Profiles In Eccentricity

This week Johnboy brings the story of the German family that killed traveler folk in Kansas while preaching spiritualism and free love post-civil war! Plus the saga of native murderer Queho and the sadist vengeance of Jack Slade!

This week Matt dives into the upstart basketball league that challenged the NBA to the point that it could no longer be ignored! The American Basketball Association brought fistfights, rule changes with long lasting consequences, pageantry and an entrepreneurial daring that brought us none other than Doctor J!

This week the boys conclude the saga of Phineas Taylor Barnum and reflect on his enduring legacy after first covering Jumbo The Elephant, a partnership and rivalry with Bailey, a public feud with ASPCA, a hasty marriage and Barnum’s final Egress! 

This week Johnboy continues Barnum’s saga with his financial ruin, rescue from friends and new featured exhibits like Zip The Pinhead and Commodore Nutt, a love triangle of dwarf performers, ruinous fires and political forays in the era of Lincoln!

This week The Covid Kid aka Johnboy has the bug again so we will be back next week for Barnum Part 2! In the meantime, here is a classic Patreon episode from April where we get into, amongst much else, Caleb Landry Jones, cocaine beaches, and artificial intelligence!

This week Johnboy explores the origins of the pivotal showman, Phineas Taylor Barnum and his initial series of traveling shows that brought him instant worldwide repute with Joice Heth, Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind; a slave woman reported as 161 years old, a dwarf with talent and charisma and an angelic voice who showed Barnum’s extent to manipulate the media narrative!

This week the boys venture again into media mayhem with wild punk rock binges in mania, Ice T let loose on blaxploitation and Luchador wrestling and a slew of PSA ads that beg belief! 

This week Johnboy hits the lads with two tales of weirdos! The first is a swamp bandit whose gang ruthlessly attacked police, robbed banks and controlled the illegal alcohol economy in South Florida! The second is a magician that worked in yellow face round the clock before having a very dangerous trick go exceedingly wrong!

This week Johnboy brings the tale of Nicolae Ceausescu, the conniving and cruel dictator of Romania who forced excessive childbirth on the population, razed homes to construct North Korean style palaces and cities, achieved status internationally as a rogue of the eastern bloc and finally was brutally executed along his evil bride on Christmas Day!

This week Johnboy treats the lads to the sordid class war saga of the Johnson County War, where cattle barons openly started a campaign of assassination against smaller cattle farmers before president Benjamin Harrison and local entrepreneurs intervened on either side of the conflict!

This week Matt regales the boys with the legacy of heiress Marchesa Casati, whose style, charisma, wealth and pomp made artists and high society fear and fawn over her exploits with sex, drugs, the occult and exotic animals!

This week the boys revisit the playboy lifestyle of the mid-twentieth century in Europe with the tales of three different playboys who entered the spheres of wealth and high society by virtue of just being hot, fun, connected bachelors!

This week Aaron brings us the story of chemistry prodigy - turned - nuclear threat, David Hahn - the child of divorce who applied DIY ethos to nuclear energy experiments before his creations became too unwieldy for US government agencies and still earned him an Eagle Scout badge!

This week Johnboy brings the tale of the young Australian boy who was trapped in the hostile wilderness of the Northern Territories for two months and became a national hero whose exploits became the basis for the film Crocodile Dundee,  before his legal troubles and drug abuse led him to a bloody showdown with the law!