The Blindboy Podcast - Pineapple Folly

Episode Date: July 7, 2021

A history of Ireland through lens of the Pineapple. A Deep dive, hot take. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

God malish gael, you steamy queevas. Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast. How is everybody? I hope you're enjoying the nice weather. I'm, I'm waiting on my old fucking vaccine is what I'm doing. I've applied for my vaccine. And I'm waiting for the text that tells me I can have vaccine number one. We were supposed to, we were supposed to kind of come out of lockdown this week. They were supposed to allow a bit of indoor dining.

Currently, if you want to have a cup of coffee or a meal, you can't sit indoors. You have to sit outdoors. Now, this has actually been quite nice. It has been very, very nice. So we don't really have a tradition in Ireland of outdoor dining. Not like they do in Spain or in Italy or France. We don't have that tradition. And in Limerick, my city,

which is usually very quiet, empty in fact, Limerick City Centre is often empty, it's been magnificent the past few weeks because you've got entire streets with restaurants and tables and chairs outside and loads of people just eating and enjoying the space. And then what this has done is

it's had a psychological impact on anyone who's watching so not only have you got people eating sitting down in restaurants outside but you've got people who would normally just walk through the street are now magnetized there because there's other people there. And you just have groups of people standing around talking and chilling out. And it feels like people are using public space. Properly and socially. And it's magnificent. Because I've never seen Limerick so alive. Maybe back in the Celtic Tiger days when I was younger.

But in the past 10 years I've never seen Limerick so alive with so many people just living their lives it's been fantastic really really nice but it's fucking Ireland

and July is a bit of an angry month July is a queer old month because it's one of these things about Ireland you know June is very dry and hot and we have this we've got a culture of shame in Ireland

a culture of shame whereby if you enjoy something you must then punish yourself and some people blame this on Catholicism and often times I think is that Catholicism or is it the weather? Sometimes I think the theatrics of Irish weather has given us an education in shame. Because what happens is, June is dry and hot.

And then July comes around and says, Oh you were enjoying June there for a while were you? You fucking prick, Outside getting some sun. What are you, Spanish? You bollocks. And then it just rains for July. So the past week, it's been a bit chaotic.

I was in town. There was hundreds of people sitting outside in tables and chairs. A lot of those tables and chairs didn't have I don't even know the word for them, that's how alien it is, those umbrellas that go over public tables, parasols so loads of the tables and chairs didn't have fucking parasols over

them, I don't know why so I'm walking down the street and people are outside eating the weather is lovely and then from nowhere the fucking clouds open The street. And people are outside eating. The weather is lovely. And then from nowhere. The fucking clouds open.

And this torrent. Of fat July rain. There's raindrops in July. That are so large you could keep them as a pet. Like a descending temporary wet pet. So this rotund July rain.rents down onto everybody who's outside trying to eat their lunches. Within seconds people are soaking wet.

It's that rain where it's like, forget about it, you're not even running away from this. This is an aggressive, liquid, meteorological revenge for enjoying the June sun. So this starts coming down. And then there's just chaos. There's people getting off their seats.

Running under other people's parasols. And I just stood there getting wet. Doing that Irish thing where instead of acknowledging that a bad thing is happening. You say to yourself that it could be worse. so I'm there soaking wet saying to myself well at least it's kind of warm and it's not like December so it's warm rain at least even though I'm soaking wet and it's in my toes now so I'm gonna have that really queer set of itchy feet that you get from Fat July rain but I'm watching the food get destroyed

in the rain you know really really kind of going yeah this is why we can't have nice things in Ireland this is why we don't have an outdoor dining culture and it took about 90 seconds

but closest to me this chap was eating he'd ordered a lovely plate of fucking buffalo chicken wings you know and they were in a little tapa dish with the celery sticks and the blue cheese on the side and there were this lovely you know that lovely glistening bright orange that buffalo wings have you know that lovely glistening bright orange that buffalo wings have.

You know that lovely mixture of hot sauce and butter. But the rain, I watched the rain pelt off the fucking buffalo wings and it bleached them and exposed the bare chicken skin. chicken skin and then the little tapa dish started to overflow with this orange buffalo sludge that went dripping off the table onto the ground like blood

onto the cobbles and I looked at him and I'm like I won't be able to eat buffalo wings for a year now, that's it now that's put me off buffalo wings so I averted my eyes completely from that poor man's buffalo wings and then i looked to the right and there's a fucking pizza just getting hammered hammered by rain and what had happened is that the pizza which again a

lovely fucking stone baked pizza looked fantastic the The water had infiltrated the dough. So the pizza had like, bloated and expanded into this soggy mess. And then floating on top were slices of pineapple, just floating on top. And the mad thing is that the first image that came into my head, I'm looking at this poor man's pizza with the floating pineapple. And the first image that came into my head, I'm looking at this poor man's pizza with the floating pineapple, and the first image that came into my head was,

do you know your man Paddington Bear? That fucking bear, and he was wearing the yellow raincoat, all the little pieces of pineapple, buoyantly floating. It reminded me of, like, just lots of Padding paddington bears face down drowning in a swimming pool and i don't know why i thought of that i you know i tend not to interrogate the immediacy of the of the unconscious mind but i think maybe what it was was was i don't know paddington for me represents probably something very happy in childhood or something something that has to do with dreams and hopes if, ok the emotions

that were going through me at that moment seeing all this food getting destroyed, I felt like my dreams were being crushed my dreams of oh look at us here in Limerick, we're like Italians, sitting outside and that's something I'd love to see

so my dreams were crushed. So, something to do with Paddington Bear in my childhood must have something to do with aspirations and dreams. So then when the little bits of pineapple were floating in the pizza, the image that came into my head was 20 Paddingtons

drowning. And I can laugh at it now, but it wasn't funny at the time. People were shouting and screaming. Like it wasn't funny at the time people were shouting and screaming like it wasn't no one saw the funny side of an extreme torrent of rain ruining their lunch in 90 seconds no one found that funny and then of course what happens the rain fucks off the sun is back out and people are going I'm not paying for this lunch you should have given me a parasol and I didn't stick around but I'm assuming no one paid for this lunch you should have given me a parasol and I didn't stick around but I'm assuming no one paid for their

lunch so that was disappointing that was disappointing because this week we were supposed to be allowed to have indoor dining and I want to be able to go to a coffee shop I want to sit so the thing for me is I'm not fucking risking sitting outside a cafe in Limerick with my laptop writing a book

if the rain is going to come down like that I want to sit indoors so it's a bit disappointing but at the same time the government are paranoid about this fucking Delta variant and now we have the Lambda variant as well government are paranoid about that so they've pushed back

indoor dining for a while what can you do but I won't say the trauma but the dining for a while what can you do but so that I won't say the trauma but the the impact of that incident and it's specifically

it's specifically the visual image of the floating pineapples it just I couldn't stop thinking about pineapples pineapples because I'm not pineapples aren't a huge feature of my life

maybe eat pineapples once a year closest I'll get to a I don't have anything against anyone who puts pineapples on pizza it's not my vibe I know people are very

purist about it but I can understand it's sweet and sour people are entitled to that I've got respect for pineapples they've got chemical in them called bromelain

which can be used as a meat tenderiser I think that's fairly cool but I couldn't stop thinking about pineapples and it got me thinking of a couple of years back I was up in

I was gigging I was gigging in Kildare I think or somewhere near it and I was up in Kildare which is close enough to Dublin it's within the pale Kildare's weird

Kildare isn't in Dublin but if a Kildare person is outside of Dublin they'll try and tell a culture that they're from Dublin which is an odd thing that Kildare people do I think Kildare people would be better off just going, I'm from fucking Kildare, it's not Dublin, it's fine. You know?

You're not impressing me as a Limerick person by telling me you're from Dublin when you're not. We know the difference. You know? There's nothing wrong. Kildare's got many things to be proud of. You've got a fucking... There's an outlet store. But anyway, I was up in Kildare

and it was about two years ago and I had some time to kill and the weather was nice so I went to this place called Castletown Estate and around near Castletown Estate as I was walking around the gardens we'll say

I came across this really really strange building like it looked like a it looked like a building I came across this really, really strange building. Like, it looked like a... It looked like a building. And it was like a monument. Did it look a bit like a pyramid? Just this weird, ornate, concrete tower that had a fence around it. And it was clearly like two or three hundred years old.

that had a fence around it and it was clearly like two or three hundred years old and someone had put a lot of effort into this strange monument and it just my eyes went towards it I'm like what the fuck is this and then when I looked closer at it

I saw like wow the designs are very intricate this I don't know what this is but it's a very intricate, strange looking gigantic monument with a tower and it has lots of lovely little designs

on it and stuff so I tried to get as close as I could to get a look at them because obviously I know a thing or two about art history so in my mind I'm thinking right okay this is two, three hundred years old we're near like this was probably a stately home or some

we're in the pale we're definitely in the pale the pale was the area around Dublin which would have been very British been very British in English you know aristocracy would have lived there so I'm aware of stately would have lived there so I'm aware

of stately home out of this so I'm going some eccentric English cunt built this weird monument I want to look closely I want to see these designs because what I was thinking was that it was Masonic it was something to do with Freemasons and as I look really closely

at the designs on this monument in Kildare I see pineapples and I'm there going the fuck is there a lot of pineapples why does this weird pointless building have loads of pineapples carved into the concrete and it's like 300 years old and I'd kind of forgotten about it

but because this week I'd been thinking about pineapples I'm like I need to investigate this I can't just walk away from a 300 year old monument in Ireland because someone made an aesthetic choice to put pineapples there

and people just don't put pineapples there for the laugh laugh it symbolised something it meant something so I went on a hot take journey this week I said fuck it let's find out why was there pineapples on that monument up in Kildare

so it led me on an interesting hot take journey which I'm going to drag you through and I'm going to drag you through. And I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell a story of Irish history from the perspective of a pineapple. And it's surprisingly intriguing and it makes for a good hot take. And the hot take, you know, for me, the hot take, it's going to be factual. I'm going to stick to the facts. I've done a good bit of research.

But when I go at history from a hot take perspective, I'm going at it from the perspective of a fiction writer. I want to tell you a version of history that's just really strange and interesting and different. And that's a hot take for me. And I found it. So firstly, this monument has got a name. It's known as the Obelisk. It's now a national monument, I found out.

It's also known as Connolly's Folly. And it was built in 1740. Okay. And it has pineapples on it so let's look now at the let's take a little look at the history of pineapples pineapples are native to South America and

Christopher Columbus who quote on quote discovered America and I say quote on quote because you can't discover a place where people already live. Christopher Columbus was a bollocks. Okay? He was a murdering bollocks.

Christopher Columbus headed over to South America in 1492. And in 1493, in the Caribbean island of Guadalupe, Christopher Columbus first came across pineapples right, came across lots of different fruits in the new world but one of the ones that was particularly impressive was pineapples

so Christopher Columbus was he was Italian but he was heading over there on behalf of Spain so he manages to bring back a bunch of fruit and a bunch of

seeds and spices and whatever he's found brings it back on the ship and he must have brought a couple of young pineapples ones that weren't fully ripe so they arrive back in Spain and I'm guessing

like that journey is probably six weeks at least back then maybe even fucking two months couple of pineapples arrive back to Spain in 1493 and

at that point as well they're probably mushy and very very ripe so probably incredibly sweet like pineapples are interesting like if you leave a pineapple go a little bit too much it almost naturally turns into alcohol

so the pineapple gets back to Spain and the first person to taste it is the king of Spain and all the different nobles and royalty have a little bit of this fucking pineapple and they go apeshit for it fucking apeshit you have to remember

sweet things weren't very common in the european diet at the time you would have had things like honey but like proper sweet sugar wasn't really a thing like this was before cane sugar cane sugar is from Papua New Guinea but cane sugar was brought to the Caribbean and grown there and it became this huge sugar trade which fed slavery and all this but when the pineapple came back to Spain in 1493 the king of Spain had never tasted something this sweet and this complex

it's hard for us to empathise with it King of Spain had never tasted something this sweet. And this complex. It's hard for us to empathise with it. But like. Pineapples really are special. The way that they taste. They really are. There's sweetness. There's tanginess.

As fruit goes. Pineapples are. Very close to fucking sweets. Like. It's almost fizzy. Like it's very unique. burns your tongue it's it's something new and very pleasurable and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who'll say no to a nice juicy piece of pineapple it really is incredible so the king of spain is eating it

going this is fucking amazing then they start to fetishize the pineapple because the royalties start to enjoy the fact that the pineapple itself looks like it has a crown. So they felt, oh, this is a royal fruit. This is a fucking royal fruit. It's got a crown. God has put a crown on this fruit. You know, and then you start bringing in fucking Catholic Spain, some religiosity to it. And they think that it's a fruit from the Garden of Eden and all this like I did a podcast a few

weeks back about the painter Hieronymus Bosch and when Hieronymus Bosch paints the Garden of Earthly Delights there's quite a few pineapples in there so the pineapples to Spanish royalty became a fruit of incredibly high esteem

that you could only get on a six week journey halfway across the world and also they couldn't grow it they simply could not they couldn't grow pineapples in Spain so

in the early 1500s this was rare you might if you were lucky even if you were a king, you might get to taste a pineapple four times in your entire life. An early description of a European description of the pineapple from around then says it's scaly like an artichoke at the first view but more like to a cone of the pine tree which we call a pineapple for the farmay being so sweet in smell tasting as if wine rose water and sugar were mixed together

so as you can imagine what happens the pineapple becomes the most exclusive fruit that could possibly be imagined and it becomes a symbol of royalty and decadence. You remember a podcast I did about a month ago called Lobster Purple where I spoke about how how lobsters became an exclusive food and how the colour purple became associated with royalty. Well in the 1500s to 1600s the pineapple purple became associated with royalty well in the 1500s the 1600s the pineapple became a symbol of royalty because only royalty

this might as well have been a fruit from Mars that's what you're dealing with a fucking unbelievably tasty fruit from Mars and this process of the European diet changing completely because of the quote-unquote discovery of America,

that's known as the Columbian Exchange. It's the fucking food and animals and diseases that were brought over from the New World to the Old World and the Old World to the new world. Vice versa, that carry on. Like, things we take for granted today. Fucking tobacco, chocolates. Corn.

Vanilla. These are all things that came from the Americas. That didn't exist in the European diet. Like, fucking tomatoes, man. Columbus bought tomatoes over to Europe from South America and they were able to grow. So pineapples

could not grow in Europe. That made them really exclusive but tomatoes could grow. But the mad thing about Europeans and tomatoes, for like a hundred years Europeans didn't eat tomatoes they assumed

that they were just deadly poisonous and no one would even risk eating them the name tomato translates in Latin to wolf peach they believed that it was this peach they believed that it was a mythical

fruit that had been described in a 13th century book by a fella called Galen right they believed that it was this mythical fruit that was used to poison wolves so

the Spanish grew tomatoes as decoration only for like a hundred years and no one would dare go near them until a poor person said

let's try and eat it and they're like yum yum this is delicious and i think it was the italians who started that and also of course another very important food stuff that was brought over from south america was the potato and it was the portuguese i believe that brought that to Europe. From fucking Peru. Because potatoes, Europeans didn't know what potatoes were. So the thing with the potato is that really did grow well in Europe.

That grew fucking fantastically well. Particularly in Ireland. The first potatoes were brought to Ireland, I think, in the 1600s. Accidentally, by Portuguese sailors down around Wexford. The Portuguese had been using potatoes as a military food because here's this highly nutritious thing that stores kind of well and you can just fucking eat like an apple and it has everything you need in it. So the Portuguese were using it as a military food

and then they stopped off in Wexford planted a few of them or fucking threw them on the ground that's another thing with a potato you throw a potato on the ground and it'll turn into a plant so the potato began to thrive wild

in Ireland and that's how the potato took root in Ireland and became a foodstuff. It just loved growing in Ireland. And there's a queer little duality between the pineapple and the potato, both of them coming over from South America and how they both relate to Ireland in a strange little ironic way which relates to that weird building I saw in Kildare that had the pineapples on top so I want to tell that story uninterrupted

because it's a little bit complex, it's a bit complex and I want to try and make it simple in a narrative so before I go into that let's have a little ocarina pause so I'm uninterrupted. No, no, don't. The first omen, I believe, 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 omen, only in theaters April 5th. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario 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 come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. Gentle ocarina pause this week. So that was the ocarina pause,

which meant that you would have heard an advert there. I don't know what for. The adverts are algorithmically generated, depending on what you search for. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind buy podcast. If you are enjoying this podcast, if you're listening to it regularly, if you like it,

please consider becoming a patron. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or the price of a cup of coffee. Once a month, that's it. What you're doing is paying me for the work that I'm doing. This is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. It's, I love doing it. It's incredibly enjoyable, but it's a lot of work.

These are monologue essays with quite a bit of research. So if you're enjoying them, just consider paying me for that work that I'm doing. By becoming a patron also, what you do is you keep this podcast independent. I have advertisers on this podcast the odd time to fulfill my contract with Acast. But I turn down more advertisers than I take on so that I can maintain independence and creative control and so that no one can tell me what to do or influence the content. I want to keep this what I want to fucking make.

I want to speak about pineapples for an hour because I'm really passionate about it this week because of that incident with the pizza. And that's what I want to do. But if I was sponsored by Nike, they might have a different, they might go, no, no blind buy.

We want you to interview James Carden. So that's how it works. Please consider becoming a patron. And thank you to all my pre-existing patrons. It means the world to me. I can plan financially. I can pay my bills it's fantastic that's a hard thing to do as an artist today but if you can't afford it don't worry about

it all right if you don't have a job if you don't have any money right now don't worry about it you can listen for free the beauty of the patron model and the patreon model is that if you can afford to pay me for this podcast you're also paying for the person who can can afford to pay me for this podcast, you're also paying for the person who can't afford to listen. Everyone gets the exact same podcast. I earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Works perfectly.

And I want to keep it going. Catch me on Twitch once a week. Twitch.tv forward slash The blind boy podcast where I do a live musical to the events of a video game very good crack also like the podcast share it leave a review that's very important share it on your

own social media word of mouth not just my podcast but any independent podcast that you enjoy share the independent podcast that you like and review them because the podcast space has kind of been overtaken

by a lot of corporate money so if you want to keep the independent podcast going that requires the listeners to review and share and all that carry on alright dog bless it's actually an extra whispery podcast this week I'm being particularly quiet because a buddy of mine

is doing a staycation he's doing a staycation down in Kerry for the week and he gave me his parrot called Archie to mind and Archie's an African grey parrot very friendly

but it's a fucking parrot so all so noisy so currently Archie is in his cage out in the kitchen but I don't want to fucking it's late at night and I think waking up a parrot would possibly ruin the podcast

so that's why I'm being extra whispery so back to the 1600s while the potato is from the potato from South America is absolutely thriving in Ireland growing wild like weeds doing brilliantly with very little

assistance, while the potato is thriving they're still fetishising fucking pineapples on the continent and they can't grow them, they still can'tising fucking pineapples on the continent. And they can't grow them. They still can't grow the pineapples. And news of the pineapple has travelled. It's not just the Spanish royalty who are nibbling pineapples now.

It's the English royalty have had a taste, the Portuguese, the whole shebang. And they're just racking their brains going, this is the fucking tastiest thing I've ever tasted. And I might only get two bites in my entire life. We need to sort this shit out. So a kind of a race emerges where they're trying to figure out how the fuck do we grow pineapples here in Europe? Because it's too tasty. We need to figure it out.

So the first ones to figure out how to grow pineapples, how to grow this difficult, large fruit that's from a hot fucking humid country were the Dutch, right? The Dutch at this point, by around 1620, the Dutch were cunts. The Dutch were absolute bollocks with slavery and colonialism, real shower of pricks. And the Dutch had the

Dutch West India Company so they were bringing pineapples over from the Caribbean and then the Dutch they have this culture so I don't fully know the reasoning behind this right I think what it is

like the Dutch today are still leading the world when it comes to greenhouses I think what it is is that they have all this flat reclaimed land. They've got, it rains an awful lot. So the Dutch were real pioneers of greenhouses

as a way to grow their food sources on a small amount of land. So the Dutch pioneered greenhouses and they were the ones that first successfully grow the pineapple by the the 1680s and the way the way they used to heat the greenhouses was harsh shit they they used to put tons and tons of manure horse manure inside the greenhouses on these big royal estates and then the horse manure would get so hot that it would heat the greenhouse up so it meant that you had heat in the day

but then at night time the greenhouse could be heated by the horse shit and this allowed the pineapples to grow because they needed to like it's having a greenhouse and heating it in the day time isn't a problem but before electricity you know, how did you do it?

So they used horseshit and this kept it warm at night time and then the Dutch figured out how to grow fucking pineapples. But the interesting thing is, is that around the 1680s you had your glorious fucking revolution. So that means William of Orange. So William of Orange was a Dutch king who also became King of Orange. So William of Orange was a Dutch king who also became king of England. So the Dutch and the Brits had a fairly solid relationship.

Even, you know, gin. I've done entire podcasts on gin before. But gin is a Dutch drink. It's Genever. And gin became huge in England because of that Dutch connection and they wanted to stop drinking brandy because brandy was French but anyway it was the Dutch

who showed the Brits how to grow pineapples so the English royalty now were able to grow their own pineapples on their estates and the pineapple became accessible way more accessible than if you'd brought the pineapple became accessible, way more accessible

than if you'd brought the pineapple over on a ship from the Caribbean but now at least it was able to be grown in greenhouses for a small amount of royal people and they went apeshit for the pineapple now the name William of Orange, you know that's where orange

men come from, you'll know that that spells bad things for Ireland, when William of Orange, you know, that's where Orange men come from, you'll know that that spells bad things for Ireland. When William of Orange was, came into fucking power and before him as well with Cromwell, that meant the Protestant descendancy. That's when things started going

very, very bad for the poor people of Ireland. The Protestant descendancy in Ireland meant the eradication of the Catholic Irish, we'll say the native Irish people, which eventually culminated in the potato famine. Back to the pineapples. By the 1700s, the Brits had invented a thing called a pineapple stove, which was a furnace that could heat greenhouses so this this meant that pineapples were still very hard to come by but a little bit more accessible if you were wealthy so because

the pineapple was being elevated to this status of royalty and exclusivity what happens is that the middle classes in England. Who would have been the industrial revolution. The factory owners. No money. They would try and copy everything that royalty were doing. So they all wanted fucking pineapples. But they couldn't really afford them.

They say that a pineapple in the 1700s. Would have been the equivalent of about 8,000 pounds for one pineapple. So this weird industry started to emerge in places like London, where people were renting pineapples. Now, I'm not joking you. So what would happen with the upper middle classes of London when they were having dinner parties or whatever, is you couldn't afford a pineapple, so what you'd do is you'd rent a pineapple for one night

and then have it as the centrepiece at your dinner party to let everybody see, I've got a pineapple. And then the next day you'd give it to another person and it would cost less until finally the last person rented the pineapple when it was mushy and maybe that person got to eat it but sometimes people wouldn't even sometimes people would literally rent a pineapple and arrive to a party with the pineapple like under their arm and they'd just be at a party hanging out carrying a pineapple the whole time

like just a decorative thing a rented fucking pineapple that's how mad these cunts were and then what happened if you couldn't even afford to rent a pineapple what happened is the pineapple starts to appear as a decorative element on clothing or on a wedge wood who used to make cutlery and fucking dishes he'd have pineapples pineapples became a design motif in the 1700s the 1800s they became a design motif to symbolize opulence generosity. Like even if you look at, if you're around Dublin or Limerick and you see Georgian architecture, Georgian architecture up and down Ireland, if you look at Georgian railings,

sometimes on the corner of a Georgian railing, you'll see a little thing that looks like an urn or something. That's actually based on a pineapple. Pineapples were really important symbolically to represent wealth and generosity if you couldn't afford to rent one and when you start to see this

you start seeing fucking pineapples everywhere basically in architecture so around the same time a trend in architecture was happening known as Orientalism where British architecture in particular because Britain had colonised India

was borrowing a lot of architectural styles from India in particular Indian style domes at the top of buildings but sometimes when you look at a building from that period and you look at the dome at the top it's not an Indian style dome

it's actually a fucking pineapple hidden in plain sight for instance look up the National Gallery in London the dome at the top of that is a fucking pineapple now you might be thinking doesn't look that much like a pineapple to me well it's possible that the person who was designing it never even didn't even get to see a pineapple in real life. What they had was a shitty drawing of a pineapple. But there's fucking pineapples everywhere, on top of buildings, all this shit. So this takes me back now to the original little building, that weird fucking monument that I found up in Kildare.

Connolly's Folly, as it known or the Obelisk as it's known as a national monument in Ireland so when I'd found this out about oh fuck me pineapples were a feature in architecture and design from the 1700s to the 1800s something that you'd associate with the Rococo movement

I've done a podcast before on the Rococo movement of art it's a type of art from that period that was shit, very very decorative with very little substance but anyway, so this building up in Kildare this monument, I'm going fucking great, I've got it sorted now

that's why a building in Kildare that's built in 1740 has got pineapples on it, whatever rich English person that built it was just adhering to the style of the time and was showing off

some pineapples was trying to show off that they even knew what a pineapple was but then I looked in further and it's yes that's the case but it's a small bit darker than that so let's take it back to 1740 when this

monument is built in Kildare and let's take it back to the potato this other food source that came over from South America so you've got this potato that

thrives, that fucking grows in Ireland that becomes the staple food of the poor and the potato and the pineapple are fucking exact opposites this is what I find intriguing they're exact fucking opposites so why does the potato become

so popular in Ireland why does it become so fucking popular so I'll try and condense this down very quickly and apologies if I get some details wrong by the 1600s in Ireland? Why does it become so fucking popular? So I'll try and condense this down very quickly and apologies if I get some details wrong. By the 1600s in Ireland what you had was the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland which

was very religious based. That was a Protestant based conquest of Ireland because Ireland was conquered by the Brits the Normans in the 1100s and yes they conquered us, it wasn't particularly pleasant but between

1100 and 1600 the Normans had kind of assimilated a bit into Ireland especially outside the fucking pale, outside Kildare the rest of Ireland, you had Norman families kind of intermarrying with Gaelic clans,

and Ireland in the 1400s, the 1500s, wasn't really under full English control. It was nearly in danger of becoming something new and independent. But Oliver Cromwell's reconquest was very fucking vicious and it was religious Cromwell was a Protestant

fundamentalist you could compare him to fucking ISIS he was a Protestant fundamentalist who really believed that Catholics need to fucking die and Cromwell came to Ireland and he did acts of genocide. He did acts of genocide. So when Cromwell took over Ireland, it was not about fairness.

He really wanted to eradicate the people of Ireland. That meant kicking Irish people off their lands, sending as many Irish people as possible to the area of Connacht on the west where the land was shitty and sending forced transportation to fucking Barbados all that carry on

Oliver Cromwell was a coloniser he cleared the forests kicked the Irish out turned this into a pasture lands full of cows and then give all the land to Protestants from England and Scotland. That's what Cromwell was about. So from Cromwell you start to see the emergence of the Irish as really dispossessed peasants with fucking nothing.

Very, very deeply persecuted peasants dying and hunted down and because all the land is now being distributed by Cromwell to Protestants if you're a Catholic it means you have fuck all land you might have

half an acre or less if you're lucky and the potato was fantastic to grow under those circumstances because if you want to grow wheat to feed yourself you need more land but you've got this new potato growing now that came over from South America and you can grow enough to feed you and your family in the in a tiny space of land so that's why the potato became so popular in Ireland. You're so poor and you have so little that at least you can grow this one thing.

So that's why the Irish become dependent on this fucking potato. And the beautiful irony of it is that it's the exact opposite of the pineapple. They both come from South America. The potato grows easily. you need fuck all land but if you're to grow a pineapple you have to literally own an estate because you need to be able to build a greenhouse and then have so many horses that you can have that much manure to heat

your greenhouse so they're opposites complete opposites now getting back to this situation of Cromwell coming over to Ireland and then all the land being taken off the Irish and then distributed to the Protestant planters from Scotland, from England who did this?

well the person who did this was a fella called William Petty, now William Petty is one of these people who in England is considered a fucking legend. He founded the, one of the founding members of the Royal Society. William Petty, Oliver Cromwell gave him this job to go. Petty was a, he was a scientist, he was a physician. He was one of these fucking Renaissance men. He, he's considered almost the founding father

of statistics and statistics are statistics are sometimes a little bit problematic because statistics can be used to dehumanise so William Petty carried out this huge survey of Ireland

called the Down Survey where it mapped out Ireland, it mapped out all the lands and it mapped out the population of Ireland called the Down Survey where it mapped out Ireland, it mapped out all the lands and it mapped out the population of Ireland. He estimated how many people died during the Cromwellian conquest. And what Petty also does is that he uses the science of numbers and statistics to remove human value from an entire population and country and now skew how you view a country, not through things like people, culture, but to skew statistics and to measure a country based on how productive it can be economically. Like the map he created of Ireland was seen at the time to be the most advanced map

of any country that had ever been created but effectively what he's doing is conveniently reducing populations down to dehumanised percentages and then viewing Ireland as a machine where wealth and resources can be extracted from and where a new population how do we get this population of Catholic pricks who we want dead

how do we get these cunts out of here and then move this new population in and how do we effectively flatten all the forests and we have a huge forest over here how do we get rid of that and turn it into somewhere where cattle can be and how do we maximise exports and how do we put rid of that and turn it into somewhere where cattle can be and how do we maximise exports and how do we put crops here so turning a country into numbers

and when something's numbers it becomes very easy to govern in a very cold calculated fashion that services capitalism and he's seen as a legend over in England he founded the Royal Society but he laid the

blueprint for the industrialised colonisation of an entire land and the eradication of people and the extraction of resources which was repeated the world over throughout the Empire and has caused quite a lot of misery and pain

so it's the policies of William Petty under Cromwell that you start seeing the groundwork for an entire population becoming peasants who have fucking nothing, who need to grow their potatoes on the six foot of land that they personally have. Petty also is a huge proponent of laissez-faire economics, which is an extreme form of capitalism

where there is zero intervention from the state, zero help. You treat the economy like a wild animal that must grow and thrive and you never ever intervene. And petty was the beginning of that. And that laissez-faire economic belief is a huge driving factor

for what became the Irish potato famine. So let's move on, almost 100 years after Petty, to the 1740s. Now here's the thing, we've had several famines in this country, not just the great potato famine of the 1840s. There was a very, very serious Irish famine in 1740, which which apologies to use Petty's methodology killed 20% of our population and 480,000 people died of starvation in Ireland in 1740 that's 100 years before the famine of 1840 why did it happen there was a particularly bad winter, a load of potatoes froze and you have a peasant population with

no land and all they have is potatoes and no money to buy anything that isn't potatoes. So that's how 500,000 people starve. So how does this relate to this building that I found up in Kildare that was built in 1740, the year of that famine? How did they tie in together?

So that estate in Kildare in the 1700s was owned by a fella called William Speaker Connolly, who was one of the richest Catholics in Ireland at the time, which was very odd to have a Catholic with that much money. Ironically, he was a politician and he was actually overseeing the Irish House of Commons as they were drawing up the fucking penal laws. Like in the 1690s, I've mentioned this many times before,

but this system of laws came into Ireland called the penal laws, which were designed to eradicate the Catholic, the native Irish Catholic fucking population. Simple as that. Catholics couldn't own land. They couldn't have a horse. They couldn't get an education. They couldn't have a weapon. land, they couldn't have a horse, they couldn't get an education, they couldn't have a weapon, like they couldn't vote. An entire system in place to

make sure that Catholics were peasants and dying and laying the roots of a systematic structure in the law that means that if your potatoes don't grow you fucking die so in 1740 this huge famine is happening and half a million people dying in one year so half a million people dying in a year you can imagine the scale of that and the misery that would have been everywhere to see amongst the peasant population of Ireland. So up in Castletown Estate in fucking Kildare, Speaker Connolly's wife, Catherine Connolly, decides, I have a lot of money, how do I help the starving poor that are living around here? How do I help them? But the thing is, because the culture at the time was this laissez-faire economics, remember I was talking about William Petty, who had created this culture of laissez-faire economics,

which basically means you do not help people. If a famine is happening, it's because capitalism wants it to happen. And also a belief that this was a punishment from God. So it would have been seen as a moral failure to simply give starving people food. That would have been seen as a moral failure and an embarrassing thing to do. So what Catherine Connolly did is, she basically went to a ton of starving people and said, I can't just give you money. I can't just give you money.

I can't just give you money or give you food. So we're going to have to think of a job. So she got this fella called Richard Castles, bit of a convenient name for a man who designs castles. She got this cunt called Richard Castles to design a building known as a folly. And a folly is a building that exists for no reason it's just pointless

stupid decoration so she had this monument designed and then she got the starving people of Ireland to build this ridiculous obelisk with pineapples on it.

Purely so she could give them work, just so she could pay them, just so they could buy food. Because charity was against the ideology of laissez-faire economics. That would have been a moral failure. So that's what that building is. It's a pointless building that shouldn't exist, that was built by starving

people in the famine, just as an excuse to give them work. A very, very sad building, a very tragic, pointless, irrelevant, decorative lump of Rococo stone in the middle of Kildare for no reason that just stands there now with no purpose and Richard Castles who designed it his head was so up his arse that he decides let's put some pineapples on it

to symbolise opulence this wonderful fruit that comes from South America that's so difficult to grow that symbolises wealth let's get the starving Irish who are starving with the fucking potato to build

a building with pineapples on it just for the laugh and that's what that is, it's known as a folly a pointless building that exists for nothing other than decoration and in Ireland they were called famine follies, and there was quite a few of them.

Buildings that served no purpose. They were simply built to give starving poor people a job so that they could be paid, because to intervene and help them goes against laissez-faire capitalism. And what I find also interesting around the same time, 10 years previously, so this 1740 famine, like that was an extreme famine that killed 500,000 people, but there was loads of little famines leading up to it. And when there wasn't a famine, there was still tons and tons of poor people starving to death in Ireland as a direct result of policy that was there to eradicate them. But Jonathan Swift in 1729,

ten years previously, Jonathan Swift who wrote Gulliver's Travels, Swift was an Irish writer, he was a satirist, he's seen as the father of modern satire. he wrote a pamphlet called A Modest Proposal in 1729. And this, A Modest Proposal, is seen as the birth of modern satire. And what A Modest Proposal is, is, so that woman, Catherine Connolly, like, she's doing something good there. All right?

Within the context of the times, probably she's very religious as well, within the context of the times probably she's very religious as well within the context of the times she truly believes she's doing something good she's trying to help people alright and in a climate where

charity or assistance or intervention is seen as almost a fucking sin she's doing her best there was far far more landlords quite happy thrilled in fact

to see the Irish just dying that was a good thing for them but what you have there with you know, getting the famine starving famine Irish to build a pointless monument with pineapples on it just in order to pay them a wage for work

to create work that doesn't need to exist that's just a continuation of the culture that was laid by the likes of William Petty and his laissez-faire economics so when Jonathan Swift in 1729 wrote a modest proposal what he was actually doing was taking the piss

out of people like William Petty who would write these huge think pieces about not how do we assist the poor, not how do we help the poor, but how do we solve the problem of poverty without intervening directly, because that would be wrong. Swift wrote this piece, which at first seems like a dead serious kind of William Petty type essay and Swift says there's a huge problem in Ireland, there's lots of poor starving people, what will we do?

Well I have a modest proposal here's my suggestion in order to solve the problem of people being poor in Ireland we need to figure out a way for them to be able to afford food so how about this

they also seem to be having lots and lots of children don't they I propose that the children of poor people are actually fucking delicious and here's a direct quote a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old

a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food whether stewed roasted baked or boiled and i make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasse or a ragu so jonathan swift suggests the rich should eat the children of the poor so if rich people start eating these delicacies of young Irish toddlers, then they can give the poor people money to buy the toddlers off them so they can eat them. Now Jonathan Swift isn't being serious there. Jonathan Swift isn't seriously saying let's eat the children of the poor. But by presenting this fucking piece of satire you know directly

parodying the type of arguments that the likes of William Petty or Francis Bacon were putting forward by him doing that he is holding a mirror up to how actually fucking brutal the solutions are and holding a mirror up to how fucking

privileged and clueless the wealthy are. It's like you have loads of fucking money. People are starving. Stop putting tariffs on food. Stop exporting all the food. Maybe give people some free fucking food. You can afford it. They're dying. But

poor starving people selling their babies so that rich people can eat their delicious children and give them money for it that echoes the ridiculousness of let's get the poor starving people

to build a giant concrete monument for no reason just so we can give them work for no reason and then to top it all off let's put big concrete pineapples on it

because these people are starving because the potato is fucking the potato is dying in the soil so let's without even having a clue symbolically have the monument showed these pineapples which are impossible to grow

and represent something that only the richest of the rich could eat and I don't think that was a cruel satire maybe this Richard Castles fucker who designed it was an absolute cunt and he intended it to be that way and thought it was funny that theunt. And he intended it to be that way.

And thought it was funny that the poor starving people were making a folly with pineapples on it. Or maybe he was just that fucking clueless. So that's my little hot take on the significance. That's Irish history through the lens of a pineapple. That's what that is. And the interesting correlation between pineapples and fucking spuds. They're both from South America. They both come over at the same time and they're fucking direct opposites.

And I hope that was concise and clear for you. Because I had to cover a lot there. That's a lot of history to cover in a concise way. And apologies if I got a detail wrong here or there and what about pineapples today um like if you ask me pineapples should go back to being you know a pineapple should be worth like in in the in the 1600s a pineapple was worth six grand one pineapple was worth six grand pine One pineapple was worth 6 grand. Pineapples should be very, very expensive. They really should.

And why can I walk into any supermarket now and I can buy a pineapple, a full fucking pineapple for 2 euro. I can buy an entire pineapple for 2 euro. Why is that? Because of the same rampant laissez faire economics that William Petty was introducing years ago pineapples

today are not a particularly ethical fruit, like many fruits that come from South America in particular bananas are another example, I did a podcast on bananas before, but pineapples right now 84% of them are grown in Costa Rica

huge giant plant fruit plantations that are owned by multinational fruit corporations the history of fruit corporations in South America

then I did a podcast on this before regarding bananas massively fucking problematic CIA were very much involved the term banana republic has roots in this

where an entire economy is basically exploitatively based around one fruit export but in Costa Rica where most of our pineapples come from 70% of the workers in Costa Rica who make pineapples are migrants from Nicaragua

and these migrants are employed through subcontractors and these migrant workers, they don't have unions they don't have rights, they're exploited completely in order to grow the pineapples they're paid fuck all

73 euros a week they're paid and they earn 73 euros a week for 80 hours a week they're paid and they earn 73 euros a week for 80 hours a week. And loads of them just say that they earn less than half what's considered to be a living wage. So pineapples are two euro today because of extreme laissez faire economics. No one can intervene to say, hold on a minute, this is wrong. This is wrong this is wrong and the difference between now and the 1740s in Ireland

laissez faire economic policies in Ireland in the 1740s, people like Catherine Connolly, she's watching people die all around her she's watching the misery of humans being exploited all around her we in the 21st century

are completely we're sheltered from that we just see a lovely pineapple in the supermarket as communicated to us through the advertising of the multinational fruit corporation that sells us the pineapple and then if you say to the fruit corporation

are ye implying a load of fucking exploited migrant workers to grow your pineapples and the fruit corporation goes I don't know we just get it from this farm in Costa Rica

well who employs the workers oh not us a subcontractor we don't know where they it's just impossible to trace but this is how we're able to get two euro pineapples. Extreme massive exploitation with roots in colonisation.

And it's not just pineapples, it's a bunch of shit. And I would place the roots of that type of cold colonial capitalism where an entire area is viewed as statistics and the area is viewed not in terms of who lives there or the quality of life but in what resources can

be extracted from this area in the most efficient way and people are just numbers I'd put the roots of that at people like that William Petty cunt. You know? There's my hot take this week. Yart, I'll be back next week.

I don't know what with. 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. Thank you. you