Timesuck with Dan Cummins

Lot to unpack in this one! Today we are blending history, aliens, and conspiracy. We'll be talking about the Ancient Sumerians - quite possibly the world's first civilization. Who were they and what "firsts" did they contribute to human civilization? Why did their culture flourish so long ago? We'll go over one of the oldest, if not the oldest written story in the world - the epic of Gilgamesh. An...

Remember Jodi Arias? Remember why her trial back in 2013 captivated so many and made so many headlines? I'd forgotten. But I sure remember now. Most people have either dated someone like Jodi, or known someone who has, or... been that person. The girl who just doesn't seem to understand the difference between someone just wanting to hook up with her, and someone actually caring about her. The girl...

This guy. Killing mainly in 1929 when he was 46, the final year of his freedom, Peter Kürten would be charged with nine brutal murders and seven attempted murders in 1930, and then executed 1931. Over the course of his depraved life, he'd be sent to prison over and over, for theft, breaking and entering, fraud, army desertion, arson, rape, and then eventually, murder. Dubbed the "Vampire of Dussel...

So much WTF!?! coming at you today. Wow. Dwight York is a maniac. And a terrible writer. And only a good disco/r&b vocalist if you compare him to other cult leaders who also have dabbled in music. But somehow this two-bit con man strung together around two hundred pamphlets full of his very confusing and constantly changing theology, or "factology" as he'd call it. The only message that remained t...

Operation Greenup was a covert OSS operation carried out by a special group of men many have called the “real life Inglorious Basterds, ” a reference to the 2009 Quentin Tarantino film in which a group of US Jewish soldiers plot to assassinate high-up Nazi leaders. Two Jewish refugees living in Brooklyn - Frederick Mayer and Hans Wynberg, and Franz Weber, a Wehrmacht lieutenant and Allied POW who...

My God. This story is so over-the-top, it's hard to accept as true. But sadly, it did happen. For roughly two decades, Fred and Rose West were the patriarch and matriarch of torture, sadism, incest, and death at their horrific British home at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, England. Both Fred and Rose were raised in preposterously incestuous homes where sexual abuse was normalized. They also bot...

Hope you have as fun listening to this one as I had making it! I had no idea prior to digging into this topic, that Lovecraft was so influential on modern horror. Like Stranger Things? Heavily influenced by Lovecraft. Like Stephen King's It? The cosmic monster who presents as Pennywise is a creature who could have come directly from the Cthulhu mythos. Much of the Twilight Zone, the X-Files, the B...

Big episode for a big, complex topic today. PT Barnum has been called the The Greatest Showman on Earth. And he certainly was the most famous promoter of the 19th century. He brought entertainment to millions, and millions loved him for it. He also stirred up a fair amount of controversy and many in the modern day have not looked back kindly on him. He often lied to his audience about the nature o...

The Great Pyramid of Giza. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Colossus of Rhodes. The Lighthouse of Alexandria. The Temple of Artemis. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. These are just SOME of the wonders we go over today. Get ready to want to explore the world. We are so surrounded by so many impressive man-made monuments. And also so much natural beauty - we also look at...

When the 1830s began, nearly 125,000 various tribal members lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida - land where their ancestors had lived for centuries. By the end of that decade, only a handful of indigenous Americans would remain in the southeastern United States. The federal government had forced them to leave their homelands and walk hundr...

Heard of this guy before? If you haven't, I'm with you. I hadn't either. And then once I got into this story, I wondered HOW had I never heard of him? This story is insane. Karl Denke killed, it seems, at least 30 people in Ziębice, Poland (formerly Münsterberg, Weimar Republic aka Germany). And he ate them. And he sold some of their meat to others. Probably many, MANY others. And he made suspende...

Today we take a fun and sometimes concerning tour around the United States looking at laws that are still on the books that either definitely shouldn't be, shouldn't have ever been, are sadly necessary, or are just plain... odd. Did you know that in Indiana it's illegal to have a " a covered clearly erect penis" at a city park? Or that it's illegal to use a ferret to help you hunt in West Virginia...

Cult! Cult! Cult! We're back to sucking on a cult - a small and relatively unknown one which is surprising considering how crazy this story is. For well over a decade, conman Daniel Perez convinced a small band of followers into thinking he was possessed by three mostly evil angels, or maybe was an angel, and that he had the keys to heaven, or maybe reincarnation? And that he could make it rain, o...

Whiskey! Today’s suck is SOAKED in whiskey. Mostly, in Jameson - some Irish whiskey. John Jameson - the founder of Jameson - was originally a lawyer from Alloa in Scotland before he founded a distillery in Dublin in 1780. In 1805, he was joined by his son John Jameson II who took over the family business. For the next 41 years, John Jameson Jr. built up the business before handing over to his son...

QAnon is the conspiracy cult involving so, so many things. It MOSTLY centers around belief in an elite, leftist, Satanic, child sex trafficking slash human sacrifice slash adrenochrome harvesting ring and the one man thought to be destined to expose and destroy this Deep State, evil, globalist cabal - former president Donald Trump. Seriously. That's really what it is. Antifa is a left-wing politic...

“We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.” Anonymous - the hacking collective that for many put hacking on the map. Since 2007, Anonymous has hacked just about everyone: the CIA, NSA, the Federal Reserve, other governmental agency websites around the world, the KKK, the Church of Scientology as well. They've released millions of classified documents. They've disrupted busines...

What a wild one we have today. I set out, fascinated by his two escapes from prison, to only explore cartel leader El Chapo. And then I got sucked into the history of the War on Drugs. And what a crazy history it is. Saying drugs are bad and that's why they're illegal is to vastly oversimplify US drug policy. Does the War on Drugs make any sense at all to fight? Can it actually be won? Does it act...

Mao Zedong's name is associated with one of the heinous totalitarian regimes of the 20th century - if not one of the most heinous regimes in the history of the world. Due to famines brought about directly by his brutal policies and political "purges" he authorized, roughly 45 million Chinese citizens died. Possibly tens of millions more. Chairman Mao is responsible for more noncombatant deaths tha...

Robert Pickton was born in 1949 just outside of Vancouver, CA, in Port Coquitlam, on a pig farm. His parents were Helen and Leonard Pickton, two insanely filthy human beings who couldn’t have cared less about clean clothes or a house that wasn’t full of animal shit or even about bathing their children, Robert, his sister Linda, and his brother, Dave. Robert would live on the family farm his entire...

We got a wild one today. Today's Suck is really three Sucks in one. There is the abduction of Steven Stayner, the backstory of a notorious pedophile, Kenneth Parnell, and the story of serial killer, Cary Stayner aka the Yosemite Killer. In late 1972, Steven was abducted on the way home from school, at the age of seven, and he wouldn't see his family for another seven years. And that entire seven y...

Today we take a huge deviation for the type of topic we typically cover here on Timesuck. The Space Lizards on Patreon vote on two topics a month through the app, and for today, they voted in my grandfather who passed away back on December 23rd. Probably the most influential person in my life. Today, I cover how the Hall family ended up in Idaho which leads to a history of Idaho settlement. My gre...

Founded in 1974 by a man named Joe Ricci, the Elan School was supposed to be someplace where you could send your troubled teen so they could be rehabilitated and put back on the right track. But in reality, it was a cruel and chaotic nightmare where students were constantly being pressured to confess to things they’d done “wrong,” called “guilts,” which often were things as silly and not-wrong as...

Blackwater. Now known as Academi. Once known as Xe Services. A private military company. One of many PMCs very active in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of this century. One of many employers of "security contractors" contracted by the Department of Defense, or State Department, or the CIA to work alongside - or sometimes in place of - active military personnel in war zones around the wor...

The Great Emu War! Such a weird and fun tale to tell. What an odd historical period. As World War I came to an end, Australia - whose economy was tanking, tried to figure out what to do with their returning veterans. They decided to give many of them parcels of land in Western Australia where they could grow wheat. And then the Great Depression hit. It hit countries all over the world, and few har...

Dante's Inferno! One of the most influential literary works ever written. Put to parchment in the early 14th century, Dante's opening third of the Divine Comedy presented a clear vision of Christian Hell, wherein nine descending circles, Dante, guided by the ancient Roman poet, Virgil, witnesses various types of sinners receiving poetically fitting forms of punishment. In today's Suck, we learn ab...