The Blindboy Podcast - Custard Gust

Episode Date: February 7, 2018

Poitin, Changelings, angel readings, hot takes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

God of Meal and Mahogut you fizzy beasts you stinking deacons you've done it we are 16 weeks at number one in the podcast charts we have beat

the record set by Brian Adams with his number one hit, Everything I Do, I Do It For You, from the Robin Hood Prince of Thieves soundtrack. Thank you so much. We have achieved this because you have followed the guidebook of being a sound cunt. You've been subscribing to the podcastunt you've been subscribing to the podcast

you've been telling friends about it and you've been leaving delicious buttery reviews about the podcast and for this I am eternally grateful

we must now bask we must now bask in the mutual the mutual the mutual success and feel the podcast sunshine as it warms our backs and legs despite the howling winds

of the February moors but thank you so much you glamorous bastards 16 weeks at number 1 I didn't I didn't expect this didn't expect it at all like I've said many many times

I just started this podcast to promote my book and it has grown oh so beautifully every week to become to be honest to become a meditative space

for myself you know it's somewhere where I can offload my hot takes into the digital airwaves into the electronic universe into your heads and it's good crack so please continue to subscribe to this podcast if you haven't

subscribed already please do um the reason i say that is because mainly because facebook has gone to shit i've got half a million followers on facebook But they've made some changes to their algorithm. In the past six months. Which means that if I post on Facebook. Only about ten people see it. Unless I spend a lot of money. To promote that post. And.

Twitter's doing alright. But you can't trust these social media sites. But what you can trust. Is subscriptions. So please do subscribe to this podcast whether you're using it on acast or itunes because then you'll get a weekly notification also this podcast does not have a sponsor currently it is supported by a Patreon account which is patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast and if you'd like to contribute to that Patreon

the equivalent of buying me a cup of tea once a month or a pint or a Mars bar please do but again you don't have to it's a suggested donation based on soundness if you can't afford to donate doesn't matter I don't mind to. It's a suggested donation based on soundness.

If you can't afford to donate, it doesn't matter. I don't mind if you want to listen for free. That's cool. That's alright with me. I'm non-stop listening to shit for free. And I give cunts nothing. If you're new to the podcast, last week, last week we spoke about a mug that I bought that confronted me with a sense of fragile masculinity. Which made me internally angry and I projected this anger onto an otter. And I still have the mug of fragile masculinity. and I still have the mug of fragile masculinity. It's a stainless steel vacuum mug,

and I've been getting good mileage out of it. Very, very good mileage indeed. I have not been using this mug in an outdoor setting as it is intended, but I've been using it indoors because it keeps my tea hot for ages, which is beautiful. But alas, one downfall of this mug, its insulation is so effective, that the outside of it is freezing. So while I'm drinking a hot drink,

it does in fact make my hands cold, which is a torturous dichotomy in this mug. dichotomy in this mug as you'll know I had a lash at dry January went the whole month without any drink so then February came around

and I had an enjoyable drink I went to the bar in Limerick called Pharmacia that I've mentioned earlier previous podcasts and I had my beautiful zombie cocktail which is my favorite drink I think next to Polish cans and zombie is an interesting drink it's got three different types of rum. Bit of pineapple juice. A little touch of cinnamon. And some other flavours that I don't know. Bit of grenadine.

Don't think grenadine tastes like anything. It's just the juice of a pomegranate. I love the word pomegranate. The word grenadine sounds like grenade. For a reason. Pomegranate when you word grenadine sounds like grenade for a reason. Pomegranate, when you open it up, it's a piece of fruit that has all these little seeds in the inside, these little bloody seeds. And when they first invented the grenades in the late 19th century,

they named them after the pomegranate because it's this little ball with ball bearings inside of it. It'll rip your face off. But I digress. I had the most beautiful zombie in Pharmacia last week because it was my first drink in an entire month and I savoured it gently and the lads in Pharmacia

had gotten tiki glasses in there finally which are very fancy kind of ceramic mugs that are a hyper real simulacra of Polynesian wood carvings but on the top of a zombie cocktail

there's a flaming what do you call's a flaming. What do you call them? A flaming passion fruit. Right? Also as well I am noting the irony. That. While last week I was drinking tea.

In the wilderness. At this very masculine. Mug. Which affirmed my masculinity. nighttime tipple is probably the most feminine looking drink you could possibly imagine it's got pink umbrellas hanging out of it like but it does come with a flaming passion fruit at the top and this passion fruit is filled with what's called overproof rum which is rum that's 100% I think

it's about 80% or 100% if you drink it it tastes like paint thinner so what you do is you fuck that into the zombie rather than drink it straight but as I sipped this overproof rum it got me thinking about Pudgine

now Irish listeners will know exactly what I'm talking about when I'm talking Pudgine Pudgine is it's not a mythical Irish drink but it's near mythical it's Irish moonshine it's illegally distilled spirits a clear drink it's Irish moonshine it's illegally distilled spirits

a clear drink that gets its name from the pot that it's made in and it can be made from a number of things potatoes, molasses, sugar beet it tends to be made from whatever the poutine maker has at that moment in time that he's making it now speaking again about how different drinks can have uh connotations regarding gender stereotypes you know poutine is certainly considered a hard man's Irish drink, you know, because it's illegal. If you have poutine

in your possession, then it means you know someone who makes it. And in the cities in particular, it's impossible to find. If you're at a lock-in in Ireland and someone has poutine, you know, you're kind of whispered, you're whispered away, you're whispered away to a corner as if the person's got a big load of Bolivian cocaine or something, it's like he's got Pudgine shh shh, he's got Pudgine he's got Pudgine who's got Pudgine

and then everyone runs away to the corner very quietly and a load of lads pretend that they like it pretend that they like it pretend that they like drinking this neat fluid that could potentially blind you it is the height of masculinity when people aren't drinking poutine the other thing they say is that oh I have it for my muscles. Irish men in

particular, lads who are playing hurling and stuff out the country, they'll often order a bottle of poutine or if they get caught by the guards with a bottle of poutine they'll say, oh I'm not drinking it Gart, I'm not drinking it, it's for my muscles. And they will get the poutine and rub it into their muscles as a way to relieve pain from the hurling pitch now i don't know whether it works or not having a clue there was a man in west cork who used to mix poutine with horse's piss and then have his wife rub it all over his back that man was my father but interestingly what got me thinking about

Pudgene and it's connotations of masculinity and hard man Irishness and GAA and nearly Irish nationality is Pudgene makers right now Pudgene's been made for fucking years, hundreds and hundreds of years Poutine has been made

but there's something specifically unique historically about Poutine makers which is quite interesting now what this is is back in the day and it's tradition when the lads used to be making Poutine

how they'd do it is they'd have this pot still it would usually be kind of portable fashioned out of tin or copper or whatever they could and they'd have a peat fire underneath it and they'd create what's known as the mash I think it is

which was the mixture of spuds or barley or whatever you have and from boiling this up this fermented mash they would distill it down into pure alcohol and there was a specific ritual

when poutine was being made that when the poutine maker would put his cup out at the bottom of the spout to test the first drops of pure alcohol that come out when the alcohol

is dropped into the cup before he would take a sip out of this poutine he would fuck a little bit over his shoulder the reason being is that Out of this poutine. He would fuck a little bit over his shoulder. The reason being.

Is that. We're talking a good few hundred years ago lads. The poutine maker. He understood the ritual and process. Of what he was doing. But he didn't necessarily understand the science of it. This was before. The enlightenment even. And we're talking the fucking back hours of Ireland.

With no education so poutine makers genuinely believed that they were interfering with the world of the fairies and the spirits and the unseen powers that dominated the wilderness of ireland they thought that what they were performing was. Witchcraft. Or alchemy. So out of superstition. They would never take the first sip. Of that Pudgine that came out of the distilled.

They'd throw it over their shoulder. For the fairies. And. This is one of the reasons why. Distilled alcohol is called spirits. You know. The first. Record why distilled alcohol is called spirits you know the first record of distilled alcohol being called spirits goes back to the greeks because there's a record of aristotle talking about the process of distillation and aristotle said that drinking distilled wine or

beer it puts spirits into the body of the person drinking it. Now, Aristotle is fucking, he's three, four hundred years before Christ. Now, nobody's sure who fully invented distillation. Because it was either the Greeks or some Islamic lad. Because Islam back in the day were pretty shit hot at their chemistry but anyway same thing goes for the Irish Poutine maker they truly believed that they were

magicians but they had a sense of shame about it they felt that they were stealing these spirits from the fairies so they'd fuck it over the shoulder to give the little bit to the fairies but what they were also doing was they were protecting themselves from the fairies so they'd fuck it over the shoulder to give the little bit to the fairies but what they were also doing was they were protecting themselves from the fairies wrath okay fairies are a big thing in irish folklore a superstition that still exists today

fairy forts are little gatherings of rocks which are considered to be the meeting place of fairies and even five six years ago lads there was a motorway being built in ireland and there were huge protests to have it diverted because the motorway would have went over a fairy fort but pochine makers the makers of this traditionally masculine drink. One thing they used to also do is if they had a male child, they would dress that male child up as a woman, as a young girl. And they would do this because they thought they were stealing poutine from the fairies. they thought they were stealing poutine from the fairies and that doing this process of making poutine would make them victims of the fairies that the fairies would come in the night and they would replace their child with what's known as a changeling a changeling is like a goblin child

in irish mythology unfortunately what makes it kind of sad is that we now understand that this was merely an irrational response to huge, massive infant mortality that would have been in Ireland over the past few hundred years. Ireland had some of the worst infant mortality in Western Europe because the place was so poor. So when a mother woke up in the morning and her child was dead, what the parents would say to themselves to kind of protect themselves from pain is that the child that's lying dead is not a dead child but rather a changeling that the fairies have come in the night and taken away that healthy child and taken it off into the forest never to be seen again and replaced that child with a kind of a strange clone a strange copy of the child that's dead and that's what they used to do to make themselves feel better,

because they had nothing else. So poutine makers in particular felt that they were susceptible to their children being turned into changelings, so they would dress their male children as boys or as girls, and sometimes dress their female children as boys to confuse the fairies. Also, what it accounts for is a lack of understanding in maybe mental disabilities, or if a child had autism back then, or if a child maybe was born with Down syndrome and they didn't understand it, they would say that this was a changeling child

the poutine makers were also denounced from the pulpit because the priests believed that the poutine makers were fucking with the spirit world and this is a common theme throughout the world and history regarding any any process that was highly highly skilled whereby the artisans who were performing the craft understood

how to arrive at the end result but they didn't fully know what it was they were doing they didn't understand the mechanics of what they were doing, they didn't know why, Japanese sword making, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of years old, it's an incredibly complex feat of metallurgy, and the ancient Japanese were, you know, they were forging fucking steel, you know, mixing iron and carbon and getting steel as an end result, which is very complex. But what they had around the Japanese sword making ceremony could last several weeks. And it involved, in the process, many various religious rituals

that seemed completely unnecessary to the process which they are and they made the process of making a sword a lot longer than it is but it's because number one they thought they were performing magic they thought it was religiously divine steel and number two without the understanding of the exact scientific process of what they were doing they needed repetitive religious ritual so that the recipe for this sword never ever got lost that's all they had because they didn't have the scientific method as such but back to drink because think of it lads likeads. Like, what else is poutine going to be? Or whiskey?

You know, you've no science. You've no understanding. And all of a sudden you have this unbelievably hot liquid that gets you on your ear, pissed, takes you off to another level. Of course you're going to think it's magic. I mean, people rarely got their hands on distilled spirits

something that would make you drunk that quickly until of course the and this is a separate podcast altogether because it's so interesting but the impact of gin on London gin was the first kind of spirit to be industrially mass produced

and this happened around the early to mid-industrial revolution but when the availability of cheap gin hit the slums of London where you had factories emerging and people living in slums with very very long hours very sad lives and poor working conditions, when gin hit those streets, the gin epidemic of London in the 17th, 18th century was like a heroin epidemic, a crack epidemic. The world had not seen such large-scale, extreme, violent, destructive alcoholism because before that people didn't really have access to spirits. alcoholism because before that people didn't really have access to spirits now the other thing as well though people in middle ages especially in cities everyone was always a little bit pissed including children because drinking water was unsafe so they often drank

a kind of a weak two percent beer as their daily fluid. So everyone was a little bit pissed. But when gin hit, that fucking ravished the gaff. Gin can go fuck itself in 2018 as well, to be honest lads. There's gin popping up everywhere. There's craft gin

popping up out of fucking golf course holes. And it's bullshit like, I mean gin is only it's industrial alcohol soaked in nettles do you know and then put into a fancy a fancy fucking bottle and the charge is 60 quid for it there's one or two nice gins but don't be fooled by gin don't be fooled by craft gin you could make that yourself. Not a bother. White spirits and a dog leaf.

But back to. What I mentioned earlier. The changelings. And the fear that the Pudging maker had. That by interfering with the spirit world. And the fairy world. That the fairies would take his children away. And make them changelings.

And how this was this was just a coping mechanism to understand many medical woes that medicine did not have answers for at the time and it reminds me of a particularly disturbing murder

case from 1895. The murder of Bridget Cleary in Tipperary. And Bridget was murdered by her husband Michael. And this is a trial that was so bizarre that it gained international attention. So Bridget had been. Had been sick. We're unsure as to what exactly was wrong with her. The reports would suggest.

There was a physical element to it. But mostly a behavioural change. And Michael. Either in his anger in his grief in his superstition I don't know believed that it was not actually his wife

that was present he believed that his wife had been taken by the fairies and a changeling was left in her place now you've heard the phrase away with the fairies

something that we kind of a disparaging term that we would say to somebody who's suffering a mental illness we'll say that they're away with the fairies well michael believed that bridget was indeed away with the fairies she that the fairies had taken her so he became angry with his sick wife and it started off he tried to get the priest over to give her communion that didn't work

but mostly Michael's suspicions lay not in we'll say the Catholicism because that's the interesting thing about Ireland especially rural Ireland going back a few hundred years

the church tried their best with Catholicism and a lot of it stuck, but fairy mythology and ancient mythology and superstition about fairies and goblins and banshees, you could never take that away. So Michael threw a cup of piss on his wife, for whatever reason I don't know and then he chased her around the house with a burning piece of wood her dress ended up catching fire and there were other people in the house who tried to stop tried to put Bridget out but Michael was like no no no it's not Bridget leave her burn it's not Bridget. Leave her burn. It's not Bridget. This is a fairy. This is a changeling. So he threw lamp oil on her.

And she burnt to death. He burnt her to death. Believing that he was burning the changeling to death. And her body was found, her burnt body was found in a shallow grave. And it pained the judge. The judge nearly got caught up in the story of changelings and didn't know what to do with it

he was eventually found guilty of manslaughter and he got 15 years in Portlaoise prison until 1910 but that's the danger that's the danger of that changeling shit that's what it did

you'll still see you'll see analogues of it today especially with infant mortality and angel readings and angel cards now I don't want to be shitting on people who

you know if people get a bit of solace for believing in angels or fucking around with angel cards or if they get solace from crystals or crystal healing if someone's doing that and that's getting them through their life if that's bringing a bit of comfort and happiness to them

and it's not hurting other people then that's none of my business do you know what i'm saying in the case of michael cleary his belief in fairies that's absolutely my business and it's your business because he murdered his wife because of it but today we have angel cards and sometimes parents who lose a child, their way of coping, their way of grieving is to believe that angels took the child away. That the child was an angel that was put on the earth and it was not good enough for the earth so the angels took it away. It was not good enough for the earth, so the angels took it away. And grief is complicated and grief is weird. And if someone wants to believe that and that takes the pain away, that's none of my business.

However, if you are a practitioner of angel readings and angel cards and you are using this profession to earn money from grieving parents then I think you might be a bit ethically shitty you know I hope you enjoy sleeping on your pillow of money from that but the reason

I'm bringing it up is that the changeling is what Jung would call Carl Jung who I mentioned earlier in a few previous podcasts, the changeling is an archetype it is an artifact of the collective unconscious mind that always exists

throughout humanity whether it be a changeling or or now, whether it be, you know, something like a fucking, the angel cards or the angel readings. The Catholic Church have their own equivalent of the changeling. And this took the form of a very, a very shitty and evil notion called limbo, which the Church were forced to strike out of catechism

the past 40 years but in Ireland in particular if a young child was not baptised if a child wasn't baptised and if that child died before its baptism it went to a special place called Limbo. Now you must remember within Catholicism all of us are born with a sin

and we're born with the sin. It was actually a sin that was committed by a woman 4,000 years ago who ate an apple that was given to her by a snake and because the snake gave who ate an apple that was given to her by a snake and because the snake gave this woman an apple all of us are born with original sin we are born sinners and the cure for this is baptism and the punishment for original sin without forgiveness without the forgiveness of baptism is to be sent to a place

called limbo which means in latin the edge of hell so if hell is a shopping centre limbo is the car park and it's not as bad as hell but car parks are a pretty shit place for babies

so the parents were told this and they had to live a life of perpetual grief knowing that their child could never achieve communion with God all because the child hadn't been baptised you know the cynic in me would say

that who makes money from baptism the church so get your child fucking baptised it also keeps the children perpetually within the system of the church and perpetually donating and keeping that system of power in place. So the church used the concept of limbo to feed upon the archetype of the changeling

to maintain a structure of power. And I have less compassion and understanding for the church doing that than I do for a contemporaneous situation with a set of parents believing in angel cards if that's what gets them through their grief. Hot takes, lads. You know, that's what this podcast is for. It's for hot takes.

You know know you should you should take this podcast with the integrity that you would take Forrest Gump talking to you at a bus stop but more on more on the archetypes we'll do a little bit on archetypes because we spoke

about Carl Jung a few podcasts back I described Jung's model of the collective unconscious through the metaphor of the Yortia Hearn's shoulders peeking above the water so Jung like I said he's got his collective unconscious which is a pool of human consciousness that we all have access to right throughout history all humans it's the psychic equivalent of instinct animals have instinct we have the collective unconscious and because we're a bit more intellectually developed than animals because we use a world of symbols and language because we

use language to communicate we have instinctual symbols that are common to all human brains and these are called archetypes and there's many different archetypes and archetypes find their way they find their way to us in stories in art in imagery and through dreams in stories, in art, in imagery and through dreams and the changeling is it's one archetype this mythical creature that plays upon the inner fear of

I mean if you take it to an evolutionary level you know we're big bags of genes and our purpose is to procreate, if we can, and that naturally follows, you know, like humans, more than any animals, human children stay with the parent for fucking years, and years, and years, because of the size of the human brain, a cat will get rid of a child in a fucking five months but humans need children for years so young would probably say that the changeling archetype exists as a way for us to protect and preserve children so our irrational and terrible fears of losing a child will manifest

itself that fear will manifest itself with the changeling archetype and like i said that archetype its central tenets never change the language of how we describe the changeling archetype that develops depending on the society we live in society we live in so the poutine makers had the fairy changeling catholic church had limbo nowadays we've got angel cards and angel readings like another thing that changelings were often accused of doing in irish mythology was that a changeling would they'd sneak in in the night time and they might secretly impregnate your wife or they'd steal your husband's sperm

and then what would be born is a changeling child a child that is half fairy and half human a form of cook holding maybe the modern alt-right obsession with being a cook is just the, because of current politics, the current archetypal form of the changeling. There's a boiling hot take. That's so hot I'm going to put it down for a few minutes. boiling hot take that's so hot i'm gonna put it down for a few minutes but the the changeling fear of you know the changelings or the fairies secretly impregnating a human and this still exists today in alien abduction stories when people recount dreams that they've had where

they've been abducted by aliens and they try and recount usually through psychoanalytic therapy what the aliens want they will say that the aliens they took me onto a spaceship and they stole my sperm because they want to create a race of half alien half human sure that's no different than what they were saying three four hundred years ago with the fucking changelings it's just the language has changed to accommodate technology and culture also another archetype that has existed throughout history is the hag it's known as i don't know if any of you have ever experienced sleep paralysis sleep paralysis is an interesting one i've only gotten it a couple of times usually when i sleep on my back about 40 percent of people get it basically you go to sleep you wake up in the middle of the night and you can't move you're in a kind of a half dream half awake state you're aware that you're in the room

you kind of want to scream and move but you can't some people experience it so intensely that they hallucinate that another figure is in the room with them and they feel great terror. Now that's a complex kind of mixture between the archetype of the dream state and then just the physical, what it takes to fucking sleep. When you go to sleep your brain switches off your muscles for the simple reason that if you're running in your dream you don't want to run in bed or you'll wake yourself up so your brain switches off sometimes we wake up and this little switch in our brain that shuts off our muscles that switches on after we wake up but some people do get intense hallucinations that feel very real that there is something a presence in the room sitting on their chest uh stopping you from breathing or interfering with your nuts

some people get that there's a presence in the room sitting on my chest and interfering with my nuts and if you look up the hag on google images you'll see many paintings over the years going back hundreds of years of a terrifying old woman sitting on your chest but sure now that's just alien abductions that's what an alien abduction is and people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are merely in a half dream half awake state and are confronted with the hag archetype which through technology they have projected as an alien but it's all the same crack you know i'm aware that some people do use this podcast to help them go to sleep why i don't fucking know but it has been brought to my attention that some people like to listen to my voice and this

lulls them off into sleep so please don't get freaked out there by speak of sleep paralysis if you don't want sleep paralysis just don't sleep on your back it's that simple they've done studies into it it only occurs when you're in the supine position and i no longer sleep on my back for that reason which is disappointing because i like it when i position and I no longer sleep on my back for that reason which is disappointing because I like it when I was younger I used to not sleep on my front because I was afraid of my eyeballs

sticking to the pillow another archetype and I'm going to get on to an extremely hot take now a take so hot that I expect you to tell me to fuck off at the end of it another archetype is the trickster archetype A take so hot that I expect you to tell me to fuck off at the end of it.

Another archetype is the trickster archetype, which has existed across all mythology, of little pixies or fairies or goblins or whatever that would play tricks on the human population. Changelings, in a sense, they were a little bit more sinister because they were fucking stealing children, but they were still playing tricks to the point that

often what was recommended, kind of folk remedies that were recommended to Irish people a few hundred years ago, if you didn't want your children succumbing to the changelings, would be to do really strange rituals. Like one woman was told to try and boil a thimble of beer in an eggshell.

Or told to eat a chicken without taking its feathers off. To perform acts so bizarre that it would make the fairies go what the fuck is this person doing i've never seen anything like that in my life and to trick the fairies with weirdness but anyway in irish mythology we have leprechauns now leprechauns even though they're the most internationally the most recognizable facet of irish mythology they're really only present in later irish mythology and if you're listening to this from britain or canada or america we don't take leprechauns as seriously as ye do and i've heard

i've heard an american call a leprechaun a lepros, so fuck off so leprechauns aren't really a thing, but where they kind of came from, that is present in Irish mythology, in a crowd called the Tuatha Dé Danann which were they were kind of just a weird kind of race

of people, they were the tribe of the gods and they were all different type of characters but one of them was the trickster, it was small little beings that used to play tricks on the early Irish people whether by setting fire to their camps or going in and fucking

rearranging the furniture or something, playing tricks and the trickster is a Jungian archetype that is present across mythology in all cultures. Okay? Now here's my hot take. And I don't think I read this somewhere

because I can't find it online. I think it came out of a drunken conversation I had in a pub with somebody I know who studies folklore. But anyway. Apparently there is a completely unconfirmed theory. That cannot be proven. And I'm going to tell you this.

Because when I heard it. I was like fuck me that's interesting. But anyway. Apparently the. The trickster leprechaun archetype. In Irish mythology. And why it exists so pervasively, this race of little men that would play tricks on the people,

is because when Ireland was first inhabited between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, it is possible that because it was an island, that there was a race of actual small people. Like, there's a thing called, there's island gigantism and another one called island microism or something. But basically, sometimes when an island is isolated, the creatures on it are either massive or small. In the islands of Micronesiaia you have the pygmy peoples who are about four or five feet tall so there is a theory that when the first people came to ireland from spain or whatever that there was a race of small human possibly even hominid like australopithecus possibly even an early type of Neanderthal. That was very small.

And when Homo sapiens arrived in Ireland. This race of small human. Fucked off into the hills. Because they were terrified. And then got pissed off. Because they're like. Who are these tall fuckers. Taking over Ireland.

And they'd come down at night time. And do raids. On the camps. And set fire to houses and shit and that the pervasive pervasive myth of the small trickster creature in the woods may actually based be based in some degree of fact and it was a a type of hominid but sure we'd have discovered their bones wouldn't we but sure we'd have discovered their bones wouldn't we maybe it was the Barbary ape

the 2500 year old Barbary ape called Tony that's a hot take lads if you go around saying to anybody blind boy said that there was a race of miniature Neanderthals and that's where leprechauns come from

if I hear someone on the internet saying that I've been saying that, I'm going to... You're getting a fucking... You're getting a dog shit in the letterbox. I'll tell you that. I did not say that. 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 for you Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first O-Men.

I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real.

It's not real. It's not real. Who said that? The first O-Men. 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've presented it there as historical conspiracy theory that is to be taken with a pinch of salt it's an interesting theory it's fictional most likely not true a lot of salt. It's an interesting theory. It's fictional. Most likely not true. A lot of people have. Oh my pop shield and my microphone is after coming off. Hold on.

I have a little shield in front of the microphone. And it is partly responsible for the podcast hug. On my microphone I have two shields. I've got one furry thing and the front of the microphone and then a separate shield that offers me two layers of protection and it allows me to get very close to the microphone like this to give you an intimate and close sound but a lot of you have been sending me the story this week I've received it in my inbox and on Twitter about the life and death of Nigel the world's loneliest seabird and you've probably

seen this because it went fairly viral online but there's a species of seabird called a gannet. And off the coast of Australia, the Australian gannet, gannets live on little islands. And the conservationists were trying to get more gannets to populate certain islands because the population was disappearing. So what they did is they put some fake stone gannets on the island okay gannet is a it's like a lanky seagull it's white with a yellow head so the conservationists put had one little island and they put on it one stone gannet painted white with a yellow head female in an effort to woo these

other gannets to come down and populate the island because they'd be looking for a mate so it didn't really work except for one bird called Nigel and Nigel the gannet spent a lot of time

on his own on this island performing mating rituals towards this stone lifeless Gannet trying to mate with it, trying to win its affections. Nigel died in January. Nigel spent his life believing a statue to be another female. And he died one of the loneliest, loneliest deaths that we have ever seen. And it's very, very sad. Incredibly fucking sad. Because, I don't know, it speaks to our loneliness it speaks to our loneliness i i like a lot of people resonated with this article a lot of people saw poor old nigel

and his efforts with this stone bird and it made us feel upset on a couple of levels number one there's the obvious one where you just feel sorry because he doesn't have the intellectual capacity to know that it's made out of stone he's operating on pure instinct the other thing is that i think on a sociocultural level i think the story of nigel resonates with us because i think it's the fear of falling in love online and not knowing if the person on the other end is real which is quite common a lot of people get caught with that where you're catfished nidal was essentially catfished and i think that's why that story is resonating with us right now is it's our fear it's our fear of being catfished, the fear, the fear not that someone will take the

piss out of you, but some people do fall in love, genuinely fall in love online, with someone they've never met, and it could be bullshit, that person could, could be the, could be lying about who they are, and that's what happened with Nigel, so that's my take on why the story of Nigel resonated with so many people but it's sad poor old fucking Nigel he's dead but however the hottest take on the internet this week goes to

a woman called Nicole Serator whose twitter handle is mildly bitter and Nicole is a journalist and she wrote she quote tweeted the article about Nigel and she wrote

this might be harsh since Nigel is now dead but even concrete birds do not owe you affection Nigel stop wooing a bird who is not interested then she linked to a now deleted facebook article where she'd written this article whereby she framed the story of nigel trying to woo the stone bird as an example of rape culture now i like my hot takes and i like my cultural marxism so from the perspective of if nicole was trying to say that the the male author of the article had framed nigel's story in in terms of you know not understanding that that the stone bird was saying no and being

persistent if nicole was making that take where it's like she's analyzing the male writers you know, not understanding that the stone bird was saying no and being persistent, if Nicole was making that take, where it's like she's analysing the male writer's framing of the story about the gannet, then I'd be going, tell me more, I'm interested. But however, she made the crucial mistake, and I have to paraphrase now because she ended up deleting it. She said, deleting it she said i mean how do we know that nigel wasn't the pedophile of the gannet world how do we know that nigel wasn't a pedo that was banished to this island to live with a stone bird and i'm not having that and the internet wasn't having that. Because it's one thing to critically analyse the article, but it's another.

With no knowledge of Gannetts, to accuse poor old Nigel of being a banished paedophile Gannett. No thank you, Nicole. But the comments to her status and to her posts did restore a little bit of faith in the internet. and to her post did restore a little bit of faith in the internet everyone was universally saying fuck off Nicole, delete the post please you're caught on a gannet of paedophile and what bothered me the most then is she wrote underneath it

I'm available to write the feminist perspective on Nigel the gannet's non-tragic death should anyone wish to pay me which kind of unveiled what was going on there but i'll read some of the negative comments that she got under her status before i go to my hot take someone wrote stop trying to woo an industry that is not interested maybe there's reasons you haven't been approached to write about this oh then another person wrote it's really upsetting that you are calling everyone with objectophilia a rapist like i'm not trolling

here you are literally calling humans who have a different sexuality the same thing you would call a person that forces a sentient being to have sex against their will gross another person said we cannot and should not hold animals to human standards of behavior the behavior nigel exhibited is natural and should be encouraged because that is how gannets reproduce i will not have nigel's name besmirched for exhibiting natural behaviors years now the author of the ridiculous hot take post nicole she retracted some days later and claimed that it was sat there i don't believe her i don't believe it is i think what nicole was exhibiting there is something that would be quite common in the offices of like BuzzFeed or Huffington Post, right? And it's something that pisses me off. Like the internet culture and how it's been working, we'll say, since about 2014,

is something goes viral, right? Then when it goes viral and gets a bunch of clicks for the article we'll say buzzfeed buzzfeed will make something a topic go very viral then once the traction for that virality goes down once people that people get tired of it what happens after about four days is somebody comes out with another article to say that the initial thing that we all liked is now actually really really bad and then maybe if you're lucky you'll get a third wave of that where they'll counteract the point that it's bad and it's actually okay and that's how it works we get excited about something someone writes to say

that it's shit and you're a bad person for liking it and then rarely a third perspective on that and that is the cycle of clickbait viral and there's already been documented articles about from workers in the likes of HuffPost

or Upworthy but yeah how these companies have a brand image, an appearance on the surface of being dedicated to issues of social justice or issues of equality, whether it be race or gender. And the workers, the journalists

who work in those places or the interns will say that these companies are actually simply driven by an algorithm and they don't necessarily want to promote social justice what they want is clicks from

social justice and as you know I'm a i'm a fucking sjw marxist cook and one thing that i always try and stress to people is clickbait sites are not helpful allies in any fucking social justice sense because all they want is is rage clicks they purposefully frame issues of social justice or issues of equality in such a way that it just pisses people off and all they're looking for is arguments in the comments and these arguments in the comments they make the article that's being argued about appear in more people's feeds and it gets more clicks and through those clicks they gain more money. And what I mean by that is, and you'll know this, this has been our online culture for three years.

They'll have an article about feminism that says 10 reasons why all men are trash and that headline doesn't help anything all it does is it causes men in the fucking comment section to write reverse sexism in large capitals and then someone argues underneath that reverse sexism isn't a thing and you just have a lot of people screaming at each other or they might have another article that says 10 reasons why white people need to be stopped in 2017 no one clicks in it just starts a big scrap in the comments and it doesn't help anything it polarizes what we have at the moment is massive polarization online of a left and a right where people are just screaming and roaring at each other and getting

so emotionally hijacked that they've stopped having an actual conversation with empathy or understanding and you just have people screaming at each other and these clickbait social justice sites they're not allies they feed upon it now that's not a black and white take that i'm trying to make there because here's the thing sometimes i will see an article and it says 10 reasons why people need to be stopped in 2017 and i'll click on it and actually read it and when you read the article the journalist has presented quite a thoughtful nuanced piece of work about race

that has then made me the reader you know confront I'm then confronted with aspects of my privilege and I learn something about myself and that's a good thing it's not really the journalists that are doing this shit it's the people writing the headlines the journalist doesn't always write the headline in a clickbait site the headline is written by people who write headlines responding to an algorithm to get the fucking clicks so when

I was reading about the experiences of journalists who'd written these pieces on either gender or race when they would see the headline that was put on their article they'd fucking cringe they're like i don't want to call the article that so it's something to always be cautious of always be cautious of they're bullshitters they're bullshitters they just want to earn money from clicks and the people that were working as journalists are saying it too, they weren't happy with their

experiences, but Facebook have changed their algorithm towards video so 2018 is going to be the year where click sites can disappear Buzzfeed had to lay off 100 people there last year um is it time for an ocarina pause

we're an hour in we're a fucking hour into the podcast and I have not done an ocarina pause usually during this podcast sometimes Acast who are the company that put this podcast online they insert digital adverts and depending on your geographical location you may or may not hear an advert so what i do is i play a little piece of a spanish clay whistle

and you may or may not hear the spanish clay, the ocarina. If you hear the whistle, it means you haven't heard an advert. Here we go. And this one, this one is dedicated to Nigel the Lonely Gannet. May his soul find solace in limbo I haven't done my drunk limerick aunt as Donald Trump in a while and I won't do it this week because Donnie has been silent

Donald Trump has been quiet because he's been taking an awful amount of credit for the stock market recently he's been the stock market has been doing quite well for about a month

very well strangely well and he's been taking credit for it and most American presidents don't take credit for something so arbitrary but he has but unfortunately for Donnie

it took a fucking historically massive crash yesterday so if you take credit for it you gotta take the fall as well so Donnie's been quiet so I've nothing to say for him oh one thing I did need want to talk about a group of artists called subset they did a beautiful mural of me um in andrews lane up in dublin it's a giant mural of myself and it's my bagged face beside a mural of donald trump and it contains a quote from this podcast which is donald trump is more terrifying than a jack russell with human hands so thank you very much to subset for doing that mural it's very flattering and I asked them why they did it and they just said they were big fans

of the podcast so fair play lads thank you um subset subset if you are online give them a follow subset Dublin and give them your support because they hit the headlines during the year because they do these fucking unbelievably class murals on walls around Dublin. Murals that genuinely enhance the environment. Murals that are so beautiful people stop and take photographs of them. They take boring spaces and make them gorgeous. But Dublin City Council

consider this to be a violation of planning law and they paint these murals grey which is fucking shit so please support Subset Dublin and their crusade of murals I'll read a few questions for you

I've mainly been asking the questions on Patreon because I don't know been asking the questions on Patreon because... I don't know. I get better questions on Patreon because the people on Patreon have... They're dedicated enough to give a few quid, I think. And a lot of the questions that I've asked on Twitter recently have gotten... I've been given silly questions that I can't answer. So I'm answering Patreon questions this week.

Actually, no. Actually, I got a direct message on Twitter the other day with a pretty decent question and as I've mentioned before I get about 60 direct messages a day on Twitter and I'd love to reply to every one of them but I don't have time so I'm really sorry if I didn't get back to you but there's one question that came in from alan and i happened to catch it when it came in when i checked my inbox this question came in and i'm really glad i saw it because it's a it's a a pretty i get a lot of personal stuff in my dms especially from men and this is a big question that I think a lot of people could relate to and I want to try and tackle it if I can and offer something.

So Alan said, I had a question that I would appreciate your thoughts on. I'm working as an auditor for a big accountancy firm. I've been doing this job for approximately 10 years. I've known since day one of my training that this job was not for me. Through one reason or another I've failed to get myself out of it. I think the main reason was a fear of disappointing my mother. She was the main encouragement for me taking the financial route in secondary school rather than the construction route which perhaps would have suited me much better. I'm going to turn 33 this year. I dislike my job to such an extent that most

mornings I will wake up and my first thought will be fuck this. I do not want to do this job any longer but it provides us with a very comfortable living. I'm afraid to leave that behind. I know this is stupid. I'm in a very happy and healthy relationship. I also know my partner will support me in anything that I want to do. What would be your approach? Getting over your fear and taking the leap of faith into the unknown. But first off, Adam, it's not fucking stupid at all. That's a common, that's an unbelievably common fucking problem that you have there I know a lot of buddies

who are in that situation first off I mean you like the most important thing there is to redefine your notion of what we'll say success is if you're if like fuck me man it doesn't matter what you're earning if if you're living your life based upon something your ma wanted to

do it means that every day of your life, you're not living to, you're not living by your own standards, you're not living based on an internal locus of evaluation, it is an external locus of evaluation, which is going to be detrimental for your self-esteem. You know, you're living your daily life based on the approval of your ma, right? Now, it's not your ma's fucking fault either. More than I don't know your ma, but I'm going to guess. Your ma wanted you to do that based on her own fear. Based on her fear of just, she wanted you to be comfortable okay and sometimes parents

do that sometimes a parent will parent out of fear even though a parent parenting out of fear isn't necessarily going to result in in the best conditions for the child you know but you're a fucking adult alan and you've got nothing to prove to no one other than yourself. Getting up in the morning and doing a job, regardless of how much money it earns you, if every day you're not, that job isn't fulfilling something in you, if it isn't giving you a sense of personal meaning,

then that's not a very happy existence. Do you know, that's not a that's not a very happy existence do you know that's not and i know you fucking know this because you said you're waking up every morning saying fuck this i don't want to do it one of the things that scares the living fuck out of humans the most is change all right so what you have to do now is to find the courage within yourself to make a gigantic change and leap into the fucking unknown there's practical elements to it i mean you said it's all right it's good that your bureau will support you that's fantastic so i would say to you for fucking 2018 take a measured a measured leap into the unknown and by measured i mean save up enough money so that you know that if you do make a measured leap you're not

absolutely fucked i'm sure you have a mortgage and shit like that but understand right after you tot it up you're accountant, you'll be able to budget what you need. And search in yourself what your fucking hobbies are. What do you like doing? You mentioned construction. And look at those possibilities. The other thing too is look at the skills that you've achieved as an accountant. And look at what you can then bring to a new career. But success is fucking happiness at the end of the day man

that's what success is it's getting up in the morning going to bed at night and if in the middle you did you got paid for something that you actually love that's success and it doesn't matter what the how much money that is assuming you're not fucking getting the electricity turned off every month because you've no money that's you know you got to draw a line there i'm guessing but take a leap take a leap into the fucking unknown and the mantra that you should be telling yourself is that no matter how afraid you are of that change or no matter how afraid you are of doing something you will cope okay that's all you got to say to yourself because your mind is going to tell you your mind is going to catastrophize and your mind will focus on all the terrible awful things that might happen

but if you plan properly okay all that's going to happen is that you're going to cope, your standard of living might drop in terms of what you can spend but you will be waking up in the morning hopefully with new challenges and a sense of meaning the reason

I suggest to you to fucking do it is I've got many friends, who did do that, and they're a lot happier now because of it, they went through a tough time, when they made the change of a fucking career or whatever, but they're happier now, you don't want to be looking back at this in 10 years,

and, regretting, okay, and the only thing it'll do as well man, it'll, foster well man it'll foster an unconscious anger towards your ma and remind yourself

in order for you to make the leap into the unknown you also have to have compassion enough for your ma to understand that she pushed you in a direction

that she believed was right she did it out of fear and love all right she didn't do it to be controlling she did it out of fear and love even if the outcome of that did appear to be somewhat irresponsible or controlling have that compassion for her have a bit of compassion for yourself. And you're fucking 33. You're 33. Harrison Ford didn't start acting until he was 37 and he was in Blade Runner. So fuck that. Have a crack at it. Go for it.

Go for it. Every week I like to recommend an album. Last week I recommended Scott Ford by Scott Walker. I hope you enjoyed it. this week I would like to recommend The Dreaming by Kate Bush who is I don't think I need to introduce Kate Bush one of the most amazing performers

and singer songwriters of all time and that album was performed on a bizarre computer musical instrument called a Fairlight has quite a unique and strange sound and I think Brian Eno produced it. Not sure about that but give The Dreaming by Kate Bush a crack.

Savannah asks You spoke about people writing nasty comments online or trolling at other people while being nice people themselves. Why do you think people write nasty comments online? Um Yeah what Savannah's talking about there is Why do you think people write nasty comments online? Um.

Yeah what Savannah's talking about there is like. I think I said it before you know. I would be looking at comment sections under Irish political websites. And I would see. Someone calling for fucking. Genocide against refugees. And then I click on their profile. And it's someone's loving grandfather with their Jack Russell dog. I think the answer to the question is why do people write such horrible nasty things online in particular

is because of dehumanisation. Sigmund Freud in his book Civilisation and its Discontents he kind of came to the conclusion that what was necessary for genocide to happen was for one side to completely dehumanize the other to reduce the other into nothing but a simple label labels are a great way to dehumanize somebody no matter what that label is you can't you give someone a label you remove their humanity and you can feel intense anger towards them And you can feel intense anger towards them. So you get people online projecting all their hatred and anger, not on another human being, but on an avatar.

A completely stripped down, dehumanized avatar. Coupled with the online environment that I spoke about earlier because of click journalism. Which fosters a polarized environment of hate. And then, then yeah you get your granddad calling for genocide even though he's probably a nice man in the pub even though when you actually pressed him on do you really want to shoot all those refugees he'd probably go no not really no i didn't think of them as people to be honest yeah that's a bit foolish online the online environment it causes us to polarise it causes us to dehumanise

and if you spend too much time in comment sections it'll make you sad and upset because the more and more you engage in polarising activity or take a black and white aggressive position on something the less you engage with empathy for your compassion for yourself or other people and that is not beneficial

to your mental health emma asks any sign of spring appearing in your neck of the woods yes there is emma there's a fine little promise of spring happening the past week um it's still fucking freezing obviously but there's these little pockets of warmth you know you can feel the temperature rising slightly and i was in the people's park in limerick there last week and i can see the daffodils not their flowers yet but they're snaking up out of the ground and there's about an extra hour in the evening that i've been noticing so I'm very much looking forward to that I love a bit of spring it's usually

shit until March and I know I spoke about December and November being tough but February and March can be pretty tough too because we don't have any festivals winter is given purpose because of Christmas.

We have this little festival, but it can get quite fucking dark and cold in March and February. There's a cunty wind as well, a very bitter cunty wind, and sometimes we confuse ourselves and think that we need to wear less clothes than we need and it gets pure freezing.

Anthony asks, Are there any differences between blind boy boat club and normal limerick guy name unknown does the bag give you an alter ego that maybe allows you to express yourself in a way that your non bag face persona doesn't allow you em

not really anymore maybe in the early days of the bandits but now would you not know I'm I wouldn't do as many hot takes in real life

and I'm a very very quiet person and I keep to myself and keep my head down and mind my own business and don't do a hell of a lot of talking and the other

thing sometimes people say to me online they think that my accent is put on and it's like it's not this is my real actual accent that I talk in every single day and you know what it's never limerick people that say that because my accent isn't even a strong Limerick accent, it's a pretty neutral Limerick City accent, so I'm pretty much the same, except, ye only know me as someone who talks into your ear for an hour and a half, and I don't think I talk into anyone else's ear for a fucking hour and a half I sit back and watch and keep my mouth shut and don't do an awful lot of talking in real life em

that's about it I suppose my accent is giving me away in real life situations now because of this fucking podcast I've had a few situations over the past couple of months where I've been in restaurants or I've been in a pub. And people, I just know by people beside me that they'll stop and their ears perk up and they can tell that it's me.

So that's a bit annoying because the bag has been doing a great job at allowing me to live the quiet fucking hermit life that I want to live and the accent is not doing that anymore now so that's fucking annoying. Russell wants to know when was the last time you cried laughing? Mine was watching Reece Shearsmith's bloopers from the program Car Share. I must give that a watch because I do like Reece Shearsmith. I must give that a watch because I do like Rhys Shearsmith he was in League of Gentlemen

wasn't he em when did I last cry laughing the Eric Andre show yeah fuck it the Eric Andre show

especially series 3 it got a bit got a bit bit shit at series 4 but series 1, 2 and 3 of the Eric Andre show they fucking, yeah I cried laughing watching that, there's two different

types of laughs, there's crying laughing because it's fucking hilarious and then there's the laughter that's, it's not even laughter, it's a dead silence because what you've just seen is such comedic genius that it stops you in your tracks

and the Eric Andre show, that does that for me, because it just, it's the end of television, that's what that show is, it's the end of television, it's taking television comedy, as far as it can go,

and turning it in on itself, fucking genius, so that's the last time I cried laughing, I'm after going for a very long time this week lads, I'm seeing 75 minutes here. Which is too long. And I need to go to bed. Because I got a cool new book.

About the history of the Crusades. That I'm going to read. And hopefully some of it will turn up in a podcast in a couple of weeks. So. I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast i can't tell if it was more mad or less mad at this stage now i should be making more of an effort for people that are recently listening because this is i realized after last week's podcast like it's it's in no way accessible whatsoever to a new listener and maybe that's what's making it work

I don't know but I'm just going to keep doing it oh shit yeah the live podcasts are coming up now they're currently all sold out but I'll tell you when new ones come up but I'm going to be doing the first ever live podcast next Saturday

this Saturday in Duncairn Arts festival up in belfast and i'm going to have a guest on with me um his name is donzo and he what does he do he's got an award-winning walking tour of the nationalist and loyalist areas of Belfast and the history of violence and the troubles and I'm going to bring him on the podcast live in front of an audience and have a chat with him about that because I'm really

interested in that because as a southerner all I know about the troubles is what I saw on the fucking news so I'm really looking forward to that so I'll leave you go have a lovely week have a nice morning be compassionate to yourselves

compassionate to other people and if you haven't subscribed to the podcast please do subscribe to it and leave a nice review if you want yort go in peace have a beautiful beautiful day 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 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.