Timesuck with Dan Cummins

The only thing Leonardo da Vinci wasn't good at was raising his kids. And only because he didn't have any. He seemed to master just about everything else. He may have known more than any other human had ever known up until the time of his life, the late 15th and early 16th centuries. He may have been the smartest human being to ever walk the Earth, including anyone who was born before or after him...

Jesse James! Perhaps the most notorious outlaw in wild west history. Yip, yip, yaw! But do you know why he was so infamous? Do you understand the social climate that helped create him? Do you know what dirty deeds he committed to become so infamous? Today, we learn a lot about how the chaos of the Civil War created a lot of outlaws, and a number of the most ruthless of these men ended up in the Ja...

The Ninth Circle Cult! Is there actually a group of "global elites" hunting children in private European forests, raping and sacrificing children to Satan? Is the Pope the leader? That's what some people on the web think. In addition to exploring Ninth Circle lore we'll also look into the Catholic Church's history of pedophilia and also into the recent Jeffrey Epstein case. Do child sex rings exis...

Infectious disease. The number one murderer of humankind. By far! Nasty little viruses and other pathogens have killed more people than any other single cause of death each and every year prior to the advent of arguably the greatest invention ever - the vaccine. Vaccines have prevented millions and millions of deaths. So why are more and more people choosing NOT to vaccinate? And what are the repe...

Lost technologies! Greek fire, Damascus steel, the pyramid building abilities of ancient Egypt, India's flying vimanas, Rome's miracle medicine, the Antikythera Mechanism and so much more. We look into various claims of ancient technologies lost to time. Did they exist in the first place? Were they in any way superior to modern equivalents? A lot of historical mysteries explored on a Timesuck that...

Hinker du teh hoingy boingy! Uff da! Uff da! Tiddly winks teh dingy thingy. Don't worry - not all of today's show is in Norwegian (and neither is that gibberish). Talking about Norway's infamous export, serial killer Belle Gunness, today on the Suck. It seems as if she had begun to operate a "murder farm" in Laporte Indiana at the dawn of the twentieth century. We'll never know exactly how many pe...

OJ Simpson. It's been twenty-five years since his *alleged* murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. You've heard about the murders. You've heard about the trial. But how much do you really know about "The Juice"? We dive deep today on the life of OJ and look into his childhood, football playing days, acting career and more to establish just why his trial was so shocking. Feel the Heat album Link...

Serial killer Robert Hansen abducted and killed at least seventeen women and hunted many of them down in the Alaskan wilderness in the 1970s and 80s around Anchorage. This bakery owner and sport hunter was convicted in 1984 after confessing to killing seventeen women, mostly dancers and prostitutes, during a twelve-year reign of terror. Hansen led a very strange dual life - a happily married, donu...

Less than a week after the 4th of July, we Suck into the birth of the United States of America. We glance at some of the war's important battles and important figures, but, more importantly, we dig deep into the events leading up to the Revolutionary War. What went down between King George and the Founding Fathers that left colonists feeling like going to war with arguably the most powerful empire...

Who killed Elizabeth Short in 1947? We still don't know. Or do we? Today we go over the details of the Black Dahlia murder mystery - to this day the most infamous murder in Los Angeles history. We also go through a long list of suspects and take a close look at the guy I think did it. Will you come to the same conclusion I did? Find out today, on another true crime edition of Timesuck! Feel the He...

On April 19th, 2008, forty-two year-old Elisabeth Fritzl helped her seventy-three year-old father Josef carry their nineteen year-old unconscious daughter Kerstin - yes, THEIR daughter, you read that right - out of a small, windowless cellar that Kerstin had literally spent her entire life inside up until this point. That day, Elisabeth felt sunlight on her skin for the first time in twenty-four y...

Since 1971, well over thirty women have disappeared along a fifty mile-long patch of I-45 between Houston and Galveston. Some refer to this stretch of the Gulf Freeway as a highway to Hell, and to the marshy land around it as "The Texas Fields." Initially, the press only referred to one twenty-five acre patch of land in League City, an abandoned oil field, as the Texas Killing Field after the rema...

Really hope you enjoy this one. One of my favorite episodes so far. Such a big topic that touches so many lives. What is the history of homelessness in America? Why are people homeless now? Who is homeless now? What is being done to help the homeless? What COULD be done to help? I touch on mental health issues, substance abuse, economic conditions, good ol' fashioned laziness, and more. I also sha...

The Darwin Awards! Meatsacks removing themselves from being able to procreate or from the planet entirely in the most easily avoidable ways. Natural selection at work! We make light of a lot of death today, and also use this topic as an excuse to look into evolution theory and the man who put it on the map - Charles Darwin. Is evolution more than just "a theory"? Can we prove it worked? Did we rea...

Albert Fish. The Boogey Man. The Werewolf of Wysteria. The Brooklyn Vampire. The Gray Man. The Moon Maniac. A sexual sadist, sexual masochist, kidnapper, con artist, cannibal, torturer, murderer, and the kinkiest mofo I have ever read about. This tale is equal parts dark and captivating. Fish is the train wreck you can't stop staring at. After his capture in 1934, he would claim to have molested a...

Do you enjoy knights, wizards, and dragons? How about medieval history? Folklore, maybe? Want to learn how England became England? We learned a lot about the beginning of the mythology that has led to our cultural fascination with knights, jousting, sword fighting, dragons, and everything medieval in this Suck. There would be no Game of Thrones without Arthurian legend. No Lord of the Rings as we...

Today we talk about Vietnam. Do you know how the Vietnam war began? What events really led up to it? You will after this episode. You'll learn about centuries of foreign occupation at the hands of the Chinese and the French, and how colonial oppression led to a willingness to accept communist ideology. Communism may not be fun, but neither is being ruled by the French. We go over battles and the A...

Back to the USSR! Talking about Mother Russia's long history with BRUTAL various secret police agencies terrorizing its own people today on the Suck. Gonna go over the GULAG forced labor camps, gonna talk about the US vs. USSR Cold War spy game, a brief history of spy and secret police agencies in non-Russian parts of the world, and so much more in a Suck that gets about as dark as a show can in v...

Did Madame Delphine and her Dr. husband really torture their slaves in the most horrific of ways at the now infamous LaLaurie Mansion at 1140 Royal St in the French Quarter of New Orleans? Or are the stories of firefighters walking into a burning structure in 1834 and finding horribly mutilated bodies just part of New Orleans ghost tour folklore? We do our best historical detective work as we exam...

2019 is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing! Yip, yip, yaw! On July 20th, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin, two American astronauts, landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on the moon. The Eagle has landed! And then, some six hours later, Neil became the first human to take one giant leap for mankind. And then Buzz followed Neil onto the moon's surface less than...

Vikings! We take a deep dive today into the history of Scandinavia, focusing in particular on the age of the Vikings! We look into what they wore, how their society was structured, why they became associated with barbaric raping and pillaging, and so much more. Viking culture is fascinating, complex, and honestly - pretty weird. And strange people make for a fun Suck. Hail Nimrod! Donate to our ch...

Napoleon! A man who knew before he died he would be remembered as being one of the most important European leaders in history - and boy was he right. He's regarded by many military historians as being one the best military strategists of all time. Dude was SUPER hard to beat on the battlefield but he was defeated several times - mostly because pretty much every other nation in Europe joined forces...

Former Russian police officer Mikhail Popkov was found guilty on December 10th, 2018 of killing fifty-six people in Siberia. All but one victim were women between the ages of seventeen to thirty-eight. He was given a second life sentence. He already had a life sentence he'd been given in 2015 when he was convicted of murdering twenty-two Russian women. He used his badge for years to lure women int...

On October 4th, 1994 the dead bodies of two Solar Temple cult members and their baby are found in Morin Heights, Quebec. All three have been stabbed to death. The baby has had a wooden dagger run through its heart in an obvious ritual killing. Forty-eight other cult members would take their lives that evening. And then another sixteen in 1995. And then five more in 1997. Why? Why did so many cult...

The origin of the Chupacabra legend! UFO sightings in Yosemite. A giant, lost Egyptian city in the Grand Canyon. Another underground city supposedly inhabited by mystical Lemurians in Mount Shasta. Mysterious murders. Unexplained disappearances. Haunted camp lodges. Cursed land. The birth of a cult that exists unto this day. Myths, monsters, aliens, ghosts, and more in today’s cornucopia of strang...