cities…anymore). Pensacola and Saint Augustine are also former heads of state that ceded to Tallahassee when East Florida and West Florida unified. Join Albort for a brush-up lesson of US capitals and a pot...

It is time for this season’s language analyzing episode, featuring near miss accidents, poison versus venom, Judas Priest, Alzheimer’s Disease, The Pirates of Penzance, bald faced lies, Diphtheria, Contronyms, Malapropisms, Voiceless Labiodental Fricatives and Albort explaining the difference between amused/bemused, viable/feasible, ultimate/penultimate and how to pronounce Açaí. This is Unglish.

It’s the season three premiere and boy is it a scattered one, including little known factoids about some infamously ferocious historical redheads and a queen whose hair turned white overnight. Delve into the many loves of Cleopatra and Gaius Julius Caesar (along with each other), cross-dressing Romans, decisive beheadings, felinophobes, the tale of the Gordian Knot and the unlikely American succes...

It’s the Season Two Finale and Albort thinks the Renaissance names for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were not assigned properly and intends to make a case for it. Get the back story on the cold-blooded half-shelled vindicators of justice and their belletristic namesakes of antiquity Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.

Albort reflects on his fortieth year on this our fortieth episode. Travel back to the mystical year one thousand, nine-hundred ninety-eight to decide if Albort predicted the Bird Flu virus as he reads excerpts of his recently dusted off writing assignment book borne of his ten year old, pop-culture infected mind to discover how he and the world have changed in the past thirty years.

Snowmen, Alan Alda, Candy Canes, and Cherries are just some of the many nicknames for pairs in playing cards and the first two make up four fifths of the infamous Dead Man’s Hand. Join Albort for a lesson in poker tournaments, game strategy and learn the jargon that will have you talking like a pro in no time. Discover how the World Series of Poker became a popular sport on ESPN and get to know so...

It’s the first Tinysode of the season, a lost relic from the series premiere of the Scattered Curiosities. Get a very brief overview of the Battle of the Downs, one of Albort’s favorite paintings at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and find out what it has to do with the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Curacao and St. Maarten.

Take a trip down Saturday Morning Memory Lane with Albort Einstone as he recalls some favorite cereals, commercials, toys and mascots from the late 1800s to today. Learn the history behind some of the biggest companies in breakfast and how Battle Creek, Michigan became ground zero for the start of the unending mascot wars and cereal killers.

Albort knows a thing or two about being full of hot air and blows quite a bit of it in this episode surrounding the rigid airships of the early to mid-1900s and how hot air balloons used in the US Civil War helped to inspire the creation of the Luftschiff Zeppelin. Get to know the LZ129 Hindenburg, how it crashed and then wound up on the record jacket of the world’s greatest rock and roll band.

35 The Return of Bobby Fulton by Albort Einstone