Minisode: Reverse Q&A

of your emails. I read all of them, and I appreciate every person of Greek ancestry who wrote in with their own family stories about the nickname Yanaki, which is just Greek for little Johnny. And I was very intrigued to find out that Brian Serralt pronouncing his name Seralt

and not soah. Maybe more than just the American tradition of mispronouncing anything foreign, because there is a particular linguistic tendency to intentionally bastardize the pronunciation of anything French in certain parts of New England because of local animosity towards Quebec. And several of you wrote in to tell me that Frank Smith setting his lawn on fire is apparently not that weird, and burning dormant grass in the winter isn't

uncommon in rural areas. I mean, forgetting there was dynamite hidden in the haybales. This is definitely not standard procedure, but the fact that he intentionally set his yard on fire wouldn't have been confusing to the fire department. And I didn't know that. You guys all know so much, and I love learning new things from you too, so thank you to everyone who has written to share their

knowledge with me. I think I'll start keeping notes on the fun facts I get so I don't have to just rely on my memory, and maybe i'll add in a row recurring segment or a quarterly round up of the loose ends you guys have tied up for me. Off the top of my head, though there are a couple I wanted to tell you about. I'll keep your names off the air because I forgot to ask you how you felt about that, and I put this off too long to have time to write you and ask you.

But I recently got an email from a court reporter who had some information for me about what happens in the transcript when someone misspeaks. In the October twenty eighth minisoded about how often people accidentally mix up Norman Rockwell, the artist and George Lincoln Rockwell, the Nazi. I told you about the time I heard a lawyer make that

mistake in court. It was a memorable moment. I mean, it wasn't consequential to the case, but I remember it so clearly because I burst out laughing and was briefly a little bit grateful for the global pandemic, because that's why I was listening to the trial on my headphones at home and not in the court room, where that kind of outburst would have gotten me in trouble. But when I went back to look at the transcript while I was writing about it, it wasn't there. I mean,

I couldn't believe it. I thought transcripts were these infallible records of everything that was said in the courtroom. Now this might earn me more emails from court reporters, because I'm sure court rules and local bets practices vary. But the court reporter who wrote in said that where they work, the rule is that you don't put into the transcript words that were spoken by mistake if they are immediately verbally corrected. So the transcript wouldn't say George Norman Rockwell.

I'm sorry, George Lincoln Rockwell, it would just admit the mistake entirely. And if you're just reading the transcript, all you would see are the words that they meant to say. That makes sense, but it has been a tremendously unsettling realization for me. And now I'm never going to stop wondering what tiny little pieces are missing from the transcripts I read. It sounds so minor, right, it sounds totally meaningless. But when a case is appealed, there's not usually an

audio recording. The appellate case is just a transcript, so there's no true, faithful record of what the jury heard in the courtroom. There is no objective truth or reality when you're looking at the past. I don't know. It really shook me. And now this is just a mini so I'll just tell you one more. One of you emailed me to tell me what Dan Burrows was watching

on TV on Saturday, November tenth, nineteen sixty two. This was from the first episode about John Patler, The Death of a Demagogue, Part one from September e eighteenth of this year, and toward the end of that episode, I was talking about the few months John Patler spent in New York City in late nineteen sixty two early nineteen sixty three, during one of his spats with George Lincoln Rockwell.

Remember before he ultimately murdered Rockwell in sixty seven. Pler had a few rough spots in his friendship with Rockwell, and in nineteen sixty two he had packed up and moved to New York City with another member of the American Nazi Party who was so mad at Rockwell that he also quit, was a guy named Dan Burrows, and they set up their own rival Nazi group, but never really had very many members and it was struggling to really even be a group at all, and this failure

was starting to put a strain on their friendship. And the real nail in the coffin came on November tenth, nineteen sixty two. John Patler was arrested that day for putting on a one man protest outside Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral, and Dan Burrows had refused to go with him day. In a biography of Burroughs, it just said he stayed home to watch sports on TV. I wanted to know what game it was. The book didn't even say which sport. I spent like an hour or two on this, which

is kind of embarrassing because it doesn't matter. I don't know anything about sports today, let alone about sports in the sixties. So I gave up the day the episode came out, I think honestly, in the middle of the night. Within hours a bit appearing on the podcast apps, I got a text from my dear friend Gode. Now, if you don't know God, you should check out his coverage of Virginia state politics on Twitter, Blue Sky, and TikTok

at God Gatsby in case you didn't know. Maybe it's tacky to plug my friend's stuff in the middle of a story, but he's the only person in the world who has both picked me up from jail and been picked up from jail by me, and that's a special kind of friend. But God texted me to answer my first question. No, there weren't reruns of sports games on TV in nineteen sixty two like there are today, So whatever Dan Burrows was watching, it was a game that

would have been played that day. And God told me that the only televised sport on a Saturday in November of nineteen sixty two would have been college football, so that definitely narrows it down, and I felt satisfied. But then recently one of you took this over the finish line. There were several college football games on November tenth, nineteen sixty two, but CBS aired the Purdue at Michigan State game,

which Perdue won seventeen to nine. Now doesn't that matter, No, not at all, but I feel so much better knowing it, and maybe it does kind of drive home the point that Dan Burroughs was completely checked out of whatever he and John Patler were doing. There's no way he cared about either of those teams. He didn't even go to college, and he was from the Bronx. He never spent any time in Indiana or Michigan, but that football game was still more interesting to him than getting arrested with John

Patler and Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral. So now we know, and I realized now that I was going about it all wrong. I was trying to find old TV schedules and newspaper archives instead of seeking out the online archives of sports fanatics researches its own skill. Subject matter expertise can only take you so far. You have to know how to find what you don't know, so I am grateful to all of you who write in to help me fill in those gaps. Weird Little Guys is a prorection of

Poolzo Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me, Molly conger Our e secontive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me at Weird Blue Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it. I probably won't answer it, but I might talk about it on the show. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show

with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's gonna make it of my Weird Little Guys