The Blindboy Podcast - A thorough meditation about Sparkling Water

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

I investigate why 19th Irish immigrants to the America fetishised sparkling water and how it relates to early pagan traditions  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Head over to NSU Breastfed Dennis. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. Thank you for the magnificent response to last week's podcast. I had the wonderful David Koehn on the podcast who is a stone lifter and he's metaphorically and literally unearthing folkloric traditions in Ireland by finding stones and lifting them. Go back and listen to that podcast if you didn't hear it. It was a riveting chat with a fascinating person and he wanted me to thank Yee as well for the feedback and for how many people followed him on Instagram and he has set up a Patreon page too. I'm a busy boy at the moment. I'm currently in the final stages of editing my book Topographia Hibernica which is coming out this November.

So I've been working more or less non-stop from when I wake up in the morning until I go to bed and in the middle I've been writing and editing and drinking loads of sparkling water mainly because if I'm working 14 or 15 hours a day and habitually drinking something, which I like doing, I want that substance to be relatively inert. I limit myself to two cups of coffee a day and ten pints of tea a day, but then as many bottles of sparkling water as I like,

because it's just water and carbon dioxide. It keeps me incredibly hydrated, and I very much enjoy the violence of the effervescence on my tongue. Sparkling water is one of the few little treats that you can drink continuously with no repercussions whatsoever. I mean, I could drink still water all day long too and receive no repercussions but still water isn't any crack. Sparkling water is crack. If I drink too much tea then there's a certain amount of caffeine in there. Sugary drinks you get a bit

of a sugar rush and then you get a slump. But even diet drinks, technically they don't contain sugar. But I don't trust them. There's too much pleasure. In something like a Diet Fanta, there's too much pleasure in the drink. Or even Diet 7-Up. I just feel it's open to abuse. But not sparkling water. I can never abuse sparkling water.

I can drink sparkling water all day long. I even have a favourite type abuse sparkling water. I can drink sparkling water all day long. I even have a favourite type of sparkling water. It's the nicest sparkling water I ever tasted in my entire life. It's called Vichy Catalan. And I can only buy it in Spain. It comes in a really heavy glass bottle. And I couldn't believe my mouth when I first tasted it.

Because it wasn't just sparkling water. It was... It felt like you could eat it. There was a saltiness to it. It reminded me of bread soda, bicarbonate of soda. I tasted it in a restaurant in Cordoba in Spain. And I got so excited about this sparkling water in the restaurant that when I asked the waiter about it, he lost his ability to speak English. I couldn't understand how this sparkling water was so tasty, how it tasted like a meal. I needed to know how they made this sparkling water.

I couldn't believe that on the bottle, the year 1881 was printed. All the words on the label were in Spanish, so I couldn't understand it. So I had to take out my phone and Google this this wonderful water called Vicky Catalan and then I went Googling and the water comes from a natural spring in the Caldes de Malavella in Catalonia and this sparkling water it comes like that from out of the fucking ground this sparkling water that I was drinking it comes hot at 60 degrees out of the ground and then they cool it down. And what I'm tasting in my bottle, the fucking bubbles that I was tasting, the fizziness, came from the depths of the earth. And what happens in this area of Catalan is that

rainwater falls down near these springs. Then the rainwater seeps down into limestone, which is calcium carbonate. But the pressure of all the layers of rock and soil caused the rainwater to engage in a chemical reaction with the limestone, and that creates calcium bicarbonate. But while that's happening, miles and miles and miles underneath the earth, volcanic activity that's way down is pushing up carbon dioxide.

The carbon dioxide then permeates upwards through the layers of rock and it dissolves into the groundwater to form a type of acid, carbonic acid. All the pressure underground causes the carbonic acid that comes from the volcanic activity to mix with the calcium bicarbonate that's in that rainwater to eventually emerge in the spring as this really hot naturally fizzy water and then they cool it down and put it into a bottle and that's what ended up on my table in this restaurant in Spain and I said to myself and I said to the waiter my god these bubbles in my mouth might be hundreds

of years old they might be thousands of years old and whatever rapid whatever really quick and enthusiastic way I was saying this in the restaurant anyway the waiter got freaked out and lost his ability to speak English for a small period of time because he was probably just not understanding me because I was talking too fast and then just looking at my face and going what the fuck is going on with this fella here why is he so excited about this glass of water what's going on why is he on Wikipedia and i considered bringing bottles of it home but the fucking bottles they were just too heavy but then i said to myself

no this sparkling water is so special and so delicious let's leave it in spain let's keep it as a wonderful memory let's keep it as something I fetishise, something I fantasise about, something I think about, something that I know I'm going to have and can't wait to have when I go to Spain once or twice a year. Let that wonderful, strange, salty, sparkling water be the dragon that I chase.

When I drink just regular sparkling water here in Ireland that's artificially carbonated. So that's the reason I'm just regular sparkling water here in Ireland that's artificially carbonated so that's the reason I'm talking about sparkling water I've been drinking fuck loads of it the past month or so while I'm working like all day long I started off with smaller bottles then I moved on to the two liter bottles but before long I just looked around my office one day and was like, oh fuck. I'm becoming engulfed with empty plastic bottles. There was empty plastic bottles of sparkling water fucking everywhere. To the point that the clutter got so extreme that I didn't, I got that overwhelming sensation where I didn't know how to clean it up.

I know that sounds foolish, but I'd reached a sparkling water bottle tipping point where there was just too many sparkling water bottles. I was tripping over them. They were all over the floor, all up on my shelves. There was about 160 bottles of sparkling water in my office last week. And I said, right, okay, you got to sort this the fuck out. Now I know you're thinking, why didn't you get a soda stream? Why don't you just buy a soda stream and carbonate your own water?

In Ireland, we traditionally have solidarity with the people of Palestine. And soda stream is made in a factory in an occupied part of Palestine. So that's what puts me off buying a soda stream. And I should probably look into alternative fizzy water machines that are more ethical. But usually when I get to a situation where clutter is overwhelming me and I kind of freak out a little and I'm like, oh fuck, there's too much now and I don't know where to start. That's usually when I start procrastinating. I'll engage in some other pursuit that makes me

feel as if I'm solving the problem but I'm really not. But it did lead me down an incredibly interesting rabbit hole. So archaeologists in the United States will often carry out surveys and dig up the ground around old areas. Now, old in the United States isn't like old here in Ireland. They'll carry out archaeological surveys in the United States on areas that might have been inhabited by immigrants only 150 years ago. But something they found which is incredibly fascinating and they found this in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and in San Francisco when they dug up any area that used to be an Irish slum 19th century so I'm talking 1820 to 1860. The Irish people that emigrated to America during the famine when they dug up old Irish neighborhoods they kept finding glass

bottles of sparkling water. Now they also dug up old Italian neighbourhoods, Dutch, German, African American. They didn't find loads of bottles of sparkling water. It had gotten to a point that when they were digging up the ground in America and they found a bunch of sparkling water bottles, they were like, ah, this was an Irish slum sometime between 1820 and 1860. This was an Irish slum sometime between 1820 and 1860. And we know this because there's a lot of glass sparkling water bottles in the ground. So as you can imagine, I got incredibly excited and was like, well, I smell a fucking hot take in here.

This is one of the enjoyable things about being neurodivergent. First off, I don't think a neurotypical person is going to allow their office to become completely engulfed with 160 bottles of sparkling water. They're also not going to get so overwhelmed by that clutter that they completely shut down and lose the ability to figure out how the fuck you clean it. And what they're definitely not going to do is to say to themselves, I notice I'm surrounded by sparkling water bottles in my office it's become a huge problem I wonder could I solve this problem by thinking about sparkling water in a very focused and intense way for hours and also engage in academic research about sparkling water I wonder would this solve my problem it didn't solve my problem but that didn't matter because now I had a new problem. And the new problem was, why the fuck were Irish immigrants to America in the 1840s

collecting bottles of sparkling water? What's going on? And what rip in the fabric of space-time or facet of my genetic memory has caused me right now, as an Irish person, to be surrounded by bottles of sparkling water? I found incredible research by an academic called Meredith B. Lynn who looked into it and the answer most likely isn't a million miles away to how I fetishized that Spanish sparkling water so let's take one area of New York for example and it's an area I've spoken about before.

The Five Pints area of Lower Manhattan. It's the area that's featured in the film Gangs of New York. The Five Pints which doesn't exist anymore. It's near Canal Street now in New York. It's kind of near Chinatown. It's near Canal Street now in New York. It's kind of near Chinatown. This area, from 1820 onwards, was a notorious slum.

It had been built on marshy land. Wooden houses sank into the ground. It was disgusting. It was uninhabitable. So the only people who lived there in the 1820s, because of the racial system in America, would have been freed African American slaves and new Irish immigrants from like 1820 onwards because you have to remember from about 1820 Irish immigrants in America were not considered white the social construct of whiteness as it exists in American society,

which is a racist society. Irish people were considered a disease-ridden, violent horde of religious extremists, very much at the bottom of the system. And these Irish people who emigrated to New York from 1820s onwards, especially the 1840s, they were escaping the famine. So you're talking about a starving, mostly rural Irish population with a high amount of disease because A, they were starving, B, they'd just spent eight weeks on a coffin ship trying to make it to New York. So it's in the areas where these real poor famine Irish lived is where they find all these glass bottles of sparkling water when they dig these areas up now. So did these poor Irish people back in famine Ireland, did they have access to soda water,

to sparkling water? No they didn't. But when they got to New York in the 19th century soda water was a big deal in New York. Soda fountains were very popular places that people would go to drink sparkling water. Also the temperance movement was a big deal. Temperance which led to prohibition but temperance was to abstain from alcohol so a lot of people in New York drank at soda fountains and drank sparkling water I remember earlier when I described that wonderful Spanish sparkling water and the hundreds of years of geologic processes that happen with fucking rain water and volcanic activity and how these chemical reactions take place to eventually form carbonated water in a natural spring. A special anomaly in

one part of the world. Natural carbonation that takes nature ages. Well in New York in 1832 a fella called John Matthews who I think was a chemist, figured out how to do that himself. He mixed pulverized marble dust with sulfuric acid and this created carbonic acid gas. And when he put this in water, he made sparkling water. He didn't have to go to one of the incredibly rare springs in the world to find sparkling water. He figured out, I can make it. So it was sold at soda fountains and also in chemists, in bottles, in glass bottles, this sparkling water. And everybody drank it. Everybody drank it.

But when the Irish drank it, it meant something else. it meant something else something about this soda water this sparkling water in new york was very very special to irish people specifically this is most likely because of the the ancient irish relationship that we have with holy wells of which there's over 3 000 in ireland now i've done full podcasts before at length about Irish mythology and Irish beliefs around water, in particular water that springs from the earth in a natural spring. Our relationship with holy wells, it goes, it's before Christianity, it's several thousand years old. A holy well is, it's basically a site in the earth where water springs up from the ground and this water is usually mineral water. It comes from deep underneath the earth

and each well had different minerals and each well had different healing properties. The pagan Irish believed that these wells were interdimensional portals to the other world. That there was a parallel universe to our reality and the beings in this parallel reality were smarter, were healthier, were stronger, had more abundance in their lives. A much better parallel world where the gods lived and sometimes little rips would occur in the earth where water would spring forth from the other world and bring with it knowledge and health and that's what holy wells were and people would gather around these holy wells and they'd drink from them to heal illnesses and to be healthy and go back thousands of years and the the thing is, they weren't wrong.

A well is a natural spring. It's water that comes from deep underneath the earth and it brings with it micronutrients that humans need. For instance, there's a holy well that was near Lucan in County Dublin and the waters that came from this holy well contained lots of sulphur. So people would have used this for rheumatism or arthritis. Down in Mallow and County Cork there was another well and the waters from this well whatever it dragged up from the earth underneath it deep down it brought up iron, sulphur, iodine, magnesium and people would go there if they had problems with their stomach or if they had skin conditions and then of course my favorite

holy well of all which I've done a full podcast on the holy waters of Glownigelt down in Kerry the area that's known as the valley of madness going back thousands of years people who suffered from mental illness be it bipolar schizophrenia people with mental disorders for thousands of years would find themselves living around this well in Kerry and then when they studied the water 20 years ago they found that lithium is present in this well deep deep down in the ground underneath this well in Kerry there's lithium and the spring brings it up to the surface and people for thousands of years would eat the watercress around this well and if they had mental illness they found their symptoms alleviated if they drank from this well and lithium is still a

valid treatment today for people who have certain mental illnesses but the pagan people of Ireland they didn't understand this they didn't know this they didn't know if I go to this well, it's going to help my skin because there's sulfur in it. They just knew something about this water seems to help this particular condition. And this must be magic. This must be knowledge and magic and wonder that comes from the other world. And that's why these wells are special. That's why it's not just water. it's something that comes from the parallel universe. So holy wells and natural springs are a massively important part of Irish indigenous culture

and when Christianity came here and Saint Patrick came here, these wells went from being pagan gateways into the other world into just becoming holy wells that were blessed by a saint and people still congregated there and people still believed that the well had healing properties but just for a different reason now, it was a Christian reason. But the most powerful wells in Ireland were ones that contained even the tiniest hint of carbonation. Any hint of bubbles, natural carbonation that occurred in a wet in Ireland, this was considered to be a direct powerful seam into the other world. The well of Sagus for example had bubbles of inspiration. The well of Sagus is where one of the most famous stories from Irish mythology comes from.

From the Fenian cycle. The story of the salmon of knowledge. And in this story, when hazelnuts would drop from a tree into the well of Sagus, little fizzy bubbles would form around wherever the hazelnuts dropped. Now what this tells us now, in the 21st century, is that, ah, the well of Sagus contained carbonic acid. When the fucking hazelnuts

dropped in, whatever was going on with this well, it fizzed a little bit. Like if you dropped something into a glass of fucking sparkling water. But the salmon and knowledge story, again that could be 2,000, 3,000 years old, we don't know. But the people at the time said, no, no, no, those bubbles, those bubbles of inspiration,

that is knowledge from the other world. That's the parallel fucking dimension, the other reality, the aliens, whatever you want to call them. Those bubbles are them giving us inspiration. Those bubbles from the well of Sagas contain all the knowledge of the other world. And then inside in this well,

there was a salmon swimming around. And this salmon was swimming in the bubbles. well of sagas contain all the knowledge of the other world and then inside in this well there was a salmon swimming around and this salmon was swimming in the bubbles so that fucking salmon whoever caught that and who could eat it would gain all of the knowledge of the other world and there was this poet called finagas who spent his fucking life trying to catch this salmon so that he could gain all the knowledge of the world. And then one day he did catch it, and he asked the hero, Fionn MacCool, to help him to cook this salmon.

And Fionn MacCool said, okay, I'll cook the salmon, don't worry about it, Phinegas. I'm going to cook this for you on a spit, and then you can eat it, and when you eat the salmon, you'll get all the knowledge of the other world like you've wanted. And then Fionn MacCool is cooking it, and sees a blister on the salmon and he puts it out with his thumb then he burns his thumb sucks his finger and Fionn MacCool gets all the knowledge of the

other world because of this sparkling carbonated water another story about the importance of the presence of bubbles in Irish holy wells is the story of the river Shan, the river that flows through Limerick where I am now. The story goes is that there was a well, can't remember the name of it, but anyway thousands of years ago there was this well somewhere up the north of the country and this well had bubbles and the bubbles rose up in the water and the goddess Shunuk was looking for inspiration she was she she was trying to write poetry she was trying to create art and she needed inspiration so she decided I'm gonna go to that water with the bubbles because the bubbles that's

the information from the other world but she got kind of greedy and she jumped into the well and tried to swim to the very bottom to find where the bubbles came from and then the well got angry and when the well got angry it expelled her thousands of miles into the air and kept flowing and created the river Shannon and this is an interesting thing you find with holy wells or healing wells in Ireland even to this day they're not seen as things they're not really seen as just like a body of water they're seen as beings as entities a holy well has to be treated with respect because if you don't treat it with respect you can offend it and if you offend a holy well it can dry up or bring bad luck upon you some of the

things that you can do to offend a holy well are washing your clothes in it removing the fish from the well if a well is identified as being healing or life-giving and there's fish living in that well you don't fish from that well you don't kill any of the animals or insects that live in or around that well. One of the worst things you can do is to drown a person in a well, to make a well a site of violence or to leave a dead animal inside there. And if you do any of these things to a well in Ireland, it'll dry up and it'll move somewhere else or it'll bring great bad luck on you and your community. And this is one of those things I love about folklore. Not just Irish folklore, but folklore in general.

And I'm speaking about this a lot recently. I believe that folklore exists to keep us, the human animal, in line with systems of biodiversity. Because if you think about it, if you have a well in a rural community, and this is your source of really healthy fresh water, then don't fuck with it. Like why would the Irish going back thousands of years have a rule that says don't take the fish from the well? Because the fish are part of an ecosystem. The fish probably eat plants that are in that well or they eat insects that are in there

and the fish are part of a vital system that keeps that water healthy and keeps the water oxygenated and if you remove all the fish from that water then you've fucked with the ecosystem. Nothing is eating the flies, nothing's eating the plants, it becomes overgrown, the water loses its oxygen and then the well dies. Same reason you don't kill the insects that belong to the well. Same reason you don't wash your dirty that belong to the well same reason you don't wash your dirty clothes in the well and pollute it and contaminate it their reasons were don't fuck with this well it's it belongs to the other world or it belongs to a christian deity don't offend this well it's a thinking living thing that was their reason but it stands up to science it stands up to science it protects the biodiversity

of this very important source of water so holy wells of which there were thousands were a very very important thing to rural Irish people hugely important there were sites where people gathered and there were sites of celebration and sites of fairs and sites of healing and the most important wells were ones that contained any amount of carbonation and from reading about this when I say carbonation it doesn't just mean that the water from this well is particularly fizzy it can even mean if there's an incredibly high mineral content in the well it can just you can taste it you can taste that extra thing. That thing that I tasted in the restaurant in Spain when I drank that water that got me so excited it's like this isn't just fizzy

it's salty it's something else this is amazing water. Any well that had those properties naturally in Ireland was considered to be a very powerful conduit to the other world. So when poor Irish immigrants got to New York in the 1840s and visited a soda fountain where all the yanks are drinking this soda water, When the Irish drank it, they understood it to be magical and they understood it to be healing. They fetishised sparkling water in America. While the Germans and the Brits and whoever the fuck else was going, calm down lads, it's just a bit of fizzy water. The Irish were going, no.

We've been drinking this shit for thousands of years. We can taste it. This is the knowledge of the other world. This is healing. This is a healing substance. Another theory that the academics have when they're looking at this, they contrasted the famine Irish experience of tasting sparkling water in New York with the experience that American soldiers had in World War II when they drank Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola was very important for the morale of US soldiers

when they were in Germany and Italy and wherever in World War II. American soldiers in World War II, they were children when prohibition was a thing back in America. Soda fountains were a massive part of their childhood. Going to the local soda fountain and drinking Coca-Cola. And the memory and taste and sensation of Coca-Cola to those soldiers had such a visceral and strong nostalgic reaction in their mouths that it became a hugely important part of boosting the morale of

the troops. The taste of coca-cola felt like it reminded them what they were fighting for and when the famine Irish got to New York and they're freaked out by seeing fucking giant buildings for the first time and living in a city the taste of carbonated sparkling water brought them back to a happier part of their childhood in rural Ireland where there mightn't have been a lot of food but they went to the holy well to gather and drink this special water that came from the ground that had a little tang or a mineral quality to it or a little hint of fizziness. So those early Irish immigrants then started to buy glass bottles of sparkling water and to treat them almost like luxury objects in their homes.

And they collected loads. And this is how archaeologists in America now tell if they dig up an area, whether it was an Irish slum or not, because of this fetishisation of bottles of sparkling water. This then caused the academics to look at medical records, hospital records from around the 1840s. Now like I mentioned Irish immigrants were very very unwell. Tuberculosis, typhoid, diphtheria, the lot and what they found with a lot of Irish people in America in the 19th century when they eventually did go to hospital with whatever ailment they had

the Irish people would say to the doctors that they'd been treating themselves with sparkling water before they came to the hospital which further points at the theory that when they got to America and drank the sparkling water they believed it to be to be healing like the wells at home but the thing is this sparkling water that they were drinking in America that was the fake shit that was the stuff that was just made by a chemist by mixing marble dust with sulfuric acid so it didn't contain the mineral richness that what they would have been looking for at the thousand year old wet at home and here's something now that I find incredibly fascinating about this and most of the research in this area is done by an academic

called Meredith B Lynn and I went researching and researching looking at every academic who'd looked at this issue, and no one had brought this point that I'm going to make right now up. This is my little contribution to the discussion. I find this fascinating and so beautifully coincidental to the point that it feels supernatural. So you have this area of Lower Manhattan, the Five Points slums, unbelievably poor people. People so poor that they're dying of poverty. Irish famine Catholics. One of the questions that comes up for me is, how were they even able to afford sparkling water? How were they able to afford to go to a soda fountain and drink sparkling water? How were these incredibly poor people able to afford a bottle

of sparkling water? Because it's the 19th century. And like I said, this sparkling water was being made by chemical processes by mixing marble dust with sulfuric acid. That's how they were making the sparkling water and selling it. How did poor Irish people get to afford this stuff? Here's the mad coincidence that no one has pointed out. There were so many Catholics, Irish Catholics in Lower Manhattan that a diocese was created and Irish priests were sent to Lower Manhattan to build a fucking church and to create a place of worship because there's so many poor Irish Catholics in this area. And the church that was built in the 1850s was St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. St. Patrick's Cathedral was massive. This was a giant construction project. St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York in the 1850s was fucking massive.

And then when they were building it, they built it out of marble. St. Patrick's Cathedral used so much marble in its construction that there was now a huge excess of offcuts of marble from the stonemasons building the bricks. There was so much marble in New York because St. Patrick's Cathedral was being built that the price of marble went down to fucking nothing. What were they making sparkling water out of? Marble dust and sulfuric acid.

So the building of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York for the poor Irish community caused the price of sparkling water to go down that they could afford it. Complete fucking coincidence. I find the synchronicity of that absolutely fucking beautiful. That actually makes me think that... that makes me believe in the supernatural. Like here's the Irish in New York fetishizing sparkling water unbeknownst to themselves because it reminds them of holy wells back home. And then the new place that's built for them as a gathering place, as a place of worship in New York happens to reduce the price of that sparkling built for them as a gathering place as a place of worship in new york

happens to reduce the price of that sparkling water so they can afford it and no one planned that it just happened i think that's gorgeous so i did all that research and thinking while being surrounded by bottles of fucking plastic bottles of sparkling water in my office and once I got that out of my system and I said I think you've really gone deep now on sparkling water blind boy then I said cop onto yourself and I got a black plastic bag and I got all the fucking bottles of sparkling water put them into the black plastic bag and brought them down to the recycling bins. Where hopefully, they'd be repurposed into something useful.

And my office won't be dug up in a thousand years and it's just a bunch of... There'll be a podcaster in a thousand years wondering why I collected plastic bottles of sparkling water. Okay, it's time for the ocarina pause. Don't have my ocarina this week. What have I got?

Let's go for a book. What have I got here? Bad Behaviour by Mary Gateskill. A wonderful collection of short stories by a fantastic writer. This book was written in the 1980s.

It's a wonderful, strange, paranoid collection of short stories. It contains in it... Do you remember that film, Secretary? It'd be about 20 years old. Maggie Gyllenhaal was in it. Well, that film was loosely based on a short story in this book called Secretary. But they're quite different. Mary Gaitskell's Secretary story is, it's like a Me Too story but long, long before Me Too. It's really fantastic. I cannot recommend this collection of short stories enough. Bad Behaviour

by Mary Gaitskell and I love how she writes men. She writes her male characters as just unbelievably pathetic, but pathetic in a way that only a woman can see a man, not how a man can see himself. It's beautiful for that. And I got onto Mary Gaitskell because I was reading Artesha Moshfeg who's one of my favorite writers and she's quite influenced by mary gateskill so we're gonna hear some adverts and i'm gonna hit myself into the head with mary gateskill's bad behavior and you're i'm doing this because i don't want a big loud advert coming in and startling you so on april 5th you must be very careful margaret it's a girl witness the birth bad things will start to happen evil things of evil it's all no no don't the first omen i believe

the girl is to be the mother mother of what is the most terrifying 666? It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's not real. What's not real? Who said that? The First Omen. Only in theaters April 5th. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none.

Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. I'm going to hit myself in the head with this book first.

There you go. So support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash theblindboypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you distraction, entertainment, solace, please consider supporting it directly via the Patreon page. This is my full-time job. I do all the research, the recording, the production, the whole shebang. I make this myself and put it out independently with full creative control,

no fucking interference, no bullshit, no advertiser getting in the way. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That allows me to do this as my full-time job, to have the space to make this podcast as passionately as I want, to have the space for failure. But if you can't afford that, if you can't afford the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, don't worry about it because you can listen to it for free because the person who can afford it is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets a podcast and I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast. Stressing the importance of this podcast being independent is,

I think it's quite relevant this week. We've got a huge big scandal here in Ireland this week because it emerged that one of the broadcasters, one of the presenters, Ryan Tuberty, who's with RTE, who's our national broadcaster, was being paid far much more money than was publicly disclosed to us, the public. And that money comes from our TV licence. It's public money. It's tax money.

So there's a lot of anger in the country at the moment about public broadcasting, the importance of public broadcasting, the importance of public broadcasting, the relevance of it. People have been asking me for my two cents on it because I'm always quite critical of TV and how TV is made in general. Like let's take this fucking episode for example. So it's not very high budget, it's not very flashy, it's audio only but what I can deliver is uncompromised creative vision I rely upon solid research and good storytelling and if I can do that I can deliver my creative vision to you who's listening would I be able to do that on RTE let's just say I went to RTE I want to make a half-hour documentary in my own style about sparkling water in Irish America and how it relates to our pagan tradition.

That'd be a pretty good documentary. It'd be quite difficult to deliver it in any way that's actually good at the end. And the reason I think that is, is because of the reliance upon advertisers and ratings. I'd go to them. I want to make this sparkling water documentary, I've got a really good idea. And then they'd go, that sounds great, okay, wow,

we really like that too, okay, let's make that. We have some notes on the script. We think blind buy, right? We love this sparkling water thing and the pagan mythology. We think it's great, but would you be willing to co-present it with Vogue Williams? And then I'm like,

I've nothing against Vogue Williams, absolutely nothing. I don't know her. I'm sure she's lovely, but we seem like a bit of an odd fit. Yeah, but she's really popular. If we get Vogue Williams in there with you, in this sparkling water documentary

about pagan mythology we could really see that bringing a lot of people in who wouldn't normally watch it and the advertisers will be thrilled so then i say okay fuck it okay i'm gonna do do this sparkling water documentary and vogue williams is gonna co-present it with me i bet you i can make that work okay we've got some more notes on the script Blaine boy. We love the bit where it's you and Vogue Williams but we're not too crazy about the sparkling water part anymore. Really? But like the whole idea of the documentary was to be about sparkling water. Yeah but we don't think people are interested in sparkling water. They're interested in dancing. Specifically, celebrities dancing.

So how about this? Instead of it being a documentary about sparkling water and pagan mythology, it's you and Vogue Williams who've agreed to be your co-presenter. It's the 2EE and you're hosting this competition where celebrities dance with each other. And as a compromise compromise because we know you love sparkling water we're gonna call the show dancing with the stars too but there be loads of like sparkly bubbles in the writing and there be sparkly bubbles on the set how does that sound also you're gonna love this because we

know how much you love sparkling water the show is gonna be sponsored by soda stream yeah they're funding the entire show. However, because they've put up so much money to make this show, we must have 700,000 viewers a week without exception or else they're going to pull their funding. So don't worry, we're going to fly in Jordan Peterson and at the end of each show, you get to debate Jordan Peterson and at the end of each show you get to debate Jordan Peterson about whether trans people exist or not and also whether refugees are people that would generate a lot of debate in the media and that would then act as advertising for the show and put the ratings up to where we need them to be is that all right I don't really like that well you've signed up for it and we've already

got a big sponsor for the show and they need their ratings and no one cares about documentaries about sparkling water but they do care about seeing famous people dancing so that's what you're doing now so that's an extreme exaggeration that like literally that wouldn't happen but that right there is kind of the process of having to make television when television relies very heavily on advertisers. If you go to someone and say we want you to be creative and passionate about your ideas and to create something and to create a piece of work in which you're passionate and creative we want you to do that but also it has to be really popular and there are advertisers on this podcast, but on my terms, they don't dictate content. They don't demand higher listenership. And if they tried, it's like,

fuck off. You're not advertising on this podcast. That's really difficult to do because to be creative, it's a bit like funding science. You have to fund people to fail. It's a bit like funding science. You have to fund people to fail. When you allow creativity space to fail, you'll end up with occasional greatness. But if you try and force creative people to create in an environment where they must succeed and can't fail, you're guaranteed consistent mediocrity.

So that's my opinion on what good public service broadcasting should be. Get the advertisers out of the place unless they're willing to exist as benevolent guests who bear no influence over the content. Fund public service broadcasting the way that you fund science. You pay everybody fairly to explore curiosity creativity and passion and everyone's earning a living and no one is concerned or worried about losing a sponsor because the thing that they make isn't getting not going to get enough eyes on it

i think i think pbs in america is a good example of this. PBS and NPR, even though that's not TV license, I think it's more, they've been doing something closer to a Patreon model directly funded for a long time. But yeah, fund curiosity and fund passion. Fund the fallibility of the process. Don't necessarily fund a desired outcome you do that and eventually you'll have greatness you'll have a bunch of shit that nobody watches as well but it won't matter because it's publicly funded and there's no advertisers to give a fuck about it and you definitely won't have mediocrity and regarding this podcast and I don't want to sound like I'm fucking blowing my own horn but I started off this podcast in my bedroom zero budget no advertising nothing funded by ye

to basically go here's a fiver just do what you want so I did and then like just this year alone the podcast got featured on the New York Times. So that's like big international press. And then like a student in Trinity College in the literature department did their whole master's thesis on why this podcast should be considered literature. I appreciate that sounds a bit like I'm bragging, but those are socially accepted external markers of a successful podcast but the point i'm trying to make is there is no way in hell that i could have achieved those two things under the current model of television and how it's made no fucking way a commissioner who's under pressure from advertisers would have come in and said we need to make what you're doing more popular and more accessible to more people and what you

get from that is shit it's the point directly fund independent creators that you enjoy if there's an independent creator making a fucking podcast and you listen to it regularly fund them directly and if you can't afford it share their stuff speak about it to other people, like it, review it, you know the crack, right, I'm gonna answer some questions that you've asked me, because, I, you asked me like 500 fucking questions there, about a month ago, and I'm still getting through them, Barry asks, can you recommend any good audiobooks, yes, I enjoy audiobooks, I tend, I tend to listen to non-fiction when it comes to audiobooks rather than fiction here's the thing with fiction a lot of fiction is written in the heritage art form

of physical writing physically writing something to be read on a page is a heritage art form I love it i respect it i do it myself but it's not 100 relevant to how people consume words today and i think to create decent fiction that works as an audiobook you need to write it with a listener in mind just because something is written really well on a page doesn't mean that that translates to something that's effective to listen to also i think i think the audiobook format sometimes radically changes

the book that's being read out and i I mean radically, as in the entire meaning of the text, like I'll give you this example, and I'm not going to name the book, because I don't like shitting on people, there was a collection of science fiction short stories, that I really loved, as a book, I read it, and I fucking loved it, it was amazing, as a book that I read, and I liked it so much, I said, fuck fuck it I'll get the audiobook too and I listened to that and then I listened to the audiobook and this this wasn't a comedy novel this was fairly serious science fiction what would be called speculative fiction which is what they call science fiction when they want to say it's science fiction but it's for clever people which

is bullshit but that's what the publishing industry does so I was listening to this collection of science fiction short stories which wasn't comedy or funny in any way and the person who was narrating it was English and there was one particular story and it contained a few Irish characters but this English narrator who was reading the short stories, he could only do one Irish accent and this accent was Terry Wogan. So every single fucking character in this story,

man, woman, child, sounded like Terry Wogan. And that turned this serious science fiction into a very absurd comedy where multiple characters are different versions of Terry Wogan and then in my head I'm just seeing all these Terry Wagons. Terry Wogan as a tiny Terry Wogan, Terry Wogan in a dress, old Terry Wogan, multiple Wagons. So that's why I don't really listen to fiction as audiobook because it's it's written to be read and for those words to formulate in your

your mind's voice but when someone else reads it out for you especially when they start doing different voices it drastically changes the art to the point that it's no longer in line with the artist's initial vision my new collection of short stories topographyografia Hibernica. I am writing that with this is going to be an audiobook in mind. So I bring that into my awareness and my process. I forgot to fucking plug my gigs and plug my fucking book.

Jesus Christ. That's all those water bottles now have fucked my head up. I have a book called Topografia Hibernica, right? it's coming out in November. You can pre-order it. Just go to my Instagram, playingbybookclub. Look at my saved stories.

There's links where you can buy the book. Gigs. Fucking gigs, man. 26th of August. Cork Podcast Festival at the Cork Opera House. 28th of August. Vicar Street, up in Dublin. 9th of September. Pavilion Dun Laoghaire. 30th of August Vicar Street, up in Dublin 9th of September, Pavilion

Dun Laoghaire, 30th of September The Patrick Cavanagh Weekend, in the Patrick Cavanagh Centre in Monaghan, 18th of November, Waterfront Belfast, there's some live podcasts, come along, they'll be crack so what audiobooks do I

recommend to the person who asked the question non-fiction audiobooks I listened to an absolutely brilliant Bruce Lee biography recently called Bruce Lee a life by Matthew Polly just really good a really good biography I've always adored and been fascinated by Bruce Lee and this is the most kind of extensive and best researched biography that will tell you new things about Bruce Lee. That biography I believe was a huge influence for Quentin Tarantino when he wrote that film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. What other good audiobooks are there? At Home by Bill Bryson. Lovely big long audiobook. All fiction. Read by Bill Bryson himself. Does a wonderful job. Another Bill Bryson book that's excellent but isn't executed very well as an

audiobook. A Short History of the Universe. Wonderful book. It's just a book about everything. It's so fascinating. Lots of wonderful facts. great storytelling. But the unabridged version, the 17 hour long audiobook, which is the one you want, you want that real long one. Unfortunately, it's read by somebody who you just don't want to listen to this person for 17 hours. They sound a bit like your man Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory for 17 hours straight they perform it it's not natural it's a tough listen

but Bill Bryson reading his own book at home fucking fantastic storytelling you could listen to him for 18 hours not a bother I also tried to listen to Chronicles by Bob Dylan Bob Dylan's autobiography Sean Penn was reading it. I just couldn't do that much Sean Penn to myself.

Any of John Ronson's audiobooks. They're cracking. He reads them himself. But non-fiction seems to work best for audiobooks. Until such time as fiction writers seriously begin to write for audiobooks. And what's annoying about that is that is seen as lacking prestige like I described literally writing a book that exists on a page as a heritage art form for some reason that is seen as having more integrity than writing something which is intended to be

consumed as an audio medium and that just makes no sense to me whatsoever. There's a pomposity around the written word as it's consumed on the page as if you're somehow smarter if you pick up a book and read it yourself. It's gatekeeping bullshit. It has nothing to do with creativity. It has nothing to do with art. It's gatekeeping. It's elitist nonsense. It's very similar to how music is devalued if the music that you make includes comedy.

I saw an incredible documentary recently called The Show. It's a documentary about rap music and hip-hop music and it was made in 1993 and it contains everybody's in it. Fucking everybody. From Snoop to Warren G to the Wu-Tang Clan. Everybody is in this documentary but it's made in the early 90s. Now in 2023 we rightfully consider hip-hop and rap music to be a very very important legitimate art form real fucking important with just as much integrity as any other genre of music but if you look at this documentary the show it's a really well-made documentary and it's phenomenal if you enjoy hip-hop but there's a clownish tone to how it's edited and to how it's

presented that lets you see that in 1993 when it was made these artists were not considered real artists they were considered kind of a joke the music that snoop dogg and dr dre and wu-tang clan that the music that they were making was considered silly stuff that's not real art it's not real important music not like what Nirvana were doing and it's a wonderful time capsule of how elitism and gatekeeping gets in the way of seeing brilliant art when it's right there in front of you being made live and we're at that right now with podcasts and with audiobooks that's where we're at right now

okay one more question this turned into a rambly podcast in the second half Michelle wants to know how Napertandi is getting on I'm always getting asked about Napertandi and i'm always trying to keep you updated napper tendy is my my cat she's feral she's wild she recently lost her

brother silken thomas she's doing all right i got her new cat food i got her this i went fancy with her i got her good stuff really fucking good cat. And this has brought palpable joy into her life. She really, really looks forward to her breakfast and her dinner. She really looks forward to it and she relishes it and she spends time with it. She loves this new cat food. But she's not right after the loss of her brother. She really isn't. She's a different cat with different routines and different spots in the garden where she sits, new places and she doesn't have conflict and crack and friendship and joy in her life anymore. She doesn't have her little brother. She just lies by herself all day and that's it and she goes to bed by herself all night, they used to boop noses

with each other, they used to have little fights they used to have rituals they used to lie down together they'd roll around together they used to keep each other warm inside their bed and now she's just a cat on her own and she's double the distance between

me and her in terms of how close I'm allowed to get to her. I was never allowed to get close to her because she's wild but now it used to be six feet and now it's 12 feet so she's always real physically distant with me and sometimes she goes and hides underneath the shed for no reason so she doesn't have a feeling of safety since her brother died and she still comes up to me at the window even though she'd have a full belly and just calls to me and calls to me like she's hungry but she's not hungry because she's full and I still think she's calling to me to bring her brother back maybe I'm projecting a bunch of human shit on her I don't know that's all I have time for this week I hope you enjoyed

that hot take even though it was slightly brief because I have time for this week. I hope you enjoyed that hot take, even though it was slightly brief, because I have been up the absolute fucking walls getting this book finished so I wasn't able to dedicate the usual amount of time that I would dedicate to a hot take on this podcast but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless.

Alright, rub a dog, kiss a swan. Don't kiss a swan. That wouldn't go well at all. Jesus Christ. Keep a respectful distance from swans. Because they're more dangerous than they appear. Don't feed them bread. I think peas, I think frozen peas are a good call to feed swans.

But double check that. But don't be feeding bread to swans. It doesn't, it doesn't suit them. Slow blink at a cat, and I'll catch you next week. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none.

Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.