The Blindboy Podcast - Cousin Suntan

Episode Date: July 17, 2019

Why the kim Kardashian of the Victorian era was an Irish Woman born in 1821 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Torah, lorah, lah, you crusing bureaucrats. Welcome to episode 93 of the Blind Buy podcast. This podcast keeps growing internationally, new listeners every fucking week. So, if you're a new listener, feel free to investigate previous episodes. Sometimes I say to people, go back to the start. feel free to investigate previous episodes. Sometimes I say to people, go back to the start. I've realized that some people have taken this completely literally and have gone straight back to the start and gone from episode one up until now.

You don't have to do that. You can if you want. But I would suggest go back to some earlier episodes. Get a feel for the podcast. It's not chronological. You can listen to any podcast you want. They're all kind of, you know, they're separate. But don't start here is what I'd say.

Go back and listen to some earlier episodes. So, how are you getting on, first of all? Hope you've been having a charming week. Hope you're minding yourself, looking after yourself. I'm, I don't know, I'm just in a weird headspace. Because, as you know, like for the past six weeks, I've pretty much been saying to you,'m really really busy and because of this I'm not relaxing as such every week I do like to touch on I touch on mental health when I can every single

week I this week's podcast is a hot take podcast I've got a nice big hot take for you but you know I get a lot of dms off you got a lot of mails out of this and the amount of people that say to me you listen to this for just mental health stuff I always try and touch on it each week and how I do that is what you'd call appropriate self-disclosure within within psychology it's called appropriate self-disclosure it's where i speak a little bit about my own experience what i'm going through as honestly as humanly possible and then you listen to it and through listening to my experience and through empathy it might allow you to reflect then on what's going on for

yourself so that's kind of the crack but this is this is a hot take episode i'm going to be getting to the hot take soon but i'd like to speak a little bit right now about stress and the nature of stress so that's kind of where i'm at you know it's healthy stress and healthy stress i consider is when you have actual reason to be stressing when you have actual deadlines or projects or not a lot of free time, then that is healthy stress. So I'm dealing with the healthy stress. Now the thing with healthy stress is there really should be a time limit on it. Like you've got healthy and unhealthy stress. So unhealthy stress for me is when the source of stress is emotional if you're stressed out because of worry worrying about things that have already happened or worrying about things that have not happened yet and as

a result of this you're quite unhappy and stressed that's unhealthy stress because the it that's fundamentally based in a position of irrationality and healthy stress is when your actual lived reality is simply busy and a source of stress so that's where i'm at right now so i can i'm dealing with it but what I would say with people with people who have healthy stress which is you're actually under stress if it goes on too long then you have to keep an eye on it because stress is no crack um it's a weird word stress stress is it's a conglomeration of a number of things so healthy stress would be you know a healthy level of it's the unhealthy and unhealthy unhealthy and healthy emotions so in my day-to-day life now, I'm experiencing healthy anxiety.

What is healthy anxiety? Healthy anxiety is when I am fearful or anxious because of something that's actually happening. Whether that be, you know, trying to reach a deadline or something going wrong when it should go right so that's healthy anxiety then i'd be experiencing healthy anger what's healthy anger when i am angry as a rational response to something that has caused me anger what's unhealthy anxiety when i'm experiencing anxiety because of an emotional reaction because of a faulty perception of something that is or isn't happening do you get me but with healthy stress you gotta put a fucking limit on it where possible so i would i have a natural limit coming up I'm at the like I was in London at the weekend

doing the final voiceover for my BBC series so the BBC thing is 99.99% done so that's one project now that I don't have to worry about I'm gonna have to do one or two little pickups that's fine

but that's a project now that's done my book that I'm going to have to do one or two little pickups that's fine but that's a project now that's done my book that I'm writing final stage is still ongoing but I would imagine hopefully by August I will no longer be in healthy stress

territory and I will be back to I no longer have a source of extreme stress in my life. If you're in a fucking job. Where it's healthy stress all the time. And that healthy stress eventually leads to unhealthy stress. Because the thing with stress.

When you're stressed your body releases stress hormones. Chemicals like. Could be talking out of my hoop here now but i think one of them is called cortisol which is a stress hormone and it does things to your body similar to what unhealthy anxiety does so if you're stressed for a long period of time you might you'll experience that as you know it might make your stomach uneasy because a stressed person you know the cortisol goes into the stomach and it says you know don't digest properly because the stress is telling you that you need to either fight or run or freeze or stress can manifest itself as

being snappy with people or not having self compassion and all of this you know so if you're in a job where you can't escape rational and healthy stress then I would suggest you have a possibly look at your fucking options If you're in a job where you can't escape rational and healthy stress, then I would suggest you have a possibly look at your fucking options.

If you can. I'm lucky. I'm in the position whereby I get stressful projects that last a period of time. So my stressful projects last six months and then they're over and then i'll have a break before the next one comes on but some people are just in a job or it's just stress all the time and the cause of your anger or your anxiety is actually a healthy response to whatever's literally going on in your life so for those people i feel for you i fucking feel for you that's tough going and i'm sure there's many many people i mean what are you doing actually yeah i mean in those situations i don't want to be so privileged as to say oh just fucking leave your

job a lot of people can't do that if you have a job you're lucky a lot of people are lucky to have jobs I suppose it's about managing the healthy stress to make sure it doesn't leak over into unhealthy stress keep the work in the workplace find space in your day for empathy and self-compassion the thing about stress is it can can make you very self-centered

because you're focused very much on the problems that affect you only and then you can forget empathy you can forget compassion and like i said before there's no self-compassion you can't have compassion for yourself if you're not similarly extending compassion for other people for fucking animals I mean that's why animals are classed for stress you know, rub a cat, rub a dog you get a little moment there of relief release from whatever's pissing you off but just ring up a friend call a friend

be nice to someone for me what I try and do is if I'm speaking to someone I care about I try and check myself when you're in a position where you're busy or stressed and you speak to another human

the tendency can be to use that other person as a sounding board for your own stress so a family member or friend rings you up on the phone or they stop you on the fucking side of the street and then you go brilliant i can tell this person about how busy i am and you're just talking at them then you walk away from that conversation at no point are you emotionally or physically present in it just shouting complaints at someone it's no crack for them and you leave and it eventually begins to affect relationships so what i try and do and check in

at myself is if i meet another human or i get on a phone to another human I will try to check in at myself and go I'm not telling them what's bothering me now what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and ask them how are you and listen to what's going on for them and try and

use empathy to feel to emotionally put myself into their shoes and there's a great catharsis in that when you do that and try and experience someone else's what's going on for them your stress level drops you're in the present moment you're in the here and now you're having an actual conversation on an emotional level with another person that's beneficial for them because you've just given them a compassionate ear for them to offload what's bothering them and it's good for you because stress doesn't exist alongside empathy, alongside compassion. It just doesn't.

So you've given yourself a little break from those hormones, the stress hormones in your body that might be causing you hassle. So there you go. So that's how I try and manage it. Also, what has been a great help for reduction in stress for me this week I noticed out my back

garden right so as you know listening to the podcast recently you know I'm taking a big interest in biodiversity you know for the interest of the climate. Just doing what I can with the space that I have. To in particular make life easier for insects. Butterflies, bees, ants, whatever the fuck.

Trying to use the space that I have. To create a little environment where they can thrive whether it be planting wildflower and creating simple little stagnant ponds where you can have you know little what do you call them dragonfly larvae and midges and all these things because they're you know i live in a city so their habitat is gone but i use the space that i can it's in the pots then what did i call the podcast couple of podcasts back chucky gar lawn i spoke about this but anyway so i've done these things i've got wildflower not cutting the lawn um i've got a bee hotel that i bought in a hardware shop, which is just a little, it's like a box with pine cones in it and shit, and bees and insects can live in there.

All these little things, and full of insects out the back. But, the most interesting thing that's happened in the past week, and it's fantastic. So I had a bag of compost, right? so I had a bag of compost right and as you know I've got two wild cats kind of stray cats out the back garden

a brother and sister Nappertandy and what's his fucking name a white fella I can't remember his fucking name because I that's the thing

Nappertandy is his sister and his name is Silken Thomas that's the thing Napertandi is his sister and his name is Silken Thomas that's his name I forget their names because they're stray wild cats so I don't go around calling them

Silken Thomas or Napertandi those are names that exist exclusively in my own head because a feral cat they don't respond to you like domestic cats do like they'll never, you can't call them

they don't respond even if you bang their dish on the ground for food they don't even seem to respond to that there's no domestication whatsoever they're fully wild so they're never going to respond to a name they don't respond to vocalizations eye contact is the only thing really they they don't meow a wild cat will never meow at you meowing is something that kittens do exclusively to vocalise to their mother.

And domesticated cats continue meowing. Because to domesticate them keeps them in an extended state of kittenhood. So these cats don't meow. What's his face? Silken Thomas. The tomcat. Now he's completely white. And I believe he's deaf.

I do think he's deaf. Because white cats are often deaf. And he's incredibly loud. Now he doesn't meow at me. But at night time. Because you heard him. He just. He fucking.

I was recording a podcast here a couple of months ago. He was out in the alleyway. Roaring. Like. Screaming. But he's really really loud. When he's out on his own. Searching for mates.

Or whatever he's doing. So I think he might be deaf. But yeah. That's the thing with. With feral cats. There's no response from them. You can have eye contact. There's still.

There's a connection. There's a familiarity. There's. A sense of. they know i'm helping them they know i'm their friend but i'll never be able to touch them always three feet of distance at all times you know never like even once i was feeding the napper tandy and she was eating out of a bowl and I'm allowed quite close to her so I put my hand down for the laugh to gently touch her head and she hissed so she had no context whatsoever for any type of touch but anyway so this is what's after happening this week which I found very useful in terms of dealing with stress and being mindful so there's a bag of compost that i have out the back and this

bag of compost happens to be directly behind where these two cats live in this little hut that i have from and what i've known what's happened in the past week which is class so the two cats i just had the compost there i was going to open it at some point but the two cats used the compost occasionally as a scratching post and they lie on it as well to bask in the sun so there were two slits on either side of the compost that the cats had put there and i noticed this week bees flying in and out of the compost now I kind of I'm freaking out a bit because I'm going shit am I going to be dealing with a beehive I could do without that I don't want what I was concerned was are these bees that are coming in and out of either slit of the compost are they trying to find a hive and I'm going to be dealing with a swarm, because in Limerick last week,

there was a swarm of bees in a cafe, someone got it on video, I don't know what happened, there was some ivy outside a cafe, and then there was like a thousand bees, and it caused a bit of panic, so I was thinking, fuck me,

I could do without a swarm of bees now, in this bag of compost, which is directly behind, where the two cats are sleeping because they're mad bastards they started attacking the bees and all of a sudden now i'm dealing with a swarm of bees and two cats could do without that that that would be a busy week so i took a video of the bees that were going in and out of the. Compost bag. What I noticed when I was taking the video is that. Each bee. Was carrying.

Big lumps of leaves. They had green leaves each. That were nearly the same size as them. That they were taking in and out of the compost. So I took a video of it. And I sent it to. Collie Ennis. who was a guest in this podcast he is an expert in insects up in trinity college dublin so collie says to me

there'd be no fear of a swarm those bees are solitary irish leaf cutter bees which are in danger there's not a lot around we've got like 16 solitary bee species in ireland but you don't see a lot of them anymore because they don't have swarms they don't they're not part of a colony it's they're solitary it's them on their own they're exclusive bees or reclusive so what these bees are interested in firstly i don't know what why but they tend to require a lot of heat so they like to kind of bask a bit you'll often see a solitary bee on a flower and they're looking for sun to warm up before they fly off so solitary bees make their homes in usually logs or trees that are south facing because south facing gets gets the best sun for them to warm up.

So this bag of compost is south-facing, right? And they think that it's a tree or a trunk, because compost, it's compost that I have anyway, it's not peat compost, It's like bark and organic material. So they think it's a trunk of a tree. They each have their own slit that they go in and out of. And they're cutting leaves off plants, bringing them there. And here's what's mad.

So there was two slits on either side of the bag, open. Each little bee had closed the slits using leaves and spit or whatever and had managed to close the slits so it's just little entrances for each of them but what they're doing inside they're laying larvae so they're gonna have little baby solitary bees coming out of there i don't know in august maybe or something but now this is a new it's a new task i have so here's the concern right so i asked collie i i can't move so the cats they often lie on top of this bag of compost. They scratch it. And now there's baby bees inside there.

So I want to get the compost, the bag, and I want to move it away from the cats. But I can't fucking do that because, think of it, if a little solitary bee is after laying a load of babies in there, like, it'd be pure easy for me to crush that because compost is is a it's not solid like so if I move that bag that could disturb it and kill those babies so I can't really move the

fucking bag the cats are still acting the prick with the bag sleeping on it pissing on it so what I now have to do is I got the idea from watching Chernobyl so in Chernobyl when the reactor went off they covered the reactor in concrete right but then they have this dome over the reactor

made of concrete so then I was thinking I need to make like a chicken wire or a mesh dome I need to make like a chicken wire or a mesh dome around the bag of compost that keeps the two fucking cats away but allows the bees the two solitary leaf cutter bees to travel freely within the mesh and to attend to their babies so that's kind of what the crack is but what brought me on to it is that act of just a half hour where I'm looking at the compost and trying to figure out what can I do how can I help him that's an act of empathy and compassion it's not empathy and compassion for another human but I'm putting myself into the shoes of the two cats I'm putting myself into the shoes of the two cats. I'm putting myself into the shoes of the two fucking solitary bees. I'm trying to use empathy to see what their lived experience is. Ultimately, with both of them, they just want to fucking survive. The cats, they have their bed, they have their food, they have their water, they're happy, but they also like to scratch a bag of compost and lie on top of it.

That's their needs. The two bees, their needs is to have, you know, they have now decided upon, here is a south-facing bark of a tree, and that's where their babies are going to be. So the act of creativity and thinking about and empathy that I had to do to think of right I'm going to put a mesh around it that very act was a mindful act of

it de-stressed me basically it removed all stress you can't be worrying about your own shit you can't be worrying about deadlines you're not concerned about anything when you're completely and utterly devoting your attention to the helping or the survival of something else or the well-being

or listening to the needs of another person or creature so there you go that's my week i've got a hot take for you this week. Okay. I've got a fun interesting hot take. Something that I wanted to talk about for a while. Before I get into the hot take. We'll have an ocarina pause will we. The ocarina pause. There might be an advert. And I don't want it to shock you.

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patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast if you listen to the podcast if you take something from it if you enjoy it um you know you can listen for free if you want or you could give me the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month by going to the patreon page and becoming a patron of the podcast this is what keeps me going this is what pays my bills this is my regular source of income it's fucking life-changing it's why there's a podcast each week so if you are so inclined please consider it and i'm very grateful to everyone who's a patron of the podcast, thank you so much, also as well, look, if you're using the app on your, the podcast app on your iPhone, go in there, leave a review, leave a rating, always important, subscribe, subscribe on fucking Spotify, Acast, and tell a friend about the podcast, if a friend says

you know I want to listen to podcasts recommend this one these are all positive things you can do if you enjoy the podcast so anyway this week's hot take so I suppose what it's what it is is what the hot

take is I'm thinking about the notion of of celebrity you know massive massive celebrity today and if you were to say to a lot of people you know who who's the most famous person in the world celebrity wise a lot of people would say kim kardashian kylie jenner you know there's other people who are comparably as famous but that's something that jumps forward not just because we'll say kim or kylie are so famous but what makes them interesting is the nature of their fame they're not like Beyonce is as famous if not more famous than Kim Kardashian but it's like Beyonce is an artist she creates things she's a performer a singer um Lady Gaga the same you know they're artists

we're comfortable with that idea of fame because you go well there's a thing that they do and a thing that they produce you know art as such and people enjoy it and that's why they are famous the Kardashians are different

because they're as famous as Lady Gaga or as famous as Rihanna or Beyonce but they don't create art they know that they're not they're they're famous as a result they're famous for being famous. That's their thing. They're walking, talking brands. They're brands that exist, you know? And they're divisive. I don't... Look, some people have huge issue with...

Some people have huge issue with the Kardashians. Some critique is just straight up fucking misogynism, fuck that other critique is you know how they might culturally appropriate things like that but what there's no denying is that like Kim Kardashian

Kylie Jenner, very very famous people who have a huge impact on culture, huge influence, and they mean a lot to a lot of people. So these are facts. Whether you like the Kardashians or you don't like them, these are simple facts. and you kind of, you know, you kind of wonder, Jesus, you know, does that fame that they have, can that only exist now because of reality TV, because of social media, does that only exist now, this, I suppose you'd call it influencer, they're a little bit too big to be influencers. But when someone is. Famous for kind of being famous. Because of an Instagram account or something like that.

We call these people influencers. They're people who. They just exist and they're famous and that's it. And we don't really question it. And that's culture in 2019. Look I don't mind it. I'm not going to be getting bothered about these things as I get older I really chill out about this shit I'm

I'm not going to get upset about what someone else enjoys like I said before if I can boil my critique of something down to saying to another person, stop having fun in a way that's different to how I have fun.

If I have a critique and I boil it down to that, then I need to have a think about that position. Do you get me? So I'm into music, I'm into art art that's what I'm interested in and if someone else if their way of enjoying life is to follow one of the Kardashians and to take meaning from it and if that helps them then that person's right and I'm not right if I don't like that I'm right for me because I like music they're right for them because they like the Kardashians

and that's just the way things are and I find myself a much much happier person when I take on that position when I was younger my position would have been stop having fun in a way that's different to how I have fun

fuck that I used to be like that, like I don't get sports I don't understand sports, I don't have that gift I really don't have the gift I used to get annoyed when I was younger at lads who liked soccer like how the fuck does that affect my life

if someone enjoys soccer and it brings them happiness, then that person is 100% right. Do you get me? But anyway, I suppose the hot take is wondering about, like, who was the Kim Kardashian 100 years ago? Do you know?

Or was that even possible, and there's someone I've wanted to speak about on this podcast a long time, an Irish historical figure, who I just find really fucking fascinating, because again, it's like the kardashians i don't know i don't know what my position is on them i just find this person incredibly fascinating because they're a huge anomaly of their time it's like they don't they don't make sense and they don't fit in with their time that they existed so the person i'm speaking about is it's an irish woman so kim kardashian what what was a hundred years ago 100 years ago was 1919 no farther back lads nearly 200 years ago so the equivalent of kim kardashian 200 years ago someone with that comparable level of fame

that's kind of inexplainable and very difficult to put them into one particular box it was an irish woman um an irish woman whose name was eliza gilbert born in 1921 now she's a contentious kind of figure within history in that to find out what's true about her is difficult because you have people who've genuinely attempted to get a true biography of her you have eliza gilbert herself who's written and published her biography in the 1860s i believe um but she was quite fantastical in how she described herself and then you have very strong critique of her so there's three kind of separate biographies and you're wondering which one is true how much of her story that she tells herself is true how much of you know serious biographers is true and how much

is true of the people who are critical of her she was born so here's the thing with eliza gilbert she comes from a family known as the olivers the in county limerick in kilmalloch there's castle oliver which was built in the 1600s okay now when castle oliver was built in 1600s there was a fella robert ol, who would be this Eliza Gilbert's grandfather or great-grandfather. So who Robert Oliver was and who Castle Oliver in Limerick was named after, he would have been one of Oliver Cromwell's soldiers. Now I've mentioned Cromwell on the podcast before. Cromwell is Ireland's Hitler. Cromwell was a Protestant religious fanatic comparable to ISIS who committed mass, mass murder and genocide on the Irish people on behalf of the English crown and also enacted colonization and plantations in Ireland where the Irish Catholics were

murdered, sent to penal colonies, sent to fucking Barbados, whatever you have it, the Irish were, there was an attempt at ethnic cleansing on the native Irish by the hands of Oliver Cromwell

acting in service of the crown and the Irish were removed and in their place Protestant settlers hands of Oliver Cromwell, acting in service of the Crown. And the Irish were removed and in their place, Protestant settlers were placed. So, you know, first off, get rid of any native Irish aristocracy. They're gone, you're left with a peasant class. Murder the peasants, kick them off their land, take the land and give huge landed estates to english and scottish planters to ethnically cleanse the population of ireland basically so this guy robert oliver in the 1600s was a soldier of oliver cromwell's and he was given a huge amount of land and And he built Castle Oliver. And they would have been.

What would become. What's known as the Protestant descendancy. The Protestant descendancy being this. Ruling class. In Ireland. That created mass. Mass racism and inequality. Based on their.

English and Scottish blood. Their claim to the land. their Protestant religion, right? Should we know this crack? I'm just saying this for the, I don't know, the person listening who's from Peru. Now here's the bit that gets a little bit insane. This is the bit in the Serial Killer podcast where the music stops and the host acts all shocked, but they're not really shocked because it's pre-written. Well, this bit here is real. If you're listening to this particular bit right now,

these words that are coming out of my mouth this second, this here is a segment that I have had to add after the podcast has gone out, which I never do because it's it's very finicky and it can fuck things up but I had to do this so this podcast went out live on the morning of July 16th and then I found out something after the podcast went out a giant glaring fact that I was unaware of and for me this fact is so insane it has left me

a little bit shook so the podcast has already gone out I'm adding this bit now I spent a long time researching this woman Eliza Gilbert comparing her to Kim Kardashian

I have no reason to relate the two of them whatsoever other than they're they're quite similar they're similar people here's the thing, Castle Oliver which I just mentioned there Kim Kardashian had her fucking honeymoon there

with Kanye West in 2014 now I was aware that Kim Kardashian I knew Kim and Kanye had a honeymoon in Limer West in 2014. Now I was aware that Kim Kardashian, I knew Kim and Kanye had a honeymoon in Limerick in 2014. I wasn't really consciously aware that Castle Oliver is the place. So here's an insane fact that has actually connected up this entire podcast that I've completely missed.

The hot take that I'm making where I'm connected to unrelated people across history actually have a very very relevant and deep connection i would love love to think that kim kardashian was aware of eliza gilbert and actually chose castle oliver because of that i don't know what this is. You know, sometimes I call it Jungian synchronicity. Most likely what it is, is deep in my unconscious mind from 2014, I did know that Castle Oliver was where Kim Kardashian had her honeymoon. And that nugget of information stuck away in the depths of my unconscious mind, bubbled up without telling me, and has connected Eliza Gilbertbert to kim kardashian but this is going to

bother me for the rest of the day so getting back to the regular podcast now and the early life of eliza gilbert but anyway eliza gilbert this is the woman i want to speak about born in 1821 she is her mother's name was Eliza Oliver and Eliza Oliver would have been a granddaughter of this fellow Robert Oliver the Cranwell lad but Eliza Oliver was illegitimate so she wouldn't have been

Eliza Oliver would have been born in the 1700s so she'd have been illegitimate so there's that weird thing going on so eliza gilbert who i want to talk about she used to say she was born in limerick because of what that would have connoted she was able to say i'm of the olivers and i was born in castle oliver and kill malik and i am posh i am important but she wasn't really her ma was illegitimate she was born so eliza gilbert was born in sligo in 1821 and i'm going to go on now and give you my hot take as to why this eliza gilbert descendant of cromwell's planters why she

became the kim kardashian of her time that famous that influential that controversial so she'd had a queer enough childhood because you know Sligo, but born to, of noble blood, but not being able to claim any of it or to say it because her mother was illegitimate. So her ma married some British soldier. That's how Eliza was born. When Eliza was quite young, she would have been, they moved to India when she was about six years of age. Her real father died of cholera pretty much as soon as they got to India. When Eliza then was about five or six years of age, her ma sent her to England to study in school as a young one now eliza she's from sligo like

she's born in sligo i don't i doubt highly doubt she would have identified as irish at this point we're in the 1830s she comes from protestant descendancy family she would not be calling herself Irish she's you know coming from people who were put here by Cromwell so Eliza at a young age even when she goes to England to school she really sets herself apart from the other students she was

quite eccentric she liked to stand out and reports are that like and quite eccentric. She liked to stand out. Reports are that, like, she would have been considered very different looking. She was dark skinned in the way Irish people weren't. She would have been considered very, very, kind of pretty as a child. Also, when she went to England to be schooled,

a lot of people noted that she used to dress in a really peculiar fashion she would dress very very differently she'd often run around the place naked just for attention as she really stood out regarding her dress sense no one knows there there's reports basically of like her schoolmaster and shit saying she just dressed really strange most likely what it was is that she'd spent time in india she was probably dressing the way they would have dressed in india and this was not seen from white people in england in 1830. When she was 14, her mother tried to marry her off to a fella back in India. Eliza herself said, what was it?

She tried to marry me to a gouty old man of 60. So Eliza said, fuck that. She was 14, like, so when she was 16, she didn't go to India to marry this old fella and she ran off with some british soldier who was her own age um what makes eliza so interesting and this is you have to look at this in the context of the time so in like 1841 1842 she would have been 21 22 she leaves this fella that she married she just goes fuck that i'm gone and then she moves to spain right she moves to spain on her own what makes her so

interesting is like women in 18 in the 1820s would have had very little fucking agency. Very little independence agency. Women were married at a young age, and then they just had kids, and they lived very domestic lives. Women did not work. Women were not independent, unless the woman was really high up fucking nobility, a queen or a princess. But Eliza really sets herself apart

as being this real free spirit who's like fuck that i'm doing whatever the fuck i want so she pisses off to spain in 1821 and she learns spanish folk dancing right spends about six months there learning Spanish folk dancing and then in 1843 she goes to London right now at this point when she's in London she would never have identified as Irish but she no longer calls herself Eliza Gilbert anyway. She arrives in London in 1843, dressed in like Spanish flamenco clothes. And she calls herself Lola Montes. So this is, she's famous now as, known as someone as Lola Montes. That's the name she invented for herself.

She invented a whole backstory about being descended from Spanish nobility. She claims that she is Spanish. She learned a bit of Spanish when she was in Spain and she's also already dark-haired and by all accounts at the time she was just a total right like everyone who saw her just said this woman is ridiculous in every single respect her face her body everything everyone was enamored with her so lola montes originally born in sligo is in london claiming to be this spanish fucking princess um speaking the odd spanish word

she's got the dark looks she's doing well for herself and she sets herself up as a Spanish dancer in various clubs, right? So when Lola Montes is in London, she quickly becomes incredibly famous as a dancer. Because when she was in Spain, she trained in a type of flamenco. And now by all accounts, she wasn't a good dancer. Everyone who went to it said that she was shit at dancing and that she had very little rhythm and people started to kind of tell that she was a bit of a spoofer but here's the thing there's a traditional spanish flamenco dance it's also present in parts of italy it's a folk dance and it's known as the tarantella dance which the name comes from spider it's a type of wolf it was related to a wolf spider in spain

but basically the person would dance as if there was a spider somewhere in the body on their body and they were trying to find it okay so this for me is where the kim kardashian comparison comes in kim kardashian became incredibly famous at the start of her career. Because she recorded a. A sex tape of her and her boyfriend leaked. But Kim basically like released it herself. And I think her mother. Kris Jenner. Shopped it around. So Kim released a sex tape.

And this made her incredibly famous very quickly. Lola Montes in 18... The 18 fucking... Was it the 40s? Lola Montes in the 1840s, lads. She was dancing in London. And this spider dance, or this Tarantella dance that I'd mentioned, she started doing a version of it which became known in London as the spider dance.

And all the men in London would turn up to see became known in London as the spider dance and all the men in London would turn up to see Lola Montes with this spider dance and what the spider dance was is that Lola would be up on stage all the men would be like oh my god she's unreal she's gorgeous look at her and she'd do this dance where she's searching for a spider on her body in this flamenco costume. And then finally, she would look for the spider under her dress. And she'd lift the dress up. And she wouldn't be wearing any knickers. And everyone would see.

Now this is the fucking 1840s. Right? This is pre-Victorian, I think. Or is that the Victorian era? I'm not sure, but's the 1840s lads. Women didn't show their ankles right? There was no skin and Lola Montes in London is like fuck that if they're turning up, if they're paying me money if me lifting up my skirt is gonna

pack this place out the whole time and get me this famous and this much attention fuck that I'm doing it and she did it Eliza Gilbert from Sligo and get me this famous and this much attention, fuck that, I'm doing it. And she did it. Eliza Gilbert from Sligo, pretending to be the Spanish noble Lola Montez. But sure, they got wide to it anyway. In England, after a while, she would have become

the equivalent of the tabloids at the time. She did this dance, it would have been all over the papers, everyone went to see it, and then someone figured hold on something's up here her Spanish isn't right her accent isn't right

her dance isn't right something's off she's not really Spanish and she was exposed so she had to flee London as everyone was like they turned against her

the scandal of it what they saw is the deception so she fled london but as she's fleeing london like she became famous not only in the tabloids of london but kind of bits and pieces around europe with like her photograph appearing in the papers and this this is where she kind of gets she gets known as what's called a courtesan a courtesan is what would it be it was a word an old school word from like kings used to have courts right and a king's court was like i don't know it was there it was where the king lived

and if the royal court right it would have contained the king's servants nobles artists entertainers anyone who had the grace of a monarch would have had kind of special attention and protection and privileges and a court a courtesan was an educated kind of posh girl i'm sure there was lads as well actually although it'd be there would have been men too obviously but that's not as highly remembered in history because the stigma about people being gay was so extreme. So I'm sure there was male courtesans too, of course there was. But female courtesans were women who were kind of educated and charming and had a lot of etiquette. charming and had a lot of etiquette and they would use these things to get close to a nobleman or a king or a prince and then essentially become their mistresses and from this they would achieve a certain degree of power and wealth and protection that would have been because there wasn't a lot

available to women so she becomes known as a courtesan at this point. Because this fella called King, no what is it, Prince Heinrich of Leipzig in Germany, right. He'd read about her in the paper and fallen for her because of a photograph invited her over. And she became his mistress then, right. So she's now the mistress of a royal German fella. And getting the money and privileges that go with it, she's being looked after now he soon gets tired of her because

she what really sets her out at this time she was unruly like she would very much place herself in this courtesan position as a way to survive. But she was incredibly outspoken, highly intelligent.

The reports at the time is that like she would place herself close to powerful men. Like obviously there would be a physical dimension to the relationship but she'd have no issue telling a king to fuck off. And she mainly wanted to speak about politics she'd really really strong radical kind of political opinions for the time and she would speak about politics with with men in a way that women were not permitted to speak at the time uh so this leipzig prince of leipzig fella was just like fuck this this one's too hot for me no way so after this 1843 shits she heads off to warsaw in poland now poland at the time was being occupied by the russians and this is where this is where lola really starts to become like a a real troublemaker

a proper political troublemaker em so she whatever happened she was dancing in a theatre in Warsaw and she had the grace of some fucking royal there or whatever but the chief of police right

em he didn't like her something about her he didn't like her so when she was doing a performance the chief of police right um he didn't like her something about her he didn't like her so when she was doing a performance the chief of police got a bunch of like he put kind of fake people in the audience to deliberately boo her but she also had a huge amount of supporters because she's getting a massive amount of fame around europe for her this fucking spider dance where everyone now in poland is going we not need to see lola montez dancing because she's going to pull up her skirt so everyone's waiting for that she's got a huge amount of supporters so when the people start booing this causes a fucking riot in

the theater and then lola gets up on stage and she says this riot was organized by the chief of police the chief of police is organizing this riot because he tried to fuck me and i wouldn't let him and her supporters then rally around her and it stops being about lola and whatever she said about the chief of police and she becomes a symbol of resistance and there's a riot starts and the riot is lola becomes a symbol to riot against the russian occupation in poland so she starts real fucking shit there now she could start a revolution so after this now her celebrity stops kind of being exclusively about this spider dance and it becomes about here's someone who who can cause fucking riots, here's this really divisive celebrity with strong followers

and she's now getting involved in political shit. But the beauty of it is, so Lola kind of just gets bored of it and goes, fuck Poland, I'm not interested in this anymore. She has a gig up in Russia in St. Petersburg, she has a crack at it, but because of the anti-Russian riot

that started in Poland she gets a shit reception in St. Petersburg but what she has which makes her really fucking unique as a woman at the time she has a sense of autonomy and agency she's self-employed

she's doing these gigs she's getting paid for them she's working for herself. In a social and political climate. Where women didn't really have jobs. There were female entertainers. Ballet and shit like that. But they were paid less than minimum wage.

They were kind of like. Female performers at the time. It was just a way for them to gain notoriety. So they could meet a wealthy man whereas lola's now earning her own money she's still obviously using powerful men as a way to help her own career but while she's in saint petersburg she opens a newspaper she reads about the classical composer franz list and she sees that list is massively successful all over europe doing tours so she says fuck that i'm, I'm going to find Franz Liszt and I'm going to go out with him.

So she tracks down Franz Liszt, manages to seduce him. And then she's Franz Liszt's girlfriend for a while. So through Liszt, she manages to meet the composer Wagner. Wagner fucking hated her. Really didn't like her. She didn't have a romantic involvement with him, nor did she seem to be interested. But, really didn't like her, she didn't have a romantic involvement with him, nor did she seem to be interested, but Wagner really didn't like her, Wagner is, he's the guy that Hitler likes, he, Wagner, the Nazis were a huge fan of Wagner's

music, to the point that, even today, Wagner's stuff is a bit problematic, um, especially amongst Jewish people, because of what he represented to the Nazis but she starts kind of writing her own plays she realises wow I'm getting a huge name for myself dancing only pays so much how about I write my own plays

and put them on and star in some of them too and she does and they start selling out and them on and star in some of them too and she does and they start selling out and the only way to really describe her at the time is hugely controversial everywhere she went she was all over the papers with people either utterly hating her or loving because here she is like defying every single expectation of what women were supposed to be at the time taking complete ownership of her sexuality getting up on stage dancing going

yeah i'm gonna if i'm gonna show off i'm gonna lift my skirt up if i want to do that completely on upon apologetic about her beauty about her figure very much what we would now call empowering taking ownership anti-slut shaming all of this stuff she appeared to be doing it at the time but was really hated for it she heads off to paris and she she in paris she doesn't do so well as a performer but what she finds in paris are the bohemian crowd so paris at the time would have had a kind of a just an inner circle of artists and writers and performers who were very liberal thinking forward thinking and bohemians you know they would have been the original what we would now call hipsters so she becomes friends with uh your man alexander dumas who wrote the count of monte cristo and wrote the three musketeers and bizarrely then from whatever she displayed this unbelievable ability to ability to shoot

pistols so i think she was on stage showing off how good she was with guns for a while dumas said uh she is fatal to any man who dares to love her so we don't know whether she had a fling with dumas or not but she's in fr now. Shooting pistols. When she was in Paris. She. She met a fella. She actually really loved. He was the editor of some. Like hipster newspaper.

It would be the. It'd be the equivalent of finding some fella. Who's. I don't know. The editor of fucking. Vice. Or Dazed and Confused. Today.

But. He was like a bohemian. And she seemed to really actually. Fall in love with this fella, some shit happened anyway, I don't know what it was, your man ended up in an argument, with another man,

about Lola, the other fella had said some shit about her, so her fella, the editor, to defend her honour, challenged your man to a duel, kind of regretted it the duel went ahead

the other fella was a better shot so now her boyfriend shot dead in a duel which broke her heart because that was the one fella she really gave a fuck about and that she loved

who was the editor of this newspaper this bohemian Parisian fella and he's dead now so that really that seemed to have bothered her deeply so she spends the next few years or sorry the next few months or whatever farting around europe doing her thing doing her dances putting on shows and eventually kind of settles in germany and the king was he the king

of bavaria ludwig fucking something king ludwig of bavaria and Ludwig fucking something. King Ludwig of Bavaria. Now he was an old fella. He was about 60. But he had this mad fetish for everything fucking Spanish. Spanish women. Now even though Lola wasn't fucking Spanish from Sligo. Or from Limerick. Born in Sligo.

He doesn't seem to give a shit. And apparently when she met Ludwig for the first time, like, she went out of her way, she heard that he fancied her, you know, and she's like, fuck it, I'm gonna bag a king, so when Ludwig meets her for the first time, he's 60 something years of age, first thing he says to her is basically, are your tits real, um i found strange because i didn't know they had fake boobs back then but maybe it meant padding or whatever but apparently that's the first thing he said to her the king are they real and she was wearing like a her spanish dress with the corset and she used to dress in a way that like her breasts would be kind of out there you know that was part of her costume and when he said to her are they real she took a knife out of her pocket and ripped the

dress open and just showed him to him there there and then and at that moment boom that was it he was ensnared and this is most definitely her most famous like she was hated in Bavaria by the people she was really seen as this radical scandalous perverted woman who was after she would have been seen as a witch

who was after putting a spell on the poor old king of Bavaria in his 60s and this poor old man didn't know what he was doing and he was entranced by this evil politically radical sexualized woman the Irish woman who pretended she was Spanish and he gave her a title he made her fucking a countess or some shit like that so now she had a proper fucking royal title in bavaria and it upset a lot of people now the thing with the ludwig the king he was so entranced with her that the more opposition that the public had towards her the more he would take

it personally and defend her and she gained quite a lot of fucking power in Bavaria, almost the power that a queen would have, even though she was a courtesan, she was his mistress. This is where, this is the bit that I love, because this is where the fucking, that Cromwell blood comes out, you know? Like I mentioned at the start, like, Lola or Eliza, her original name, she comes from, you know, still illegitimately, but it's the Oliver family. It's the family that were planted in Ireland as Protestant planters to eradicate Catholics.

She does not identify as an Irish Catholic. She comes from a family who would have hated Catholics, a family whose very existence is there for the eradication and replacement of Catholics. So the thing with Bavaria at the time is, first off, she'd have been posing as a Catholic because she's pretending she's Spanish nobility, so she would have been posing as a Catholic. The bureaucracy of Bavaria at the time

catholic jesuits were really really really fucking powerful right now lola uh using her ingratiation to the king and her power she starts making political moves in bavaria mainly quite liberal things because she's got that Parisian bohemian revolutionary thing in her so she starts doing things like uh kind of social fairness like starts enacting things whereby teachers start receiving better pay public servants that repeat receiving better pay she starts to express a concern for the working and middle class of Bavaria. Right. But also because the Jesuits thought that she was Catholic.

They tried to recruit her. So she starts this fucking feud with the Jesuits. This anti-Catholic thing. And this is. That's the Cromwell shit coming out in her. Like I said. She is from the Oliver family in fucking fucking ireland they're planters so she brings this radical anti-catolicism to bavaria she's the king's fucking mistress and

the most powerful bureaucrats in bavaria are catholics so in 1849 a bit of a revolution kind of kicks off in Bavaria. Now, from the ground up, it's coming from liberals who want to see kind of greater fairness in society, who want to see the removal of this Jesuit bureaucracy kind of leading a particularly aristocratic and kind of controlling country and the kind of

they rally behind Lola so the liberal uprising rallies behind Lola as a figurehead and you've got this now this fucking potential revolution ready to break out and she's got all these supporters

the Jesuit secret service or whatever end up going to the king with a bunch of evidence about her, just basically going, she is not who you think she is, she's not Spanish, she's none of this, here she is in London, here's all the shit she was doing, the king gets mad embarrassed and is kind of forced to strip her of her title and expel her from the country, but this huge revolution nearly kicks off where these massive riots and protesters are backing this lola one she becomes the figure and symbol of liberal reform within uh bavaria it's crushed

it doesn't work out but what that would have meant if you think of bavaria in the context of world war one world war two what that would have meant for the history of the 20th century if Lola's supporters had successfully toppled do you know? toppled the fucking, the powers that be, the Jesuit powers that be she fucks off to Switzerland then, not allowed in Bavaria she farts around Europe for another bit, doing her shows, doing her thing but by this time she's the height of her fame

she's incredibly famous now worldwide as lola montez the seducer of kings the starter of revolutions the spider dancer this person who's challenging all preconceptions of what what gender, what a woman's role is. You know, she's the first ever woman to be photographed smoking a cigarette. And if you remember the earlier podcast that I did where I spoke about the invention of advertising in the 1920s, no, the invention of propaganda in the 1920s and Sigmund Freud's nephew, the Swiss,

Edward Bernays in New York, how he used in the 1920s the use of cigarettes in women's hands as a way to manipulate advertising in the 20s. Lola Montes was getting her photograph taken smoking fags in the 18-fucking-40s, lads, knowing full well what that meant meant how punk rock that was cigarettes were not for women and she's going fuck that take my photo so she pisses off now to new york and what makes what makes this a bit different is she doesn't she's she's she doesn't need to chase power anymore, she's now Kim Kardashian levels of fame, she's standing on her own two feet, she's earning money, she's independent,

she goes to New York, and she gets on stage, not necessarily as a burlesque dancer, she's Lola Montez, the fucking the fucking celebrity the really and she tells her story so she writes a play about her own life she arrives to fucking new york lads wearing what was she wearing she was dressing in men's clothing right like a pants right this is years before coco chanel started doing that shit in the 20s. So Lola's now wearing men's clothes. She's pistols on either of her side like a fucking cowboy. And she starts carrying around this massive bullwhip.

This really, really long bullwhip. So she's just like, what fucking rules have you got and I'm going to break them. And she's up on stage now. Writing writing this is where her biography comes from now and you can her biography you can you can get it online you can read it her own biography is nuts she made you know that's what i'm saying she made up half of it but she's up on stage with her plays she'd do a bit of burlesque dancing there's still a bit of that but dressed as a man with pistols and a bullwhip and she'd still do the odd burlesque dance up and down the west coast like she toured all over america she was hugely influential on what burlesque dancing was to become um

but what she started doing as well then with the fucking whip she would beat the fuck out of men in public with this whip so like if she was playing to a crowd and the lads were boozy and someone might chance coming up on stage, she'd have this fucking six foot long whip and she'd beat the shit out of a man with the whip. In the early 1850s, she finds herself in San Francisco. San Francisco would have been at the utter height now of the start of its gold rush. And you'll know a couple of weeks ago i was in san

francisco and i did a podcast from san francisco and i'm kicking myself that because she opened up her own saloon in san francisco when it would have been it would have been fucking wild like san francisco would have been a rapidly expanding brand new town of just like I said it grew from 100 people to something like 400,000 in the space of a year I'm annoyed that she wasn't on my brain when I was in San Francisco and I didn't seek out some either where her saloon was

or just some Lola Montes stuff do you know she ended up in San Francisco with some very public feud anyway with the editor of some newspaper and he was talking shit about her in the newspaper she was talking shit about him the equivalent of a modern twitter feud you know except it was going back and forth in the newspaper so the editor would say shit lola would say shit back and then one day she's in like

it was either her own saloon, I think it was her own saloon, right, I could be wrong with this, but her own saloon, I think, the editor turns up, either not knowing it's hers,

or whatever, and she sees him, and she fucking takes out her whip, beats the shit out of the editor, with her fucking whip, and then he has a whip, and he starts beating the shit out of her,. With her fucking whip. And then he has a whip. And he starts beating the shit out of her. She's from fucking Sligo.

The gold rush chills out a bit. In San Francisco. So she goes right. Because she got fond of the gold rush. Type of crowd. Probably the wildness of it. Reminded her of the crack she was having in Paris. With the bohemian crowd goes right where's the next gold rush so she fucks off to Australia she ends up in Melbourne doing the same thing touring as this huge celebrity and performing shows that are about

her life she did a play about it was called Lola Montes in Bavaria writing her own plays starring in them with this incredibly exaggerated version of the life that she lives again, not too far off the hot taker in me taking it back to Kim Kardashian Kim Kardashian, the Kardashian reality show that's not their life it's a

version of their life for the entertainment of people who follow them she was doing all that shit Kim Kardashian's not taking out a fucking whip and beating the shit out of a newspaper editor, I can tell you that. So she ends up returning to America in her late 30s.

And that's when she, she becomes a fucking, like a beauty influencer. This is the, again, this crazy, the Kardashian, I mean, Kylie Jenner's thing is a fucking, who's Kim's sister, for anyone who doesn't know, but selling beauty lines, you know, giving beauty advice, beauty tutorials, selling makeup, Lola, in her late 30 30s when she gets back to America

her shtick becomes about a more female audience she, her reputation is as this I suppose a feminist icon a very empowered icon at the time but also hugely vilified

because of the tastes at the time but she's seen as this incredibly beautiful impossibly charismatic seductive woman and women at the time want to be like her so she starts doing shows about beauty she releases books you can still get them online you know look up google books lola montez's books are there from the 1860s, one of them I was reading earlier, Secrets of the Woman's Toilet, it's called, and well able to fucking write as well, you know, so that's what she did with kind of the end of her career, becoming like a beauty influencer,

becoming like a beauty influencer which I find amazing again just because of the parallels of it with what a modern influencer is today and she died kind of a sad enough lonely death she died at 42 or was it even no she was 39

she died at 39 in America kind of lonely No, she was 39. She died at 39 in America. Kind of lonely. The people who buried her didn't even know her. She got sick. It would appear that what she had is the starting signs of what's called tertiary syphilis, right? Now syphilis, as you know is it's a sexually transmitted disease doesn't really exist that much in the western world anymore because

it's it's easy to cure but at the time syphilis would have been fucking fatal tertiary syphilis is the third stage of syphilis that was syphilis that it wasn't far off leprosy people with tertiary syphilis it's syphilis takes many years to form it's a disease that come over from the fucking christopher columbus brought it back in his ship from the dominican republic i believe but it made shit of europe and tertiary syphilis would have meant that had she not died from it. Like your nose falls off. Your face. Massive deformities happen in humans. That have tertiary syphilis.

Genuinely. If you're not squeamish. Look up some photographs. Old photographs of tertiary syphilis. People look like zombies. Their eyes fall out. All this shit. So.

That's how fucking Lola Montez died. And she's buried in new york eliza gilbert and look that's all i can say about her but i think fascinating fucking fascinating and i just think it is hugely phenomenally interesting that this the you know the who was kim kard Kim Kardashian 200 years ago woman from Sligo or Limerick whatever you want

you know and that's pretty class so fair play Lola alright that's all I've got time for this week 73 minutes yart have a good

have a good week I hope you enjoyed that. Thank you. 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.