Ever wondered if your mind can do more than ruin your life? Did you know at one time you could get a degree in ESP and psychokinesis? This week we're taking a broad overview of the real world of academic parapsychology. From the married-botanists-turned-married-parapsychologists J.B. and Louisa Rhine and the founding of the Duke University Parapsychology lab to the 21st-century psychic experiments at the Rhine Research Center, and testing our own psychic powers, we couldn't really decide what th...
May 01, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 155
What do you get when you cross sleeping pills with the tail end of the LSD molecule? Ambien! The miracle cure for insomnia taken by millions of Americans every year that definitely doesn't make your entire frontal lobe completely vanish while the rest of you walks around doing weird stuff. Stuff like perhaps taking a drive down the wrong side of the highway, start frying eggs in the middle of the night in a full body cast, and many other activities both hilarious and terrifying that you'll never...
Apr 24, 2024•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 154
Who among us hasn't had apocalyptic visions with a head full of mushrooms? Terrence sure did. This week we're looking at one of the pillars of the legendary psychedelic evangelist's cosmology: Timewave Zero. After Terrence McKenna and his brother Dennis had their noggins rocked by psilocybe cubensis mushrooms in Colombia, Terrence returned from the jungle with "some funny ideas," ideas around a self-similar fractal waveform, calculated through doing fancy wizard math on the I-Ching, the ancient ...
Apr 17, 2024•1 hr 43 min•Ep. 153
Who among us didn't have at least a touch of the mad scientist fantasy as a kid, right? Most of us, probably. And who among us failed to ever have anything come of it? Most of us, probably. Not David Hahn. David Hahn had himself a notion to build a fast breeder nuclear reactor in his mother's potting shed. And by golly, he did. By cobbling together stolen fire alarms, camping lanterns, and parts financed by selling stolen hubcaps, along with a whole lot of good old-fashioned bullshitting, David ...
Apr 10, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 152
Admit it, there aren't nearly enough creatures in your life. Weird creatures, cute creatures, mean creatures, there's a whole wide world of creatures out there. And today we're talking about three of them. And with a subtitle like "Water Monsters," you might be thinking we're talking mythical beasts, Nessie's or Champ's or the Kraken. Nope. We're talking real live creatures, but these dudes are most certainly monsters. In this episode, we talk about three animals each with attributes that most c...
Apr 03, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 151
Sometime during the 20th century, hot dogs became forever linked with an American pastime—Competitive eating—and with the most American holiday, the Fourth of July. One could argue that the business of “major league eating” is everything wrong with consumer capitalism. Because it is. However, today we’ll be taking time to celebrate the absurdity of it all by discovering how Nathan’s Fourth of July hot dog contest began and why it persists. Keep The Nonsense Bazaar ad-free and away from debasemen...
Mar 27, 2024•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 150
These days you can't shake a stick without running into some version of Gnostic Christianity. Why is that? Gnosticism is absolutely wild and psychedelic, that plays a part. But did counterculture collectively decide one day that Gnosticism was pretty groovy? Well, apart from fragments of texts, writings about Gnosticism from the Catholic church's perspective (heresy!), and underground currents of mystic knowledge, mainstream culture didn't really know anything about what the Gnostics believed un...
Mar 20, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 149
Sequoyah had to deal with some rough stuff this week so in lieu of chaining him to his keyboard and squeezing an episode out of him like an old citrus, we're unlocking an episode of our bonus series where we dive into the weird, disturbing, and hilarious world of internet tulpamancy. What's a tulpa? Well a tulpa (aka "tupper," apparently) is a thoughtform entity created by the power of belief that gains external agency and sentience. It's a concept from esoteric Tibetan Buddhism by way of Theoso...
Mar 13, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 148
Who among us can honestly say we've never been tempted to fake our own deaths? You know, get away from it all, start over as fresh as a newborn babe. Today we'll be looking at individuals who were pronounced dead only to miraculously come back or, in the case of Kaycee Nicole Swenson, who never existed in the first place. From England's 'Canoe Man' to the ridiculously dressed Violet Charlesworth to Lil Tay, you'll learn why faking a death is not a very smart thing to do. Pay us so we don't have ...
Mar 06, 2024•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 147
We had a weird day. So this week we're talking about some of the things we've been thinking about recently: nature, defiant optimism, Catholic UFO propaganda, how Willow thought Sequoyah went missing but he was actually just napping, and much more. The state of the union is strong... and ridiculous. Support The Nonsense Bazaar on Patreon and get access to our bonus series The Corkboard Bizarre and our patron Discord server starting at just $5 a month! https://patreon.com/thenonsensebazaar...
Feb 28, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 146
This week It’s a touch of the ol’ divine madness in Middle America as we take a look at the highly entertaining and very American art form of revival preaching. From the big top on the frontier to Aimee McPherson, the sexiest preacher who’s ever lived, to Oral Roberts’ saying God was going to kill him if he didn’t get eight million dollars, the tradition of the revival is a type of performance art in a league of its own. It also fills a pretty interesting role in culture. We also learn a whole l...
Feb 21, 2024•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 145
Finding yourself with one foot in reality and the other in dreamland is frightening, especially if you were alive in the 1940s when the solution was to remove all your memories by either drilling a hole in your head or hooking your brain up to the medical equivalent of a car battery. Today’s episode takes us back to that time to explore a book of case studies titled Oneirophrenia and how the author, a physician named Ladislas Meduna, sought treatment for these patients. Know what keeps us engage...
Feb 14, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 144
You know how they say you shouldn't stare at the sun because you'll go blind? Well, what if that's just what they want you to think? What if the secrets to immortality, an enlarged pineal gland, not needing to eat food, and not needing to wear a shirt on your youtube videos were all unlocked by simply...staring at the damn sun? Welcome to the "ancient" practice of sungazing. Where you stare down the sun until you receive magic powers. Is it an ancient practice? Will you go blind? Is it as stupid...
Feb 07, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 143
Tiny Tim was once one of the most famous men in America. Everything about him was a spectacle. From his trembling falsetto to his odd mannerisms, it's easy to see how he became America's laughingstock. Most people know him as an entertainer but what about as a husband? While tabloids took shots at Tiny, he was taking shots of his own--at the teenage wife he married on The Tonight Show. She wouldn't be his only wife, however, as he'd go on to marry twice more! Tune in to learn all about the man w...
Jan 31, 2024•2 hr 9 min•Ep. 142
This week we're telling a story that is very much not our normal fare here at the bazaar: a ghost story, a true-crime murder case, and a courtroom drama. But it also happens to be exactly what we're about. The story of the Greenbrier ghost is often told in the context of "that time an encounter with a spirit was used as evidence in a trial." But that doesn't really do the story justice. After 22-year-old Zona Heaster was found dead under mysterious circumstances, her mother Mary Jane Heaster cla...
Jan 24, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 141
We’re traveling to the past to explore the careers of two game show greats: Ralph “Nobody knows who I am anymore” Edwards and Chuck “They made a movie about me” Barris. Between the two of them, they’re responsible for some of the most famous game shows of the 20th century including Truth or Consequences and The Newlywed Game. We’ll learn how their creations altered the media landscape of the 20th century and discuss the possibility of game show hosts secretly having double lives as assassins. We...
Jan 17, 2024•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 140
Did you know that all of history is nothing but a bald faced lie? That the entire generally accepted arc of history has been fabricated to keep you, dear listener, from realizing your God-given birthright to fancy architecture, free energy and flying turtles? That there used to be a globe-spanning supercivilization with magic sound technology, strong jaws, and craftsmanship and artistry that we can't even come close to approximating in this fallen age of ours? And did you know that the evidence ...
Jan 10, 2024•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 139
This week we’re taking a look at the curious history of one Charles Entertainment Cheese, a robot who claims to be “America’s favorite rat” and built a cardboard-flavored pizza empire which heralded the cybernetic colonization of our childhoods and traumatized generations with animatronic animals dug straight out of the uncanny valley. We look at the history of Charles Cheese and the various personas he’s inhabited, from rude cigar smoking gangster rat, to rockstar orphan mouse, the rivalry betw...
Jan 03, 2024•2 hr 10 min•Ep. 138
We're headed back to one of our favorite centuries to talk about one of the most famous UFO cases in history. Well, at least on the History Channel. The 1561 "celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg, Germany" entered modern consciousness by way of that spooky Swiss psychologist Carl Jung who wrote about this odd woodcut broadsheet describing a day in April 1561 when the sky filled with all sorts of strange, unidentified objects. Balls and rods and shafts of many colors (primarily "blood"), great big...
Dec 20, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 137
On today’s episode we’re taking a look at some of the rather silly psychic experiments conducted by the folks over at the Center for Inquiry, a non-profit organization dedicated to stopping the spread of nonsense and promoting reason and skepticism. We’ll learn about the founder Paul Kurtz, secular humanism, ol' James Randi, and their history of legal battles against the most famous spoon bender in history, Uri Geller. They claim to be skeptics but are they actually haters? Or are we? Listen and...
Dec 13, 2023•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 136
This week we're taking a look at one of the oldest and most influential epic poems in the world. Bhagavad Gita is the centerpiece of the much, much longer Sanskrit epic poem Mahabharata and has had a huge influence on culture and spirituality the world over. It's also just wicked cool. Taking the form of a dialogue between the god Krishna and the heroic prince Arjuna right before a massive battle is about to pop off, the Gita has a lot of stuff to say about the right ways to live but also has so...
Dec 06, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 135
If you're at all into the paranormal or supernatural you've heard the name Charles Fort. After all, his name has become synonymous with the study of anomalous phenomena, or "Fortean" phenomena. He basically invented the genre. Over the course of four books published towards the end of his life Charles Fort documented hundreds of cases of strange doings: fish falls, mysterious airships, teleportation, and much more, while arguing for a radically agnostic perspective on life and reality: we don't ...
Nov 29, 2023•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 134
Who the hell is Greta Garbo? From her alleged espionage endeavors with plans to assassinate Hitler to passionate secret lesbian romances, this Old Hollywood icon lived a life worth discussing (although she would hate that we are doing so). Her intense desire for privacy over fame led her to quit acting at a young age but that didn’t stop the media from being obsessed with her, particularly her dietary habits, love life, and the adventures she got into with her dietician Gaylord Hauser. Garbo is ...
Nov 15, 2023•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 133
We're takin' it a bit easy this week and talking about something close to home: vampires! Specifically, the so-called "New England Vampire Panic" of the 1800s. Before vampires were sexy, they were something else entirely: the reanimated corpses of your friends and family who preyed upon the living and threatened to pull entire communities down into the grave with them. In New England, and very especially in Rhode Island, this type of vampire haunted small villages all the way until the very end ...
Nov 07, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 132
It finally happened, we lost our damn minds. In honor of No-Nut November, today’s episode will explore the concept of Semen Retention (aka gaining magic powers and solving all of life's problems by not jerking off) by looking at online communities, exploring the religious foundations behind the idea, and speaking to two individuals who actually practice it. Support The Nonsense Bazaar on Patreon and get access to our bonus series The Corkboard Bizarre and access to our private Discord server sta...
Nov 01, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 131
What do you think of when you hear the term "cybernetics"? Well there's a solid chance you're wrong. This week we're taking a high level overview of an intellectual Swiss Army Knife that rewired the way we think about everything from economics to ecology, psychology to semiotics. In this episode, we'll unravel the genius of Norbert Wiener, the surprisingly sympathetic mathematician who gave cybernetics its name and set the course for a science of control and communication. We also dissect the Ma...
Oct 25, 2023•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 130
Today we’re taking a look at one of the wildest, most enduring hoaxes of all time—The Taxil Hoax. Ever wondered why Freemasons are a magnet for conspiracy theories? In the 1890s, a French prankster named Leo Taxil tricked the Vatican into believing that Luciferian Freemasons were plotting world domination. We'll trace how Taxil's grand illusion unfolded, from his time as a schoolboy to his time pretending to be Diana Vaughan—a fabricated Grand Mistress descended from a 17th-century Rosicrucian. ...
Oct 18, 2023•1 hr 44 min•Ep. 129
This week we're taking a look at the stories of three legendary trickster spirits: the ever-sly Coyote of North American folklore, the web-weaving Anansi from West African tales, and the amorphous (but usually rabbit-eared) Nanabozho from Ojibwe legends. What does it mean when something is a "trickster"? Are they always out to steal your lunch money? Why are they always intrinsically linked to humanity itself? Maybe the trickster archetype is less of a con-artist and more of a lesson in how to d...
Oct 11, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 128
Today we're diving into the multidimensional world of "Path of Sweetness”, one of the strangest books we’ve featured on this podcast. It was written by a woman named Joy Elaine who has had many hobbies throughout her life: body building, orchid growing, and playing the violin to name a few. It wasn’t until later in life when she was introduced to New Age healing modalities that an entire world opened up for Joy, a world full of ascended masters, angels, fairies, and…a lover in the Ashtar Command...
Oct 04, 2023•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 127
The KLF, aka The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu were the best selling singles band in the world for a period in the 1990s. Their last single featured Tammy Wynette, the "First Lady of Country Music", in what would be her last chart topping hit. They were pioneers in sampling and house music, but you've likely never heard of them. Why? Because in 1992, after being honored at the Brit awards, they fired a machine gun full of blanks into the crowd, deleted their entire catalog, and resurfaced a short ...
Sep 27, 2023•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 126
