The Blindboy Podcast - Padre Pio and Medieval Glass men

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

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Fillet the trochera box, you gelded emmets. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. It is suddenly winter in Limerick City. I'm deckling double pants once again. I'm wearing regular trousers and then Gartex outer trousers to capture hot air in between, like the plumage of a crow. I'm protecting my fingers and knuckles with retractable mittens, like the paws of a declawed cat. And finally I'm wearing a scarf to protect my throat and mouth from the cold air like the folds of blubber on an arctic seal. I'm dressed appropriately for the cold is what I'm trying to say. I'm not sure if you can tell from my voice this week but I'm still sick. I had a sore throat last week and then had a little head cold and then for no reason this

morning my throat got really sore again. I think it's because of mould. The room that I'm sleeping in has very poor ventilation and since the weather got cold there's quite a bit of mould on the walls and the ceiling so I'm going to clean the mould with disinfectant and get a dehumidifier. So this week's podcast may be short. I don't want to miss an episode. I spent quite a long time considering not doing the podcast this week because it hurts to speak. But I want to wait until I'm hit by a car or gored by a bull or something like that. I want to literally, if I don't deliver a podcast, it's because I can't. And next week is going to be the six year anniversary of this podcast and that's six years of never missing a

week if you don't want to listen to my stupid voice my stupid fucking clogged up voice this week that's fine go back to an earlier episode there's a lot of episodes. It's like 350 or something. Even if you've listened to every single episode, I guarantee you, you can just pick any random episode from three years ago and listen to that. I don't think there's one episode. There's not one episode I can't stand over. There's not one episode I can't stand over. Each week I come at the podcast with diligence and passion and gratitude. The only episode that I slightly regret is episode 100 where I drank a bottle of wine and I was stoned and the reason I'm annoyed about that episode is that it was a wasted opportunity. It was a podcast about a goose called Andy who who was a real ghost from America, who was born in 1987.

And Andy the ghost was born with no feet. And he became famous because his owner put him in runners. So he was like this famous American ghost who wore shoes. And then he was brutally murdered, ritualistically. And subject matter like that, it's like being handed an apple from the gods. I don't think anyone else had done a podcast on Andy the Goose. It was very niche, a very niche subject that I came across myself on a late night Wikipedia troll. There were small corners of the internet where people were speaking about Andy the Goose,

but back in September 2019 it was an apple that was handed to me from the gods and I fucked it up by drinking a bottle of wine and smoking a ball of a bang to celebrate the 100 episode and now the internet is awash with content about Andy the Ghost. You'll get TikToks, TikToks about Andy the Ghost who wore shoes and was ritualistically murdered, and they don't know who did it. Maybe one day I'll return to it. Maybe one day I'll do it properly. Before the pandemic, I was considering doing travel podcasts. I was going to travel somewhere around the world, bring a decent microphone with me, and do travel episodes for

you. Because one of my favourite podcasts that I've ever made is called Bosco's Throat and it's from June 12th 2019 and it's a podcast that I did from a street corner in San Francisco. It's just me whispering into a mic but it's a stereo mic so it gives a good 3D sound image of that street corner in San Francisco. And it's just me observing what I'm seeing, chatting. Sometimes members of the public come in and out. And I really enjoyed that podcast so much because it felt like a play. It felt like a radio play.

There was a chaos to it and a real sense of place. It felt like a painting for your ears. So back before the pandemic, I was considering doing some travel podcasts. And I think if I ever do do a travel podcast, I might go to the town of Harvard, Nebraska and do a proper podcast about the life of Andy the Goose. The Goose who wore shoes, who was ritualistically killed by what I think is a weird cult but I'm not going to get into that I could have gotten into it

on episode 100 but I'd smoked too much hash I tipped upon it this weird cult called the Shriners a masonic society grown men who drive around in tiny little cars with weird red hats

and Andy the the goose's owner was one of them but maybe one day i'll make it to harvard nebraska and do a decent podcast about andy the goose try to think about other podcasts you could listen to if you don't want to listen to me this week this is turning into one of those do you remember the simpsons used to do a clip show where it's not really a simpsons episode it's an episode full of clips of other simpsons used to do a clip show where it's not really a Simpsons episode. It's an episode full of clips of other Simpsons episodes. There's a podcast from this year, from January, called Witches Pacing Horses' Skulls. It's about a friend of mine who moved into an old house. And he dug up the floorboards and found a horse's skull with a lot of battle caps in it.

And he came to me with the information. And I ended up on a very deep dive into history as to why there was a horse's skull under his floorboards. Another podcast I enjoyed this year it's called Gutta Partra Overdrive also from January. It's about a type of extinct rubber and the role it played in canonisation. There's a podcast called Victorian Sex Communes and Breakfast Cereal that I made in August 2021 I made a fairly rigorous thesis

in that episode about how you're modern how the breakfast cereals that we eat today and the cutlery that we eat it with, if you trace the history of those things you end up with two very odd and opposed Christian sex cults

Pineapple Folly, another podcast, I think that's from You end up with two very odd and opposed Christian sex cults. Pineapple Folly, another podcast. I think that's from July 2021. But the history of pineapples might not sound interesting. The history of pineapples is fucking fascinating. Podcast called Hieronymus Bosch. That's another one of my favourite ones. Hieronymus Bosch is a painter from the 15th century.

One of my favourite painters. Famous for depicting paintings of hell. And I'd wanted to do a podcast on him for years but there was so little information about Hieronymus Bosch. Then I went researching and researching until I found out that Hieronymus Bosch's paintings are actually based on an 11th century description of Cork so our modern vision of hell is based on Cork the place in Ireland Christ's foreskin from November 2020

that simply is what it says on the tin it's an hour of me talking about Christ's foreskin the historical foreskin of Christ crap's last jape from March 2020. It's a podcast about what podcasts are and I speak about my theory that Samuel Beckett invented podcasts in the 1950s. So my point is, there's over 300 episodes to listen to. I know a lot of people when you start listening to this podcast you always go back to the start. But I never put an episode out of my arse.

I never phone it in. It's always been my intention to create a massive gigantic back catalogue that can just be listened to whenever. To create a gigantic novel. A huge giant novel. So go back and listen to any episode you want. If my voice is irritating at the moment. Because I'm not. I'm not chickening out i'm not gonna say i'm not delivering an episode this week because i'm sick something serious needs to happen i need to i need to visit dublin zoo and have the top of my

penis bitten off by a komodo dragon that's grounds for not delivering a podcast. What I'm going to attempt to do this week, I'll try and speak gently, is answer a couple of your questions. Andrew asks, do you have a hot take on Israel and Palestine? I don't have any fucking hot takes about Israel and Palestine. If you listen to this podcast, you know I've always had longstanding solidarity with the people of Palestine.

Not just me, that's an Irish thing. I've pulled adverts from this podcast for companies that work in occupied Palestine or work with the Israeli state. I don't even own a soda stream because of that. We're witnessing genocide in real time. It's deeply painful. There's no hot takes. You can look at history and history will tell you that colonising power structures always benefit from chaos. I've done full podcasts about how the British state benefited from sectarianism, sectarian fighting in the north of Ireland. How they even instigated it in the 1970s and that's proven. The presence of Israel itself is hugely beneficial to the Western power structure, beneficial to the United States, to us, to the European Union. The Middle East has been

in chaos for most of the 20th century and 21st century. Hugely beneficial to anybody who wants to extract and profit from oil or other natural resources in that region. When the region is destabilized and at war all the time you can bring your companies in and extract the oil. If the region was at peace and countries got along with each other, then they might have some autonomy over their oil. They might nationalise it. Does that sound like mad conspiracy theory? It's not. Creating chaos is a strategy that colonisers use. You can read a freely available PDF of a military manual, British military manual, written in the 1950s

called Gangs and Counter Gangs by Frank Kitson. He pioneered the approach of creating chaos and destabilization to maintain control. What did Frank Kitson do? He ended up in the north of Ireland in the early 1970s. He created a British military unit called the Military Reaction Force that used to just shoot civilians, Protestant and Catholic, just shoot them for no reason. The British military shot civilians for no reason in Belfast and Derry. Why would they do that? Chaos. Let's create a million new problems and destabilize everything and then British power stays there as a stabilizing force. If you want to hear about that in detail, listen back to a podcast I made called Best Chestnuts from 2020 I believe but well maintained destabilization and chaos that's the history

of the Middle East in the fucking 20th century goes back to the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 the British and French went to the area of the Middle East which used to be the Ottoman Empire and carved it up they created the borders areas which are now Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, parts of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon. These borders were created secretly by French and British dirty bastards in 1916. They created those borders to benefit how France and Britain could extract oil. And they deliberately created those borders in such a way that would create conflict with the indigenous people that are living there. The place has been at constant war since.

And Israel is there as a Western power, effectively. It's the attack dog stuck into the middle of it all. Israel can do what it wants and it gets support from the West. And even the current conflict right now, it's not just about Israel and Palestine. There's a bigger story there about Iran and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia and Israel were normalising relations recently. They were cosying up together.

Saudi Arabia are quite friendly to the West. This was very threatening to Iran and Iran support Hamas. Saudi Arabia and Iran are effectively at war with each other. In Yemen, you don't hear about it much, but there's been a proxy war in Yemen. Loads of people getting killed since 2017. And it's effectively Iran and Saudi Arabia at war, but not directly. Funding different groups. Iran doesn't want Israel being friendly with Saudi Arabia.

America would love it. So you know my stance on this issue, but I'm not as vocal about it online. I'm not as vocal about it on social media as my emotions want me to be, because I sometimes genuinely wonder how much of that benefits anybody. Since the pandemic, I've kind of stopped talking about anything serious on social media as much as I used to because the structure of social media and the space is designed to completely polarise. Everything on social media is framed as turn and response combat, binary oppositions and in order to speak with empathy about very serious things you need to be able to hold different viewpoints on a spectrum. I hate seeing civilians murdered. I hate it. It hurts me so much.

I love people. I don't care who those people are, what their ethnicity is, what their religion is. I hate seeing innocent people murdered. I hate seeing people who are just living their lives being violently killed. There's no way to present that statement online without it being completely polarised. I can condemn the massacres that are being carried out by the Israeli state on Palestinian people while also hating anti-semitism. Palestinian people live in an open air prison. They don't have much agency or freedom of movement. In Ireland we have Bloody Sunday where British soldiers up in Derry in 1972

shot 26 unarmed civilians who were marching for their civil rights. Stuff like that happens every week in Palestine. In Gaza, just this June, a two-year-old boy, Mohammed Tamimi, shot into the head by an Israeli soldier. I think that's cruel and wrong. It breaks my heart. I see it as no different to the actions of British soldiers in the north of Ireland. I think the collective punishment of the Palestinian people

because of the actions of Hamas is a fucking war crime. I don't need to think that is a war crime legally. Those to me seem like reasonable, compassionate opinions which can become flipped on social media, very easily flipped. Those opinions would be called anti-Semitic by some people on social media. I hate anti-Semitism. Every time I speak out about conspiracy theories on this podcast, I always point out that at the root of a lot of conspiracy theories is

anti-semitism. Goes right back to this age-old bullshit about a cabal of shady Jewish people controlling the world. I hate that and I'll speak out against it. And what I think what actually is anti-semitic is to assume that all Jewish people support the actions of the Israeli state. That's anti-semitic because you dehumanise an entire population there. You remove a person's agency to have autonomous opinions. Lots of Jewish people have been out protesting all around the world against the actions of the Israeli state this week. And they should be entitled to do that because they're humans who don't like suffering. Not because we expect them to speak on behalf of Israel or all Jewish people. I can have solidarity with the people of Palestine

while not supporting Hamas shooting a lot of people at a fucking music festival. Those opinions that are rooted in empathy and love for people immediately become polarised and turn in response combat as soon as it's spoken about on social media. After fucking 10 years or 15 years or whatever it's been, we all really need to start asking ourselves, is social media really the place for serious conversations? Social media, this platform that's designed by billionaires, the most

powerful people in the world, should we have all our important discussions on these platforms that are designed not for thoughtful engagement but literally designed to elicit reactionary emotions so that it can harvest the data of our behavior for money. I mean there's your hot take. What have you got there? Chaos. Social media is chaos. When you try to speak about something serious that involves high emotions and nuance, social media creates chaos. And who benefits from the chaos? The people who own the social media companies. Why? Because when you have chaos, people's emotions are high, we stay on the social media longer and then they get to harvest our data for money and that environment too is is rife for blatant disinformation disinformation lies propaganda and there's

so much chaos that you can't tell what's real and what's not so i have not been as vocal on social media about palestine and israel as my emotions want me to be. That doesn't mean that I'm not consistently impacted and affected by it and thinking about it. I'd much rather speak about it here on this platform where I have tone and nuance and time and 1.2 million people will fucking hear it. There'll be 1.2 million people listening to this episode, listening to me with a fucking a sore throat. I'm gonna do my ocarina pause now. I don't have an ocarina. What do I have? I've got some chewing gums. I'm going to shake these chewing gums and you're going to hear an advert for something.

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Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast. You know the crack. This podcast is my full-time job. It's how I earn a living. It's how I pay all my bills. It's how I rent this office. It's how I'm able to turn up each week and deliver a podcast. So if this brings you solace, joy, distraction, clarification, whatever the fuck it is that has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. You can listen for free because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets a podcast. I get to earn a living. Quickly plug some gigs. November,

It's a podcast. I get to earn a living. Quickly plug some gigs. November, I'm doing my book tour slash podcast tour. All right. A lot of gigs are sold out. There's tickets left for Coventry, Liverpool, Belfast and Vicar Street, Dublin on the 19th of November. And Vicar Street, that's going to be my Irish book launch. That'll be very special.

Come along to that one. February 2024, I have a gig in Oslo in Norway. There's tickets left for that. I have a gig in Berlin. That's sold out. So I'm going to add a second date in February. All this information is available online. Pre-order my brand new book, Topographia Hibernica. My collection of short stories that I'm very proud of, That I can't wait to release. That's coming out in November. Julia asks, can you speak about Padre Pio? Yes I can. Padre Pio is a bit of a fucking mad saint.

He'd be very popular in Ireland. People pray to Padre Pio for healing. My ma. Because my ma is older. and my ma's not religious, but she'd still have that kind of, that folk religious Catholic thing. You know, she wouldn't go to church or anything. But I know my ma's listening to this podcast, and she's thinking of me and my sore throat,

and she's saying I'm praying to Padre Pio now that his throat will get better and that's Irish people pray to Padre Pio mainly for healing. It's Catholic but it's one of those folk traditions that are almost pagan as well. Padre Pio was an Italian an Italian like farmer who became a Capuchin monk. He was born in the 1880s and he became a capuchin monk over in Italy. And while he was training, he got real sick when he was a teenager training to be a monk. But apparently when he was getting sick, he used to receive visions and speak in tongues and he used to levitate. And his sickness wasn't viewed as an an illness it was viewed as a divine ecstasy taking over his body. By the sounds of things he was an attention seeker. He used to like receiving attention from people and notoriety. In 1918 that's when Padre Pio started becoming a stigmatist. I think that's what they're called but he was he was getting stigmata. Padre Pio used to have wounds on his

hands that corresponded to the wounds of Christ on the cross. And soon all the peasants of Italy would flock to Padre Pio, this man who has the wounds of Christ on his hands. And mythology started to arise around him. People said that Padre Pio had the ability to be in two places at once and that he could cure people's illnesses. He became a folk saint, I suppose, but then he became too popular. His legend spread in Italy and he became way too popular. And the Capuchin monks, his order, started charging money for people to see him. So the bishop was like, fuck this. This isn't sounding very Christian anymore. This fella sounds like an idol, and a cult of followers emerged, and a cult being a group of people who are a bit more loyal to Padre Pio than they are to the

church. So that's very threatening to the power of the church. So the church said to him, you can't say mass anymore, Padre Pio, can't do confessions and you have to wear gloves over your hands because we can't have anyone seeing your wounds. So Padre Pio then got his famous gloves, his fingerless gloves and whenever you see a photograph of Padre Pio he's wearing these gloves and they were to hide his stigmata, his Christ's wounds. able to hide his stigmata, his Christ's wounds. But after Padre Pio died, historians went looking and they found that Padre Pio had ordered a shitload of acid from a local pharmacist, carbolic acid. And it's like, why the fuck is a monk, a priest, regularly ordering bottles of carbolic acid? What would he possibly have to do with that so the theory is is that Padre Pio used to just put acid on his hands and corrode his skin all the time and cause it to bleed and that's what the stigmata was it was just him doing it to himself

to get attention Anya asks can you speak about any strange or uncommon fears or phobias? What pops up instantly there for me, between the 15th and 17th century, it was common for a lot of very wealthy people to develop quite extreme phobias, where they became completely convinced that they were made out of glass, that their entire bodies were made from glass and would suddenly shatter. Charles VI, King of France, who was born in 1368, also known as Charles the Mad, he was completely convinced that he was made out of glass, fully made out of glass and would shatter at any moment,

to the point that he wore completely reinforced clothes, like a woolen suit of armour, because he could shatter at any moment. People weren't allowed near him. He couldn't touch his own family. He lived a life of absolute misery because he thought he was made out of glass. And it became a common fear amongst wealthy men in the Middle Ages. And one of the theories is that the technology of glass was so shocking and mesmerizing at the time that it put people in awe. Like it's the 14th century and you have this substance that's made out of heated sand that light can transfer through. It was viewed as almost a type of alchemy.

It was viewed, glass was viewed as a magical substance. And then you had stained glass windows in churches that told religious stories and were coloured and light would shine through. And this was the most amazing, awe-inspiring thing that you'd see in the 13th century. And Kings, someone like Charles VI, was so powerful and had everything because he's king but is also vulnerable. Heavy is the head that wears the crown and kings start to see themselves as magnificent as a stained glass window. This awe-inspiring, powerful thing that could completely shatter if you just hit it with a rock.

Glass reminded all powerful kings that they're just simply human beings. It doesn't matter that you're king. You can die just like anybody else and you can be killed just like anybody else. And the paranoia of that led to a strange phobia amongst wealthy medieval men where they thought they were turning into glass and could shatter at any moment. So I think that's

all I can do this week. My sincerest apologies, but it's very painful for me to talk. I don't have any, I don't have any live interviews lined up. And the reason is that last night I was actually fine. My throat was fine. And then this morning for some reason I got sore again. So I genuinely thought I'd be okay to record this week's podcast without any issues. Hopefully I'll be grand next week. It'd be mad if I wasn't grand next week. In the meantime, rub a dog.

Genuflect to a cat. Kiss a pigeon. Dog bless. No kisses while I'm sick. I'm going to hug the microphone again. There you go, you cunts. Dog bless. 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 center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m 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 Thank you. you