In 1914, a scientist made a new kind of paint, a paint that glowed. A company was founded, and they needed girls with small hands to work there, applying that paint to the hands and numbers of watches and to the dials of gauges in aircraft. One problem - the paint was deadly. And nobody told the girls.

Auntie Lynn joins us to discuss the disastrous reign of King John - and the numerous sidebars with which we become distracted. This episode is a free-wheeling discussion of John and a lot of random - but interesting - nonsense surrounding his reign! Note: As happens often, the dogs wanted to co-host, so you will hear some puppers in the background.

A flood is a flood, whether it's water or beer - and a 571-ton, 15-foot tall wave is going to be destructive, no matter what it's made of. Join us as we talk about beer, rookeries, prejudices, and settle some myths.

Back in the 1930s, some folks in Australia's sugar industry imported the Cane Toad from South America to help control a destructive beetle population. It... did not go well. It continues to not go well. It will likely keep not going well.

The city of Chi'Ing-yang got flattened in the late fourteen hundreds... and nobody really knows what happened. We'll talk about meteorites, comets, and explosions as we examine some of the more plausible theories. A nerdy brother and sister talk about disasters - that's what the show's all about. Especially in early April.

We're headed underground yet again, to visit beautiful British Colombia and talk about what happens when you mix explosives, methane, and coal dust. It's a tragedy that affected an entire city and is still relevant today.

A guy wrote a book, collecting and codifying religious and social suppression of women. That book became a sensation, propelling the man to fame and fortune. No, we're not talking about some modern "MRA" idiot or so-called "incel"... no, this guy existed over half a millennium ago and we're still seeing his fingerprints on modern misogyny today.

This week we're looking at an attempt to overthrow the American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt by a group of Wall Street financiers and big business leaders. Mocked and dismissed at the time - in newspapers owned by said business leaders - this attempted coup was a uniquely American close-call with facism.

Join us for three stories of people exploiting - or trying to - ill-thought-out corporate promotions. We'll talk about Vacuums, Soft Drinks, and Pudding, all tied together by an odd connection to airplanes - The Hoover Free Flights promotion, the Pepsi Points Harrier Jet legal case, and the Healthy Choice airline miles promotion.

Join us in the skies off the coast of California in this episode. We'll talk about the US Naval airship L-8, the mysterious disappearance of its crew, and its brief time as an airborne ghost ship!

Re-upload. Join us as Ella explains the events of a fateful night that sent a crew of 29 to the bottom of the largest freshwater lake in North America. We'll discuss shipping tonnage, the incredibly dangerous weather systems of the Great Lakes, and talk a little about Gordon Lightfoot's haunting tribute to the disaster. This episode was taken down due to a copyright concern; we'd quoted some lyrics from Lightfoot's song in the initial version of this episode. Those quotations have been...

Join us as we head to the mid-1800's and learn about a very specific blight that nearly crippled the French wine industry!

Another deep-sea oil rig, another disaster; in 1983, five saturation divers were killed when their air pressure was explosively decompressed. This episode covers a truly awful way to die.

How does a train wind up outside of its station, standing on its face? Well, the answer involves a perfect storm of operator negligence, bad brakes, and good ol' financial incentive.

Greg and Child Unit A explore one of the biggest volcanic eruptions of all time, and why a simultaneous massive decrease in the human population may be a case of correlation, not causation.

On this episode, we're going to the city of Seoul to take a look at another example of how greed kills people. In 1988, a building was constructed to maximize profit and minimize expense; in 1995, its inevitable collapse caused the most non-wartime deaths South Korea has experienced. We'll talk about construction techniques, building codes, why regulations are important, and how to not move gigantic air conditioners.

We're going to the dry and drought-blasted British Isles of 1976 for this (short) episode; we'll talk about ladybirds, the population boom-and-bust cycles of insect life, and how weird weather can throw an entire ecosystem into red-shelled chaos.

To kick off our 2024 season, I thought we'd cover the insidious disaster that is Conspiratorial Thinking! We'll discuss how our brain can get short-circuited in the strangest ways, why it takes fear and lack of self-reflection skills to be a true believer... and why this stuff cannot be dismissed and how we can all do a better job of guarding ourselves against it. Fun. Sources: Due to being available on a whole bunch of different platforms now, it's come to my attention that our Sources...

Back in 1977, Star Wars was a phenomenon that changed the film industry. In 1978, some CBS executives tried to replicate the magic for TV and the results were... legendary? Just probably not in the way they intended.

Ella takes a dive into color theory and the bizarre history of Fuschia - the color and the man it was named for. And why it may not be a real color at all.

On this extended sidebar, Ella brings us the story of the Ourang Medan, a ghost ship found floating in the middle of the pacific with the entire crew dead. Or was it never found, its only survivor finding his way to a barely-inhabited atoll and living just long enough to relay how his whole crew had perished due to some unknown force? Or was it found in the straits of Indonesia, with the deceased crew all staring upward in abject horror? It's a creepy story with a fairly mundane truth living...

In this extended sidebar we talk about a baseball player at the absolute top of his game, one of the hardest feats in the game of baseball, why he was able to pull it off under the influence of LSD - and more importantly, the incredible work he did once his baseball career was behind him.

Well, apparently all we're going to do are "stone-based historical scams" on these Extended Sidebar episodes... anyway, this hoax came up waaaaay back in our first season during the research for the Gregor MacGregor episodes. Join us as we talk about the Ica Stones, a hoax involving ancient Incans, Aliens, Dinosaurs, and the creative use of chickens. Enjoy!

Join us for our last episode of the season, wherein Ella and Greg discuss how a selfless act of heroism led to the ruination of a man's personal life. We'll discuss how to NOT be a good friend, the state of human rights in 1975, and how far society's come since then - and how far we still have to go. Also, Ella has an announcement. Correction: In the episode, Greg stated that Mr. Sipple's middle name was William; it was actually Wellington. Thanks to an attentive listener for the...